Where can PMM provide the most lift in the enterprise sales motion?

PMMs are the most important when it comes to being able to simplify what the product has built and clearly describe what it does and why it’s important. Sales teams are constantly being bombarded with new features that product teams have built, you can’t feed every single feature separately for sales teams to sell. 

PMM should be able to help package up these new features (or existing ones) into a narrative to better help sales go to market with them. We did this at Dropbox by leveraging Sales Plays. By packaging up features (new and old) into a narrative, it helps the enterprise teams tell a better story, focus on key features that solve a specific problem, and close deals faster.

Every enterprise sales rep wants to sell more, faster. The most valuable PMMs I’ve worked with are experts on their product, market, customers, and competition. Individual sales reps don’t have time to track these things at the level of detail PMMs do, but require smart talking points to be successful.

On top of expertise, PMMs bring a macro view and can surface best practices from across the sales org. Ideally, you’re joining calls, talking to reps in different regions and segments, and even participating in pitches. That gives you a unique perspective.

There are many ways this knowledge can be put to use, but here are two that have worked for me:

1. Pitches (decks, talk tracks, etc.). In enterprise sales, the money is made through conversations. The way you pitch the product matters a lot, and you have to constantly test and refine the angle since most markets change by the quarter, or even month. Everyone wants the pitch to work, but that requires going through the right process of testing and learning to make sure it does. PMMs are the best people to define this narrative (in partnership with Sales of course). They can apply their global view and drive the iterative process across the sales team.
   
2. Intelligence on best practices and competition. Every sales rep has a narrow view of the world, often by design. They sell into a specific territory, to a specific customer segment. PMMs can surface what’s working at the global level. What talking points are working? Which competitors should they be prepared to position against in deal cycles and how should they do it? I often share this type of information through Slack channels, training sessions, and even SKO presentations.

(1) TOFU - create awareness [enteprise messaging] 

(2) BOFU - making sure you have the right messaging and assets along the journey to closed won [sales play] 

Together these two parts make an enterprise play. So depending on the problem, you can spend your time creating though-leadership pieces and campaigns, or you have to enable sales and cs. Or in some cases, you have to run a full integrated campaign. 

PMM can influence several touchpoints across the enterprise sales motion. PMM’s biggest impact will likely vary widely depending on the business stage. Identifying and anticipating the needs of each person in the buying group and building appropriate content and messaging and aligning that to the sales process will be key.

Adding value through the enterprise sales cycle can be done in a number of different ways including managing standardized Request for Proposal (RFP) responses, building a partnership with analyst relations team to help drive analyst outlook, and enabling the sales team with a differentiated story that speaks to large business impacts with solid proof points. I’d recommend analyzing your current sales motion today, what’s the biggest area of impact you find? Is there enough pipeline coverage? What are your conversion and win rates, can they be improved? What objections do your sales teams need to overcome? Is your message resonating in the market?

Stepping back, let's differentiate the enterprise sales motion from the product-led growth motion:

Smaller companies have less employees and, therefore, can often easily buy from you with a credit card. Some SDR in a sales dept. can purchase your self-serve plans with their boss' credit card. Some recruiter coordinator can do the same with their own and maybe expense it.

In these situations, it's often less about the PMM trying to train or support the sales team in hand-holding a customer to enter their credit card information. Instead, it's about doing things that help customers buy on their own: writing in-app conversion copy about a paid feature, conducting self-serve pricing research, or launching a new feature that's on a paid self-serve tier.

Enterprise customers have more employees, which (often) begets more bureaucracy: legal teams who want to go back and forth on a contract, purchasing departments that want to haggle over the price, and multiple stakehholders in different departments who want to weigh in and ask questions. Salespeople — humans! — are much better at working with other humans on the above than products are (at least, today, that is).

With bigger customers, your job as a PMM is to help Sales and Customer Success do that hand-holding with customers. This means training Sales/CS on features that are more expensive (they work on commission!), advocating for more differentiation in the Enterprise plan with research, and copywriting for them (sales emails, PDFs, etc.).

If you want to "provide more lift in the Enterprise motion," help Sales and CS close more enterprise deals. Start by trying the above, and ask your Sales/CS colleagues what they need as well.

Enterprise sales motion is one of the harder ones to pull off because it's usually long and involves large deal sizes. That usually means big buying groups with many detractors (legal, finance..).

PMMs can help in many ways:

• Conduct win/loss analysis regularly--to keep tabs on shifts in market trends (spend, use cases, customer tiers), competitive landscape, product roadmap input.

• Competitive positioning--to inform messaging and sales training (quick dismisses - how to articulate to ICP prospects how you're different)

• Identifying ICP--useful for sellers, product prioritization and ensures brand, growth and content marketing work on the right things

• Positioning and messaging at large--at the company level and for specific use cases. this includes working on the website, but also in developing sales decks and analyst decks.

  * This can mean developing persona-specific assets (think how do I help the champion sell internally and convince the CFO and COO this is needed?)

• Launches--with enterprise products there is a level of expectation when it comes to communicating changes to current customers. That can tie directly into upsells and cross-sells but also to managing expectations around changes in the current offering. Launch messaging and comms should cover these cases too.