What should product marketing's role be in your company's sales kickoff?

This is a fun question because I’ve seen this vary so broadly across the places I’ve worked. Step one is to make sure product marketing gets invited :) At Mixpanel, all of the go-to-market teams go to SKO, and it has really helped to create a sense of shared purpose across sales, marketing and customer success. But I’ve seen SKO be sales-only at larger companies and companies on tight budgets.

You’ll likely get different answers from different people on the right level of involvement in the content by product marketing. As a rule of thumb, product marketing usually has more responsibility when the sales enablement team is small (or nonexistent).

I personally prefer to be a stakeholder in an agenda owned by the Head of Sales, and only be responsible for a couple hours of content across the three or so days of SKO. 

Here are a couple examples of things I’ve seen PMM own at sales kickoffs:

• Rolling out a new pitch deck
• Deep dive on a top competitor
• Bringing in a speaker from an analyst firm like Gartner or Forrester
• Introducing a new product
• Objection handling exercises
• Product marketing plans for the upcoming year
• CEO keynote

Sales kickoffs are fun and product marketing usually has a key role to play. But driving the full agenda and all the logistics is a lot to take on.

We are heavily involved in the Sales Kick off so that's where we focused our time and energy. At Twilio, we break out Sales Kick off from the main Company Kick off so I make sure to participate in all the forums where decisions are being made as well as listen to my stakeholders (and listen to the data) about what they want to hear. I then ‘pitch’ the sales leaders creative ideas for how we can enable their teams as part of SKO.

Early in 2020, my team worked really hard to produce two hours of programming as part of our Sales Kick off. Because of the empathetic approach, we had excellent feedback from stakeholders, “that is the best presentation from product marketing that i’ve seen at Twilio”.

There should be involvement when it comes to alignment on the year's go-to-market strategy and any refreshed or new product positioning. 

Because it is the one opportunity to set the tone and focus of the year, product marketing should view it as the time to rollout any new strategies (campaigns, launches) and positioning/messaging (products) to ensure that buyer enablement is strong from the start and the sales team is fired up!  

Also, I don't think product marketing needs to be present or a presenter. In fact, I think it's more powerful when a Sales leader delivers the strategy and positioning pre-aligned with product marketing/marketing. 

That really depends on the focus of the event. In my experience, product marketing and sales enablement typically run about a 50/50 split on content sharing. The last few days of our kick-off are often deep in sales training or process updates which typically don’t involve product marketing.

What we do often own is any product or program spotlight that is of high focus for our customer facing teams. Figuring out what is “high focus” is a joint decision with Sales and CS leadership. In one kick-off, this meant a half day dedicated to a new product we were releasing. In another, we carried a large part of the content to lead the full team through new persona trainings and workshopping discovery methods the team might start using.

All-in-all, I find that product marketing typically has a pretty important seat at the table for content development of your kick off event. But I think agenda and overall programming should be owned by your sales enablement and/or sales team leadership if that’s available to you. Also, get your general marketing team involved to make sure your sales team understands all of the activities marketing will be doing to drive top of funnel demand for them.

This depends on the makeup of your org. If you have dedicated sales enablement, they'll typically orchestrate the program with sales/customer success/PMM/PM leadership, and PMMs will serve as SMEs.

If you don't have a built-out sales enablement team, PMM should play a forward role in formulating the theme/sessions/objectives.

Either way, it's a great forum for PMMs to connect to sales leaders and listen to their pain points.

Product marketing plays a crucial role in sales kickoff by energizing the team with the product roadmap and vision, sharing value prop or simply presenting new tools for sales to win. The goal is to build confidence and energy, showing investment in the right things to help Sales succeed.

I've been doing Product Marketing for 12+ years, and there hasn't been a single year where PMM wasn't an active participant or presenter at Sales Kick Offs.

Here are some examples

1. In every FKO I've seen, PMM has presented product roadmap and energized the reps on the new innovations to come. This was relevant both for new products (and SKUs) that were launching that gave them an additional product with which to win. This also gave them visibility into feature innovations for existing products that solved competitive gaps and could improve win rates. Either way, a product roadmap and vision session was on the SKO/FKO mainstage agenda

2. In multiple instances, we used SKO to do a value prop and content refresh. We realized there wasn't much new innovation to introduce, but reps weren't fully bought in to all the messaging changes we had made. We had them look through the new materials in advance and used SKO breakout sessions as practice time, as role play time, for Q&A and even as a pitch competition. It is rare to get all reps in one place, and that too with a fresh mindset of beginning a new year - and we found it very helpful to refresh our product value prop during SKO

3. The most impactful work we have done as PMM at SKO is where we talked about less PMM deliverables, but more about Sales tools. The narrative was simple - here are new tools coming this year that will help you win. These included new product launches, new marketing campaigns, new selling resources (e.g. a team of solution experts, or more sales engineers), a new buyer focus, new sales playbooks etc. And once we landed these tools, we focused on the content and collateral pieces underneath that. Reps want to leave SKO with the confidence that they will make their numbers and these sessions were very powerful in doing just that. These sessions were almost never branded as PMM sessions but were run by the GTM leadership with PMM as presenters or influencers of the strategy

Product marketing should own the story of SKO and it's activation throughout content. If I look back at my most recent company SKO, here's what my team owned:

• All keynote content and demos

• Enablement objectives and curriculum, in partnership with our field readiness team

• Demo activations in common areas

• Signage and messaging

• Rev/sales leadership alignment

• Stakeholder in look and feel of the event

In enterprise B2B PMM, there are 2 tentpole moments every year: 1) SKO, 2) Your annual customer event.