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 cont ...Read More

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 p ...Read More

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 p ...Read More

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 even ...Read More

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-o ...Read More

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 In every FKO I've seen, PMM ha ...Read More