Is there a framework for creating good sales enablement decks for new B2B products or training new sales rep on your product?

I'm a big fan of Nancy Duarte's work and her book Resonate. It speaks a lot to what a good narrative should be for any presentation.  

With that said, Enablement is a lot about teaching - so how you present to a customer is not necessarily how you present to a seller. For sellers, I put my teacher hat on and really think about what is it that they want to know about and how do I make the content engaging and interactive enough, that they don't fall asleep.  

So not quite a framework, but hopefully still helpful.

Great Our enablement decks follow this outline: Learning Objectives, Executive Summary/”Sales Play Made Simple”, Business Issues & Value, Key Personas, Key Messaging and Product Capabilities, Competitive Overview, Deal Examples, Customer Success Stories, Crawl/Walk/Run Sales Strategy, and Additional Resources. 

To pick this apart, I would say the Executive Summary single slide roll-up is one of the most critical parts. You need someone that people can refer back to and reference easily, and often times a 30 slide deck, isn’t the best fit. The Key Personas is a critical piece as well so everyone is on the same page of who this messaging is for and when it will resonate. Blanketing a sales enablement approach across all potential client types/levels can be a recipe for disaster.

The best enablement decks I’ve seen address:

• Who is this for?
• Why is this important?
• What is the impact of this?
• Action items / next steps
  
  Whatever the subject, following the framework above will help identify the specifics of why someone should pay attention.

It is also important to always keep in mind the broader context of where the company operates and if you are selling multiple products and/or have a large global presence, to make sure that the team understand that particular situation. 

Finally, it is not as much about the deck itself I think is important but the delivery of it and the fup activities. How are you going to ensure people are paying attention? How will you measure knowledge retention? These will be important aspects to consider as you rollout any enablement session.

I do think this is highly dependent on the type of product you are taking to market, but here are some go-tos I use.

1. Keep it simple: Make sure you focus any training decks in the simplest, most customer centric language. It’s often easy to use technical terminology and/or internal acronyms and names that will not help that sales rep learn or relate to the customers they are interacting with!
2. Stay value-focused: It is also really easy to go into deep detail on product features and find yourself building a demo-ish presentation. Put yourself in that rep’s shoes, they need to be focused on values and benefits for their buyer over the minutiae of clicks in product. It is your job as a PMM to be able to take all the feature-level details and package it up into meaningful value that a rep can communicate to their prospects.
3. Don’t forget sales is a customer: I have seen too many times, training decks that just focus on tangible product experience or messaging. I think one of the most important perspectives to keep in mind as you work through a new training is that sales will be thinking “what’s in it for me?”. You should always be thinking and framing any enablement content on how this is going to help your sales team reach their quota or whatever target they are pacing toward. If you can’t draw this connection, your average rep is not going to use this material.
4. Bring VOC into your training: By the time you are ready to release a new product, you have hopefully had a healthy amount of customers test the experience. Find simple ways to inject the voice of the customer into your training—zoom meeting clips, emails with feedback, beta slack channels—there are tons of sources! If you can incorporate this as proof into your training, it brings that much more energy for the field teams.

Any new product should have a “product brief” associated with it to help not just sales, but any internal stakeholder to be on the same page about the purpose and positioning of the product. Enabling sales can be done effectively without ever involving a deck. My focus is on content and training vs. deck creation. The product brief contains things like a problem to solve, buyer personas addressed, why it is important now (urgency), competitive landscape or what you are replacing, discovery questions, customer stories, user quotes, ROI calculators where applicable, product FAQs, assets to send ahead or leave behind, outbound messaging sequences, demo recordings, modified product screenshots, and recordings of effective calls of other reps - to name a few.

Training reps on products starts with training on the specific pain points the product addresses for specific personas. Understanding what problem you solve, who you solve it for, and why it is important now is essential for sales to be effective. There should be a focus on lining up discovery questions to help the salesperson dig into the prospect’s unique situation before trying to pitch any new product.

Here are some of the top sections I'd include:

1. Positioning / value prop
2. ICP (with good-fit indicators)
3. Buyer personas
4. Use cases
5. Competitive landscape (with supporting comparison assets)
6. Proof (case studies, research, data, customer wins, 3rd party reviews)
7. Feature overview
8. Discovery questions
9. Objection Handling