What is a scalable process to get ideas from your sales team on sales collateral?

A quick survey can work well. I usually use Google Forms, but higher-end tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics provide a little more flexibility if you have them.

Longer surveys get fewer responses, so if volume is most important, definitely keep it short. The best way to send it out is through an official sales communication. I did this recently and put it in the biweekly sales newsletter. If you don’t have one, asking one of your sales leaders to send it out will help boost the response rate. As long as they see the value of the survey, and you write a templated email for them, they’ll likely help out.

Another scalable option is to join existing team meetings, which most of your sales leaders probably already have in place on a weekly cadence. Even 10 minutes of conversation can produce loads of valuable ideas. Usually, sales appreciates that you want their input and won’t be shy about telling you what they need.

A key factor to keep in mind is that different sales roles may have very different needs, so make sure to get a representative sample. SDRs and Sr. Enterprise Account Execs will typically provide very different suggestions.

I have a running list of all the sales collateral requests that come in. The list always gets longer, as you can imagine! The sales leads also have access to this list, so there’s full transparency on the ask, who requested it, the level of effort required, and expected due date. 

I’d recommend meeting with the sales leads on at least a quarterly basis to review these requests (and any new ones that may come in) and expected date for deliverables since that helps with prioritization. Also, by joining smaller sales team meetings, you’ll get a sense of what gaps exist today, and what sales collateral can help them close more deals, faster.

I'm excited to hear others' thoughts here... I've tried a number of approaches in the past, but haven't nailed a totally scalable one. 

In an ideal state, it starts with Product Marketing doing the critical work of establishing positioning and messaging, including the key long-term themes for market comms. Your sales team is a critical conduit to defining this together. 

Once you have your platform defined and documented, then it's about inventorying what you have available and discovering from your team what they're aware of, what they use, and what's working/not. You'll also use this step to map what you have to your positioning/messaging priorities. 

From there, grounded in a collective understanding of current state and priorities, you're ready to take ideas from the team! You can do this in group sessions on a quarterly basis to ideate what the best use of PMM calories will be for the quarter against an appropriate number of deliverables. 

Be transparent about the effort required and ask them to think about the impact in a stack-rank fashion... Using a prioritization framework like RICE is a great tool here. 

As with anything, pick off 1-2 things you can try at a time, tackling the entirety of this post at once could be daunting!

Here are some ideas:

- Surveys 

- Slack channel 

- Google spreadsheet where sales can add ideas, describe the need and timing 

- QBR rep presentations - add this to their template deck 

- 1:1 conversations 

But always remember, sales will come up with many ideas and asks for collaterals. Always discover and ask follow-up questions to truly understand the need. You might be able to satisfy an urgent request (who's never got those 😉) with another piece of content. You never want to create one-offs and if you end up doing something as a quick stopgap - make sure to productize it and roll it out to the rest of your team. 

I recommend a two-part approach to getting sales feedback on sales collateral:

1. Create a sales council: Identify a small set of sales team members that are motivated to provide feedback on sales collateral — what’s working, what isn’t, what’s missing. These sales members are often the ones responsible for accounts that are heavy users of a particular product. These people will typically have deep, actionable feedback that will drive immediate results with your key customers.

2. Collect always-on feedback that is periodically reviewed: Have a mechanism for collecting always on feedback on sales collateral — this could be a slack group, a google doc, a workplace post. But to make this scalable, set expectations that feedback won’t necessarily be implemented immediately, but rather on a schedule like quarterly or once a half.

Using both of these approaches gives you a way to get deep, focused feedback from a small motivated group, while also leveraging the collective insight of your broader sales organization.

If you've worked with sales teams before, you know that there is no shortage of ideas they have for marketing ;)

Here are a couple scalable forums we use to gather feedback on enablement, content, collateral, and other marketing programs:

• We have a "sales-suggestion-box" Slack channel. Our head of sales personally monitors that channel, responds to reps, and prioritizes the action items.

• We send a couple different surveys throughout the quarter. We have a sales confidence survey that asks reps how equipped they feel talking to prospects about various topics & the resources they have available. And we run a quarterly Sales Team NPS survey which goes into all aspects of employee satisfaction, including leaving room for feedback.

• We also have a regular meeting cadence with sales leadership. So anything that's being talked about in team meetings gets bubbled up in that meeting so we can align on whether its a priority that quarter, or something for our backlog.

Internal surveys are a good way to crowdsource feedback quickly. You can set one up quickly and share it in your company's chat forum, or send it to your sales team's list serv.

Once your collateral is ready, I would limit the sources of feedback more strategically, so that you're not overwhelmed with too many voices. Having a clear DACI structure (driver, approver, contributor, informed) can help you ensure that you don't have more than one approver on any given collateral. And are sourcing feedback from a handful of contributors.

Sales team surveys! I love surveying sales teams quarterly or biannually on market trends, common objections, toughest competitors, most wanted features, top pain points, what messaging is resonating most, etc. I like to make most questions open-ended to get ideas, but if you have a big sales team you can create multiple choice answers.

Another good thing to throw into the survey is a question about the effectiveness of the current collateral. This one I like to make multiple choice or as a scale/score, so I can measure improvements to this score over time.

We did this at Zendesk with a two prong approach: survey for quantitive feedback and focus groups for qualitative feedback.

1- Survey: We sent out a VP-backed survey to all reps that helped us understand the value of the assets we currently provide (stack ranked), what content they would like to have that is missing, and what self-made content they use most often. This was also sliced & diced at a regional level to ensure we had a global lens.

Once we developed some hypothesis around what worked and what needed adjustments, we used the focus groups to help provide some validation to our revised approach.

2- Focus groups: ensured representation from segments and regions to help us validate our hypothesis and ensure our revised approach would actually solve the challenges.

Finally, make sure that readouts are provided back to the Sales leaders alongside a plan to deliver adjustments. If you can also plan to survey those same recipients in 6-12 months, it would be a great way to validate the changes you made had the impact you were hoping for.