Sales Enablement
16 answers
Senior Product Manager, Amazon • June 8
Measuring sales success is unique to your organization but you can gauge general
effectiveness by understanding the volume of opportunities, conversion rates,
and productivity.
Volume of Opportunity
Cross-selling, renewals, and upselling are more effective ways of generating
revenue than acquiring a net new customer. According to InsightSquared, the
average cost of acquisition for a company to renew a product is $0.13, the
average upsell costs a company $0.28. Both are dramatically more cost-effective
moves than acquiring a net new customer—at $1.18 to earn $1.00.
These cost-effectiv...
Vice President & GM, Global SMB, Braze • June 16
My top 3 metrics to measure sales enablement success are :
1. Reduction in ramp time for new AEs coming into the company - defined as 'how
many days does an AE spend at my company before they close their first New
Business deal?'
2. Quarterly rep participation rate - defined as 'what % of my ramped sales team
closed a deal this quarter?' - this number should increase every quarter if your
sales enablement program is effective. If your sales cycles are close to a year
long, then perhaps you evaluate participation on a bi-annual basis (2x/year). If
your sales cycles are much shorter (less ...
Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager, Adobe • June 23
I’m going to answer this question the same way I answered, “How do you measure
ROI of sales enablement?” because ultimately success should be ROI in some form.
Here’s my response again:
Ultimately you want everything to tie back to revenue (usually in the form of
new versus growth versus retention), but you can never fully hold PMM
accountable for those top-line numbers since there are so many other forces at
play. This is why you need a set of secondary metrics you can use to measure
your efforts a little more directly. For starters, measure the attendance rate
of your sales enablement ...
Director, Product Marketing, Datadog | Formerly Mparticle • July 7
In my opinion the effectiveness of sales enablement should be measured by
reducing the customer acquisition costs over time and reducing the time it takes
to close a deal. Having these in-process KPIs that you can track month over
month will help you demonstrate how your enablement activities are helping
sellers meet their quotas.
Sharing how I think about this as an industry marketer. My first step would be
to huddle with my sales and product leaders and align common goals (where
possible). If you are working within a larger organization, perhaps start by
collaborating with your sales strategy, sales programs and sales enablement
teams, then up the chain to sales/product leadership.
In addition to business outcomes (ARR, etc.) you'll want to leverage the
collaboration with these teams to determine the enablement program strategy and
design. What knowledge do we want each seller to have based on role? How do we
w...
I think there's a similar question above on measuring KPIs. Please refer to it.
But essentially I'll look at 2 parts
1. Whether sales has received the information
* Attendance rates, Tests/Quizzes to capture main points, engagement rates
during the training, feedback post the training and % of sales force trained
2. Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer
* Adoption of product/recommendation
* Revenue growth attributed to the product
* No. of clients pitch to
* Higher win-rates
Director, Retailer Product Marketing, Instacart • January 5
* At a high-level the goal is likely to make sellers more productive in some
sense. Probably by making them more effective or more efficient. Let’s just
call this “go-to-market readiness” as this is typically a key pillar of any
sales enablement team.
* GTM readiness is likely the success metric that is going to be most
inspected/cared about. So you’ll want to be tracking things like time to
close, deal velocity, deal size, churn (if trial to close), or any other
metrics that are standardized and easily reportable via your CRM. Other GTM
readiness metrics that would b...
Vice President & Head of Marketing, Fin.com • April 7
Sales enablement success should ultimately drive sales success, including the
size & number of deals closed won and win rates. Leading sales enablement
indicators of sales success include adoption of content, sales feedback, and
feedback from prospects/customers as part of win/loss analysis. In particular,
if messaging is done effectively and rolled out properly to the sales team, then
the win/loss analysis should show that the messaging ultimately resonated with
the prospect upon deal close. Before that even happens, product marketers should
be able to see that the field has either downloa...
Group Product Marketing Manager- Enterprise, Miro • June 11
Create a quiz or set up role playing for your sales team on their understanding
of the product features, capabilities and messaging. When you set aside time to
observe how your sales teams are understanding and consuming your sales
enablement, you create a better relationship with the team, and know which reps
may need more help in what areas. By watching how well the reps could talk
through the key messages in a role play, or through their quiz answers, I know
what was working and what wasn’t.
