What are the most successful enablement practices you have conducted in your experience to help assist with small, medium, or large product launches?

Question

Christy Roach · Accepted Answer

Enablement is one of the most critical and often most difficult parts of the launch. The key to remember is that, usually, the product launch is just part of the overall sales process, and you need to treat your enablement as such. Very rarely will a customer-facing team drop everything for a new product line, you need to fit it into their existing flow. Here are some practices I use:

* Timing is everything: This sounds stupid but it’s so key. If you’re trying to train a team during the last week of the quarter, you’ll get very poor participation and engagement rates. At Airtable, we will not launch a Tier 1 feature launch during the last month of the quarter to avoid this. Keep sales timing in mind when scheduling the launch and your enablement sessions
 * Work into their existing resources and frameworks: Rather than a feature-specific deck (which I have, unfortunately, thought was a good idea to make in the past) add this new capability to their current materials and show them how your new capabilities fit in with you overall product value prop and pitch. If they have a standard messaging framework and sales process they’re working off of, your messaging for launch should be mapped out in a way that fits into how they’re selling.
 * Outreach sequences and target customers: While marketing will have broad announcement comms planned, your CSM team is going to have a much tighter relationship with your customers than you are, and your sales team will have a better idea of how to introduce the new feature to a prospect based on their needs. Arm them with outreach sequences (that they’ve reviewed and will use) and, if applicable, pull lists of key customers and prospects who are a good fit for the new feature/product to help them prioritize outreach and communication around the launch.

In terms of large, medium, and small launches and how to enable teams for each, my POV is that large launches usually have multiple dedicated training sessions. Often one on the demo, one on the story, and one for support on nuances and expected questions. For medium, likely one dedicated hour-long training. For small launches, work it into a monthly meeting about product updates or in their monthly all-hands. My biggest advice is to work closely with sales leadership to determine what makes the most sense for the team. You should come in with an idea of what you think will work, but your sales leads know the team much better than you do and can help make sure you do the right amount of enablement at the right time.

Emily Ritter · Answer

Small: tight, thoughtful FAQs. Keep it simple. Prep a concise one-pager that delivers the facts and moves on.
Large: think about enablement as a mini bootcamp program rather than a one-and done. Work with managers in advance to get their input on what their teams might need. Do in-person trainings with role playing exercises that help confirm learning. Create a temporary slack channel for launch questions (also helpful for reporting bugs :wink: ). Make sure they know how this compares to the competition and what angles make you win. Follow up after the launch to get feedback on the training so you can do even better the next time.

Christine Sotelo-Dag · Answer

A few things we've evolved over the years as we've trained sales teams for launches. Rather than leaning on broad sales trainings that include the entire sales org, we've tried smaller trainings for specific regions or teams that are tailored specifically to what is most important to them.

We've also evolved from trainings that take place a week before launch to several touchpoints leading up to a launch - ranging from trainings, to office hours, demo sessions, and on demand trainings - so sales is able to digest change over time and have plenty of time to get comfortable with selling ahead of launch.

One area that often gets overlooked, it putting the time and energy in to making sure sales has a solid demo environment and script - and feels confidently trained (and launch enablement doesn't stop with slides and a training).

Daniel J. Murphy · Answer

This is not a great answer but the best approach for enablement is overcommunicating. Taking every opportunity to pitch the launch: why it will make sales more money, why it will help CS save customers, etc.

Not just at meetings but on Slack every week too. Share updates, share customer feedback, share new content you've developed for the launch. Basically don't keep that stuff behind close doors leading up to the launch.

For training a sales/cs team I recommend doing that with a video you record (5-10 minutes of trianing) and send them a short quick (with Google Forms). I find that's better than doing a live presentation.

Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

Klaviyo Director of Product Marketing, Katie Gerard on Product Launches

Atlassian Director of Integrated Product Marketing, Ashley Faus on Product Launches

Observable VP, Marketing, LaShaun Williams onRelease Marketing

Related Questions