What is the most successful way you've seen marketing teams launch sales enablement material with sales teams?
I would tailor the cadence and materials to your audience. You need a general track for all sales reps to highlight the 90-day roadmap updates, highlight key launches and other relevant topics. It would be best if you had a separate technical track for your technical field teams that will go deeper into the technical side of the feature.
A bi-weekly live call (for 60 min) seems to do the magic from a cadence standpoint. I've seen PMMs do loom videos and try for an offline education track, but it does not work.
Also, avoid the last week of the month for a sales enablement call :)
The most successful internal launches are often big ones (i.e., rolling out a new product or sales methodology such as solution selling), and in my experience, they include: (1) an executive sponsor (2) alignment with business priorities and (3) internal momentum.
- An executive sponsor is key if you want anything well-adopted by the sales team. Find a well-respected senior sales leader (the more senior, the better), who wants to take on the initiative and be responsible for getting the sales team to adopt it. They should be the figurehead, speaking to sales across a number of touchpoints (recorded videos sent via email, in all-hands meetings, etc.) to drive accountability and excitement
- Ideally whatever you're rolling out to the field ladders up to a key priority for the overall business, so that it's something being talked about and tracked across functions. This reinforces to the field the importance of learning and putting into practice what they've learned. If they see their manager and their manager's manager talking about the higher-order priority, they'll be more likely to spend time adopting whatever it is you're trying to teach them
- Internal momentum to drive excitement is key! Sellers are motivated by competition and rewards. Create leaderboards that the exec sponsor and managers can refer to every week. Get managers talking about success stories or reps who've adopted the material in their team meetings. Showcase reps who are successfully using the new material in a public internal forum so that they feel proud to be recognized by leadership. Create a silly video from the cross-functional team to drive awareness of the new material and send it to the sales team. This is where you can get creative and have fun!
Enablement can be delivered in multiple formats. It can be a full fledge broadcast session to the entire team, or it can also be a roadshow going into weekly team calls to deliver the new pitch deck, review new persona playbooks, or roll out new pricing. Think about how you pattern interrupt to get people's attention and make this super relevant to their world - answer the key question: how will this help me sell 10x faster and better? My final advice: work closely with your sales leadership and sales enablement team to align on the timing and the best way to deliver the enablement. Without this alignment, your programs may not land well. Also, from one enablement to another, always ask for feedback so you can continue to improve.
The most effective way is through a combination of live trainings, async video shares, and regular check-ins with select sales individuals (and or sales leaders) to gather any feedback about what's working well versus not.
Also, enablement materials should evolve. There needs to be a structure to regularly assess the effectiveness of enablement materials (through sales teams' feedback, as well as through customer research).
I think they way we currently do this at Shopify is the best I've seen at a larger company, and it has three things in common with the best I've seen for this at smaller companies:
- Dedicated time is set up to train sales reps on the new materials, especially if it's for a new feature/product launch, new pricing/plan, new campaign, new pitch deck, demo or event. (Break into groups if needed).
- During those sessions, there is ample time for reps to ask questions and even practice playing back what you want them to communicate with customers.
- The adoption and effectiveness of the new materials are monitored closely by PMM, and a sales feedback loop is created.
- Sales feedback is taken seriously, and regular check-ins between PMM x Sales occur.