Vice President, Product Marketing, Momentive • March 9
It really depends on the type of enablement that you’re doing and the problems
you’re looking to solve. But at the end of the day, there are two key metrics
I’m always looking at, which is the average contract value (in conjunction with
number of deals won) and the win rates. In addition to looking at whether
there’s a measurable increase/decrease, there are other factors I assess:
* Consumption of enablement materials: What % of the field has been trained?
And how are the materials being used in prospect conversations or follow-ups?
* Gong calls: Not everyone has Gong (software that ...
Group Vice President, Industry Marketing, Oracle • April 10
It's a bit of a white whale in a lot of organizations, but ideally you want to
measure not just consumption or certification rates, but the percentage of
closed/won opportunties in which the account team directly applied a specific
enablement program or content. If the assumption is that sales people who are
sufficiently enabled on customer needs, the market and your solution win deals
at a higher rate, faster and for larger dollar values, then any sales enablement
measure would ideally track those outcomes. Often sales enablement measures are
very "top of the funnel" in that they track the...
Head of Product Marketing, Retool • May 2
There are a lot of ways to measure sales enablement: lead-to-conversion rates,
win-rates, sales rep NPS, etc. HubSpot does a great overview of popular options
in this post.
In my experience, there is no one-size-fits all and getting to the "right"
answer requires a deep understanding about how marketing and sales contribute to
your business. In the end, it's all about alignment (with sales) and impact (for
the business).
If you're starting from scratch (e.g. new business unit, early-stage startup), I
recommend working with your head of sales to define success. In the short-term,
it m...
Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce • May 9
I've seen this done successfully a number of different ways. Here are a few
common ones:
1. Usage - What is the % of your sales team that is using the content and
collateral you are creating. If you use a competitive enablement tool like
Klue, you'll be able to track usage and adoption of things like battlecards
and digests.
2. Win Rate - This one is simple. What is your win rate against competitors
prior to your enablement initiatives. How much does it increase post
enablement initiatives? My recommendation is to start by trying to move the
needle on one or two c...
Director, Industry and Product Marketing, Motive • June 15
As an industry marketer I am mostly concerned around the sales cycle, ASP, win
rate, content performance, and rep productivity. Good enablement, marketing, and
content, should shorten sales cycles and drive how things are leveraged ie case
studies, whitepapers, solution briefs, and blogs.
Often times good enablement will measure these variables continuously on a
rolling basis and will work closely with industry and product marketers in
understanding training gaps.
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 28
My favorite way to measure sales enablement success is through a Sales
Confidence Score. Start with a baseline survey to the sales team on their
confidence across your products, personas, verticals, etc. Take pulse surveys
after each enablement session and then make changes to your programming based on
their confidence.
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • August 16
A shorter answer here, but I think there's a pretty straightforward way to
measure sales enablement overall. Ideally, this is driven by the sales
enablement team, and you're fueling their succces:
Key metrics to measure sales enablement:
1. Rep ramp - How long does it take new reps to onboard and reach full quota?
What is the success rate in that period?
2. Annual quota attainment - What % of reps are at or above plan? Does it match
the business needs?
3. Win rates - How effective is sales at qualifying, develping, and closing
opportunities?
Win rates is probaly the most...
9 answers
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing, Gem • December 17
If your sales reps are already having daily conversations, you’re in luck! It
means they aren’t short on time with their customers and giving you 20-30
minutes shouldn't be a big deal.
You might have the best chance positioning the market research ask as something
that can strengthen the relationship with the customer. If they’re already
taking the time to meet with your company often, they likely are heavy users of
your product and would value the opportunity to provide input into your
strategy. Even if you’re trying to do research on messaging, rather than collect
product feedback, yo...
Global Head of PMM and Content Marketing, TIDAL, Square • March 24
I would start with getting information from Sales first. At Square, I rely very
strongly on Account Managers to get a sense for the needs and attitudes of
larger merchants. I'll talk to them directly first and then will try to partner
up with them on specific conversations to close very specific knowledge gaps.
Try to coordinate with your Sales / AM counterparts to make the 30 - 45 minute
call with customers productive for everyone.
