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

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?

(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. 

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.

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.