What are the common mistakes you see product marketers making when they launch new sales enablement programs?

The biggest mistake I’ve made is not involving Sales at the ideation stage. Too many times, I’ve thought I had a great idea for a new program or piece of content, only to find upon rolling it out that I was solving a problem nobody had.It’s always good to have a few “friendlies” on the sales team who you can bounce early-stage ideas off of. If they think you’re onto something, you can get sales leadership involved. There’s no better way to make an enablement program work than for the Head of Sal ...Read More

I see a few issues: (1) not think about the sales process and the customer journey (CS version, not the marketing version). You need to think about when they will need collateral and what kind of collateral. This will help you with effectiveness. (2) build persona and product messaging without context, meaning just shipping an internal guide without thinking about the situations and scripts will not land. Anything you send out needs to be actionable and in the context of reps workflow (SDR, CS, ...Read More

The biggest one I've seen not just with new programs but existing is not incorporating/including sales into the plan itself! I've found in my experience that sales can be less trusting of marketing/product marketing "telling them" what to do vs having some buy in to the process. I've always found consulting with sales leaders or a few 'ambassadors' to be very handy! They will also act as advocates to ensure you get strong attendance and participation from the rest of the sales teams. Also includ ...Read More

Simply put, I think focusing on the outputs (e.g., collateral/content creation) instead of understanding the problem and building a solution for that problem. But in order to understand the problem, you have to understand how your sales team operates...you need to be on calls across the entire funnel and especially post-close.  Instead of focusing on outputs, focus on how to achieve outcomes. If you’re standing up a sales enablement team, then the business is probably needs enablement as a strat ...Read More

If there's one thing you want to avoid when developing and launching a new sales enablement program, it's rigidity. Too often, I see product marketers who are used to doing things a certain way. They have a framework that has worked in a past life or a playbook that was successful at another company, and they simply want to apply the same process to a new context. Doing this leads to friction that can doom a sales enablement program before it's even started. Instead, I encourage product marketer ...Read More

Making the program without adequate sales buy in or guidance.  There's an important balance to strike here: The product marketer should be focused on anticipating the needs to a sales team and solving the problems at hand, rather than reactively responding to inbound requests from the sales team. That means you can't execute on everything your sales team requests the exact way that they want. But that doesn't mean your sales team shouldn't help shape what your enablement program looks like. If t ...Read More