Head Of Product Marketing, 3Gtms • March 29
I love this question, partly because it allows me to address what I consider to
be one of the great misconceptions of product marketing-related research. In my
opinion, and experience, your engagements need not be with existing customers
and, in fact, sometimes it's better if they're not. When I was consulting,
rarely would I talk to my clients' actual customers when helping them build
personas. Why? Two reasons:
1. The questions I had applied equally to customers/non-customers.
2. No existing bias to creep into the conversation.
Conventional wisdom says that it's important to unders...
Director of Product Marketing, LogDNA • April 27
I am hoping that some of my other answers have made this clear, but in case they
haven't - market research, just like everything else in Product Marketing, is a
team sport. The more you can show the value of this kind of research (i.e. how
it will help sales win more deals), the easier it will be to recruit sales to
join that team. From there, you can find a process or cadence that works for
everyone to ensure that you are getting the engagement you need without stepping
on any toes.
But there is an even better solution to this - you can get sales to do some
market and competitive resear...
Director of Product Marketing, Culture Amp • September 23
Honestly, with the rise of tools like Gong you don't even need to necessarily
ask your reps to join in on customer calls. If there are specific questions you
want to ask you can always ask your rep to weave it into the call, or ask your
AM or CS rep to schedule a call with an existing customer to aid with the market
research. As long as customer calls are recorded in Gong you can always use that
as a vehicle to go back and listen (and take advantage of some of the cool
analytical features that Gong has!)
If you have a particular set of questions you want to ask, I would recommend
starting...
Senior Director, Product Marketing, Twilio • December 2
If your company uses a tool like Gong.io that is the most non-intrusive way to
glean insights from sales conversations. It's a great tool that lets you search
key topics in an easy way.
If Gong isn't an option to you, then work through your sales team. Be
intentional about which customers you’d like to speak to and be clear about why
you want to speak to them. Always get permission from your sellers to reach out
to their customers. Depending on the stage of the deal cycle the sellers may or
may not want you to be involved so it doesnt disrupt the sales cycle. You have
to be ok with that, ...
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 12
Join the conversation. As a PMM, you should have a seat at the table in any
customer conversation. You bring a different perspective to the discussion and
can often ask different questions than your account exec can.
One thing that's important is to separate these customer conversations from
"market research." Due to their in-depth nature, sales and customer
conversations are more qualitative than quantitative. Listen, ask questions,
understand their existing conditions and frustrations, and lean into what's not
working for them. You'll also hear the traps any competitors have set for y...
Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • August 4
Good question. As with everything, a lot of the answer is it depends.
If you have a customer marketing team, I hope they're doing some level of "air
traffic control" and have a sense of which customers are being reached out to
with specific asks (i.e. beta requests, market research, company speaking
opportunity, etc).
If not, I'd work with Sales and CS to ensure you're talking to the right
customers, and on the right cadence. Come-up with a list of customers you're
going to reach out to and collaboratively share it with them ahead of time, and
then set the appropriate expectations wit...
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • August 4
The sales team have so much knowledge and one of the biggest risks for an
organization is trapping this information in a silo. Work with your sales ops
team to determine whats to disseminate this information strategically throughout
the organization (for example, adding fields in Salesforce where necessary).
Listening to Gong recordings is a great way to glean customer sentiment and
feedback without being interruptive, and it never hurts have valuable 1:1 time
with your sales team.
6 answers
Director, Head of Product Marketing, Webflow • July 13
It really depends on the current understanding of that competitive positioning
within my sales team. I usually work with Sales Enablement or frontline Sales
Managers to create a bill of materials that would help inform the team on
competitive positioning.
Usually this includes but it varies on who I'm tryin to enable (Account
executives, leadership, customer success, technical sales engineers, etc..)
* Competitive battlecards
* Why we win/why we lose messaging + customer stories
* Product differentiation deep dive (in partnership with a Sales/Solutions
Engineer)
* A competitive ...
Senior Director of Product - Datafox and AI Applications, Oracle • August 17
I've seen this done a number of different ways. Typically we have dedicated time
with the field to train them on the positioning. You can get buy-in from the
head of sales and enablement (if you have one) to schedule a standalone session
that you run to help train the field on the positioning.
If your company already has a standing enablement session (e.g., a monthly sales
training time slot), you can use that time, or dedicate a portion of the agenda
to this in a Sales All-Hands.
