My company commissioned a research report with a 3rd party (HBR), and wants to "go big" with promotion and activation in the market. Have you done this before with success? What was your strategy in terms of Sales Enablement?

Exciting! Build a three-prong strategy around how you’re going to directly promote it, how you’re going to get the industry to promote it, and how you’re going to get your client-facing teams to promote it.

1) Direct: showcase it our webpage and make it a gated asset so you can collect leads from it. We put our Forrester and Gartner reports front and center on our website with this approach. Send focused emails around the report, include it in newsletters, and put some paid advertising behind it. All of this should be pretty straight-forward, and I’m sure you’re already working on it.

2) Industry: Think about how you’re going to use this report from a PR perspective. Here’s where you might need to get a little creative. I don’t know the exact nature of your research, but if it feels too self-serving/salesy, a lot of publications won’t want to pick it up (unless it’s a paid placement). Instead, consider pulling one or two interesting findings out of our research, and anchoring a compelling story on it. Our team just recently released a new research report on COVID-19 that got a ton of industry coverage. But what’s interesting with the coverage, is that none of it focused on the entire report – that would seem too self-serving. Instead, it focused on specific findings that we fed the publications such as “Gen Z has been most negatively impacted by COVID-19 but yet they aren’t hesitating to buy luxury goods.” Or “customers are tired of the ‘we’re with you’ messaging in ads. I would encourage you to dig into your research, find a few compelling elements of it, and shop those around to get industry coverage.

3) Promotion/Enablement: Make it easy for your client-facing teams to push this out. Draft emails they can send, arm them with talking points around it, and draft a few versions of social posts they can easily share. Creating a "how to use this report" guide is critical. It should outline with whom the report will resonate best, when to use it in a cycle, and how to effectively speak to the findings within it. 

This is a great tactic. Research is a great way to drive energy and excitement around a ‘theme’ you want to focus on. I have done this before and it was the single largest pipeline driver for us. We connected the campaign and promotion with another in-person event so that we were streamlining and capitalizing on the momentum we had around that event. 

The role of sales enablement here was that we used the outcomes of the research to enable the field specifically on discovery and objection handling:
1) Discovery. Good discovery can make or break a deal so building empathy with customers is key, you can use the outcomes of the research to ask comparative questions of prospects and open a dialogue around these key areas.
2) Objection handling. Focus on the data and insights from the HBR work that you can align to your differentiating features or benefits.

This is not unlike a company getting a top quadrant spot in a Forrester or Gartner report. 

More often this will involve some PR + Webinar(s) + Blogs + Ready to use materials for Sales. 

Specifically for Sales Enablement. you should train Sales on how to talk about this 'important accomplishment' via a short training that covers: 

1. Why this is an important achievement? 

2. How this piece helps your prospects gain new insights or come to a better buying decision

3. If there is an ROI component to the study, then you can use the data to feed sales ROI calculators so they can justify the price for your offering(s). 

4. Explain to Sales how this will help them get more qualified leads and/or better nurture in their current conversations and when to bring this up. 

This is an example report that really put wind behind Medallia's sails back in the day: https://www.medallia.com/press-release/medallia-positioned-as-a-leader-in-enterprise-feedback-management-satisfaction-and-loyalty-solutions/