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. A ...Read More

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 ...Read More

I recommend a two-part approach to getting sales feedback on sales collateral: 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. Collect always-on fee ...Read More

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 jo ...Read More

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 wo ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 h ...Read More

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 fee ...Read More

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 ...Read More