I've also seen internal email newsletters for sharing key updates or assets with
the field. I'd encourage s...
Director of Product Marketing, Culture Amp • September 21
You'll want to create materials that you can package up and disseminate via a
central hub like Highspot, Seismic, Showpad, Confluence etc. When you roll this
out make sure you lead with "what's it in for them?" (faster deal cycles, higher
ACV, etc)
It depends on who you're trying to enable (AEs, AMs, technical sales
engineering) but typical effective competitive positioning materials include:
1. Battlecards
2. Swords and Shields (offensive/defensive plays) supported by customer stories
and proof points
3. Product differentiation deep dive (but be careful not to turn this into a
feature...
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 13
This requires a few different tactics depending on the size of your sales team.
YMMV based on culture, sales leadership, enablement structure, but it's a good
place to start.
One thing that's constant, though. Establish a one-stop shop for all competitive
materials (Folder in sales portal, intranet page, doc, etc.) and relentlessly
point people to it. Publicly, privately, etc. Wear out your Cmd-C/Cmd-V keys to
paste this everywhere. Ultimately, you're building trust in your team that you
know what's up, what's changing, and they should trust YOU before they trust the
internet.
1. Sm...
Vice President, Product Marketing, AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart • July 7
Keep it simple and practical. We use a simple battle card format to pull
together the most essential details you need at your fingertips to enable
competitive conversations. We host it on Seismic so it is easy to search for
keywords and find the battle cards. We also do specific training sessions for
tier 1 and tier 2 competitors (described above). I’ve also used slack channels
to create a conversation around competition and tackle fringe situations
effectively with group input. Again, those people on the frontlines are often
the best source of insights.
Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • August 4
Put in a place that's easy for them to find, and be consistent. While that's
oversimplified, it really comes down to that.
Sales will look for competitive positioning as they need it, so having the
materials in a place they can easily access and consistently get updates is the
central part of ensuring it's used.
There are of course a whole bunch of things we can layer on-top of this --
internal competitive newsletter, closed won/loss data sharing, and more. The
internal newsletter can be a great way to provide regular updates and build that
consistency of directing folks back to the s...
9 answers
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex, Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com • May 19
I would love to say that you can enable global sales team with technology,
localization and ensuring they have access to all of your HQ resources. But that
is just not the case.
Here are the true challenges (and solutions) when enabling global teams:
1. Resource Constraints: You have $100 worth of bandwidth but mainland brings in
80 to 90% of the cash. Do you proportionally help the global team? Answer: No,
you still need to enable them as if you were enabling a local team. You can do
fewer programs with them, but you can't half do the ones you pick. It will take
disproportionate in...
Head (VP) of Global Enablement, Benchling • May 19
My biggest challenge is working with all the other groups vying for seller
attention and helping them approach it with empathy and working for the greater
good, versus what they think is best. But the responsibility here isn't all on
them - enablement has a responsibilty to also present the full list of requests
and pull cross functional groups together to prioritize them together.
Vice President & GM, Global SMB, Braze • June 16
Sales reps are busy. Sales managers are even busier. It's not easy to convince
these busy folks to take an hour out of their day to sit in a classroom and
listen to a lecture. And when your team is global, the odds are that this one
hour comes at an inconvenient (EMEA) or impossible (APAC) time for a rep or
manager.
Some of the things we've done are - (1) region-specific enablement sessions, (2)
tapping sales leaders and influential sales reps to lead some sections of
enablement sessions, especially those related to competitive positioning or deal
reviews, and (3) emailing or Slacking bi...
Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager, Adobe • June 23
Regarding enabling sales teams in general, please check out some of the other
answers I’ve posted here in this AMA, but specifically for the global aspect,
here’s my take: there’s a good chance that a lot of your program and material
will apply globally, and you might even think you don’t need to do regional
enablement because of how good and wide-reaching it is. However, I would highly
encourage you to ditch that school of thought and lean into regional-specific
enablement. First, you might learn something. These regional teams will have
good insight and feedback into what is/isn’t working...
Head of Marketing, Pinwheel • February 9
This is particularly relevant to Visa given our global nature and the 200+
countries we operate in. The biggest challenge I encounter is how unique each
country / market is, and by extension how that influences the customer mindset
and how sales should engage with them.
