What are your best sales enablement practices for a product launch?

Because Twilio is an API-First product, getting the technical folks up to speed is a huge part of what makes us successful because they are the ones interacting with our main buyer, developers! This is a little different than a B2B launch. Generally though, there are three pillars to how I think about this:  Sales/Customer Facing team enablement - Keep your narrative tight. Make sure you are delivering no more than a 10 slide pitch and if you do nothing, you land the main product tagline, a cris ...Read More

First and foremost it is critical to make sure that Sales has plenty of visibility into what product is building, timelines around availability, and how PMM plans to take it to market (what tier/priority is the launch). For any Tier 1 or Tier 2 launch, PMM should align with Sales Enablement on  What is being built Why it's being built now Who is the audience (existing customers/prospects) What is the persona How does this compare to competition  Value pillars for customers  From there, Sales Ena ...Read More

Ah, Sales Enablement. In my opinion, one of the MOST important pieces of a launch.  I have no shortage of tips, but for the sake of time, I'll keep it to four...  1. Align with sales leadership early on your enablement plans and make sure they're a part of the planning process. This will help ensure that key things that reps need to know are detailed in your plan that you may have originally missed 2. ROLE. BASED. ENABLEMENT. What your AEs need to know about a launch is different from Sales Engi ...Read More

One of the biggest pitfalls I see in product launches in underestimating enablement. Don't skimp on this, you want to make sure your customer facing teams are armed with right tools to take your product launch to the next level. A solid enablement plan will stem off these 4 questions:   1. WHO is the internal audience? (SDR, AE, SE, CSM, Segment)  2. What do they need to KNOW? (Timelines, expectations, goals, FAQs, etc.)   3. What do they need to SAY? (Messaging, discovery questions, business va ...Read More

I was lucky enough to manage a sales team at my previous role and hopefully can provide some insight here that were informed by that experience. But, it may be a bit controversial! I'd say that most sales enablement campaigns deliver: Competitor battlecards Product feature talking points Positioning statements Collateral like whitepapers, decks, and one-pagers Most of this is moot at a product launch in my opinion. It's not that these aren't important, but you can quickly spend significant time ...Read More

Just like in marketing, sales enablement is all about knowing your audience. At the top level, that means understanding what motivates them (i.e. closing more deals, expanding existing customer base, etc.), and tailoring your enablement to help them understand how a new product/feature will help them achieve those goals. To refine this, I like to bring sales stakeholders into the enablement creation process so they can advocate for their team's needs. The side benefit of this is that it gives yo ...Read More

First, the sales team needs to know what is launching and when so they can make appropriate plans to incorporate it in their sales conversations. To facilitate these conversations, the choice of tools and practices should be tailored to the product's complexity, the sales cycle, and the team structure. Clear Early Communication: Ensure the sales team knows what is launching and when, enabling them to plan their sales conversations accordingly.  Training: Provide in-depth training on the product, ...Read More

Don't do what hasn't worked in the past. Do a quick audit/ survey with teams and understand what are the most-utilized and successful assets available and training formats so you can automatically have the trust of the team.  Experiment with resources that you know your prospect will find value in, not just your sales team. e.g. "We need one-pagers". No one looks at PDFs anymore. Can you create a landing page that tells a story that they can tell, or a quick video that gets decision-maker buy-in ...Read More

I'm so glad you asked because I feel like enablement is often enough an afterthought for product launches. Never to be underestimated. Sales teams really need to have a single message and content to paint that big picture vision and differentiate. So when it comes to launch enablement, you always have to ask yourself these 4 questions. One, who is your internal audience for the launch? Probably mostly AEs, but what about SEs, SDRs or Customer Success Managers? What about company segments - is th ...Read More