That said, although different customers in different countries may think about
things in different ways, there are always common denominators. Most companies
with global sales teams have some notion of regional hubs or regional HQs.
Lean on your regional counterparts / leads to better understand and align on
what these...
Head of Product Marketing, ITSM, Atlassian • February 18
Enablement tactics and tools that work for a team of 50 reps need to be adjusted
when you deal with a team of 500 globally dispersed reps. Some common challenges
I have seen include:
* Multiple enablement/training tools and portals making it confusing for reps
to know where to go
* Breaks in communication and lack of localization of content
* Failure to take local needs into account
* Changes in personas and competitive environment
* Prioritization of requests
Product marketers should work with their sales enablement counterparts to
identify best practices that can scale ...
Editor in Chief, Entertainment Weekly • March 11
The important word in this question is "global"---the challenges of scaling
enablement efforts across the world are primarily across 3 buckets:
-language: scaling localization of core assets and training
-insights: scaling understanding of regional markets so that nuance informs the
approach to that market
-bandwith/HC: to really be effective, you need in-market specialists (pmm and
enablement) but that's not always feasible and often in-market marketers are
tasked with every marketing function.
How to overcome them:
-Language: Hyper prioritization of assets and languages.
-Ins...
Regional needs differ. We tend to look at things through a US lens and that's a
mistake. Buyers in EMEA vary even within that region. Southern and Northern
Europe are different. UK is different in its own way.
If possible in person meetings (QBRs) are one of thr best ways to understand
local needs.
Its impossible to meet every regional variation so I like to break out assets by
stories that will stay consistent across regions and then areas that need to be
adapted. Core value drivers aren't going to change. But the use cases will vary
based on regional needs. Use your local sales en...
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • August 2
It depends on what your global challenges are. From experience, some challenges
may relate to selling into different markets. I would segment your Sales
Enablement approach to speak specifically to the pains and challenges of
different markets instead of going for a "one-size-fits-all" enablement
approach.
1 answer
Head of Product Marketing, LottieFiles | Formerly WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold) • July 30
Creating content takes a lot of time and it definitely makes sense to get as
much as possible from your work. Some ideas to reuse content, such as case
studies, could be
* customers' quotes or successful achievements shared over socials
* LinkedIn Carousel Posts with case-study highlights
* reposting the case study as the Linkedin article
* make an infographic from case study content and use it on social
* make a SlideShare & Speaker Deck presentation
* join podcasts and talk about success stories based on your content
I hope, it helps!
7 answers
Head of Marketing, Landed • May 7
This continues to be an evolving process but we leverage a few things:
1. Lead time - sharing the info early so the sales team can disseminate it via
the right channels with enough notice (for example, some teams meet just
once a week so if you miss that cycle, they may not see it until after
launch)
2. Central POC - we have at least one person on sales who has the
responsibility of reviewing key messaging and ensuring that updates relevant
to sales are flagged via an internal dashboard
3. Visibility - important messaging is delivered and reinforced when possible
...
VP of Marketing, Builder.io • September 24
Great question! You can easily spend a lot of time on building the perfect
messaging framework, but it can be useless if other teams, especially sales, do
not understand it or believe in it - so here are a few things to keep in mind as
you work through messaging:
* Involve them at the start of the process. The first step in any new messaging
project should be doing research and gathering input. Do a focus group with
your sales team and gather their feedback - they are on the front lines every
day and likely have great insight into what challenges customers often bring
up, what...
Aside from what Anjali is recommending, you will need to understand how your
team sells. (e.g. their sales process) You will need to make sure how messaging
can play in 1st Call Deck, Battle cards, and other assets and collaterals that
will help them win deals. You will need sales champions who will evangelize your
messaging, and champions will include Head of Sales, Regional Managers, and
Highest performing reps. The reason for champions is because you will need
theHead of Sales and Regional Managers because it's a bit of top-down. But
importantly, you will need the highest Performing Reps...
This is a tough one. I work mainly on Southeast Asia which is made up of
multiple regions and languages. With minimal resourcing, we tend to do a large
online training once a week with the intention to reach as many sales folks as
person.
* We then try to get feedback from the team or the sales leads to see where are
the gaps and what do we need to tweak
* If necessary, we will conduct local market office hours or specific training
sessions targeting to individual markets.
* We also try to enable our partners on the client solutions team to help be an
extension of us so we do...
Vice President, Product Marketing, Samsara • February 8
This largely depends on the size and distribution of your sales team. On one
end, if you have a small, locally based sales team then this is managable and
usually lower effort than what you'd need to do on the other end of the specturm
for a massive sales team that is highly geographically distributed, and that is
also aligned to customers in different segments and/or industries. In general,
ruthless consistency and over-communication via multiple formats (one pagers,
slide decks, websites, FAQs, enablement videos) goes a long way, as does getting
them to actively participate (ie. through m...
Director of Product Marketing, SnorkelAI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • May 25
Repetition is so important; it's about embodying the messaging in everything PMM
produces, and as you enable on different assets, tying it back to the strategy.
Show examples of how key points can come to life in an outbound email, provide
them with quick-reference bullets that they can use as reminders of what to
always reinforce in their communications.
If you're rolling out a new deck, don't just train on it one time. Introduce it,
have strong reps or leaders demonstrate delivery. Show it working in the field.
Give opportuntiies for them to role play and practice pitching. Ask the tea...
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 29
My favorite approach to ensuring the sales team gets messaging is two-fold:
Work with sales leadership: Get alignment from sales leadership early and often.
If they are bought into the messaging and feel they were part of the process,
they will make your life a hell of a lot easier by supporting the messaging
indepdently and holding reps accountable.
Work with sales enablement: Work with SE to understand the gaps, confusion, and
lack of trust that may be existing within the sales team and work together to
create an action plan for success.
8 answers
Senior Director of Product Management, GitHub • June 14
I break it down as follows: product marketing's main role in sales enablement is
to educate salespeople on the target customers/market segments/buyer personas &
needs, etc., how to position value (not benefits or feature/function) for those
customers, and provide competitive intelligence (battlecards, training on what
to know and what to say, objection handling, etc.) There is also a technical
marketing component to it of course, which is training sales engineers
(typically) on features & functions and mapping those to buyer and user
problems.
The rest of it, in my view, is sales enablem...
Sales Enablement is a very broad term. But, content and messaging is an
important part of sales enablement.
We believe that product marketing is the best positioned to drive content
enablement because,
* product marketing is responsible for the messaging and majority of the
content (directly or indirectly). They know the buyer personas, target
markets, own product positioning, and competitive intelligence.
* product marketing is better aligned with the other teams than the traditional
sales enablement function. Companies need consistency in their messaging
across the fun...
Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager, Adobe • June 23
This somewhat depends on the resources your company has on each of those teams.
If you have a full sales ops team then partner with them to understand win/loss
and pipeline health. What you’re looking for is how much you’re winning/losing,
why you’re winning/losing, who you’re winning/losing against, and what the
forward-looking pipeline looks like considering all of those factors. If you
don’t have a sales ops team, then you need to take some of this on yourself. I
don’t believe a PMM team can be effective unless they have this foundation of
data-backed insights. If doing these activities ...
Head of Marketing, Pinwheel • February 10
This is likely something that can differ a bit depending on company and
organization, but in general:
* Sales Ops functions are focused on strategies, systems, and processes related
to stuff like sales forecasting, quota assignment, sales comp design, sales
coverage, and administration/maintainance of a company's CRM and lead
management systems. All this is of course done in service to not only enable
sales, but also execute on the desired sales strategy.
* Product Marketing's focus on sales enablement is more oriented around
development of content, assets, and sales t...
VP Product Marketing and Sales Enablement, EIS • March 29
Its OK for the line to be muddy. Make sure you have a good working relation with
your sales ops counterpart.
Usually sales ops and enablement are slightly different functions. sales ops has
also revenue ops elements in it around contracting and quoting for example. One
common metric outright owned by sales enablement is time to productivity. THis
comes from good onboarding, based on Sales understanding the market, product,
customer, tools, pricing, quotation process, SOW terms etc. Most of that has
little to do with PMM and we should be grateful for sales ops' exisitence.
If you fin...
Vice President & Head of Marketing, Fin.com • April 7
Different companies will define product marketing and sales ops / sales
enablement in different ways. The distinction tends to run along a spectrum
where on the one hand, Product Marketing will lead the creation of content that
focuses on market positioning and differentiation, and on the other hand, Sales
Ops will lead specific activities or content that helps translate that marketing
positioning in a way that resonates with the experience of being in sales.
For example, a Product Marketer may create content that talks about how your
company has designed product capabilities to addresse...
Head of Marketing, Transform • April 21
Sales ops cannot be responsible for launching new products or features. Any
topic directly related to the product or the GTM motion should fall under the
purview of PMM (since they will be closely attached to the product management
team). PMMs create the training/launch materials and are responsible for
rallying the internal teams and the market towards a launch. So, this separation
should be pretty straightforward. PMMs should also strive to share insights from
the ongoing sales motion (customer interviews, win-loss analysis etc.) to equip
the sales team better to challenge the customer du...
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 29
The lines between sales enablement and product marketing will always ebb and
flow between different organizations. There should be a more clear line between
sales op and product marketing.
Sales ops focuses on data analysis, training and support, revenue forecasting,
and general sales process optimization. I would say this role likely has more
ovverlap with sales enablement than with product marketing.
No matter your situation, sit down and map out the R&R boundaries. If you're at
a small company, you'll likely have to wear multiple hats - and that's okay!
Ensure you know what you'...
4 answers
VP Product Marketing and Sales Enablement, EIS • March 31
1. Many companies have a form of President's Club. Congratulate every single
awardee. Ask to join them on the next drive-by with prospects/clients. these are
the best reps you company has. there is probably a reason they are good
2. Listen in to tele conversation (be it inside our outisde sales). these are
always extremely insightful and eye opening. Succinctly telling your story in 20
seconds is so hard.
3. Get to know the sales ops / rev ops team. they are critical partners in
providing you with lead / pipeline data
4. Check-in with field marketing. they hvae their feet to the ground...
Senior Director of Product Marketing, InVision • October 28
When it comes to PMM core duties, typically who are the best partners in the
sales org, who has the knowledge and the customer touch points to really help
PMMs win?
I imagine this is specific to each organization, but for me it’s all about
identifying your power players within sales and customer success. In my team’s
onboarding, I actually recommend finding a “BFF” on sales and marketing in their
first 90 days. It pays major dividends in their success down the road. Here are
the teams and personality traits I find myself looking for:
1. Sales engineering or solutions consulting: Just mak...
Group Product Marketing Manager, Intercom • November 22
Where I've found the most valuable bi-lateral relationships within the Sales org
(outside of sales leadership) has been with teams that have access to data that
can help my team inform where we can lean in more to help sales.
These are sales ops type teams that have an eye on the sales funnel, and are
able to provide quantative data that paints a picture of sales health. How are
deal progressing through the funnel, where are they getting stuck and why? This
quantative data combined with the qualatative research our PMM team drives,
helps reall prioritize where we can spend our time better e...
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Google • April 23
A field sales rep and customer engineer are your most trusted advisors. If you
have account managers, you should also engage them. You should have a network of
at least one or two trusted reps who regularly speak to customers and can give
you the real feedback. Even more importantly, you should form a close enough
relationship that you should also join calls or meetings periodically to hear
and feel the customer pain real-time. There is no better way to validate a pitch
than to try and give it yourself.
Relationships with leadership are important for operational efficiency,
prioritizati...
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 28
I recommend building relationships with the canaries in the coal mine. What I
mean by this is people who may not be decision makers but will be vocal, and may
not often get "heard" from other teams or leaders in the department. If you can
listen to their feedback/warnings/suggestions, prioritize any real threats, and
take action cross-functionally not only will you build trust and credibility
with that person, but the whole sales team will trust you and want to work with
you more strategically.
There are also the obvious choices of ADRs (they are the front lines!), sales
enablement, etc.
6 answers
Head Of Product Marketing, Redox • April 6
So I have done a lot of work with Profit Well, they have some great frameworks
and suggestions for building Pricing and packaging. The ideal scenario for me is
to find out what I am building towards, what is our goal. Is it a land grab, are
we just trying to get as many people as possible or are we building towards
revenue and that is the biggest driver. From there you should be able to find
the framework that either brings in more registrations or optimizes for revenue
in order to make sure you are hitting company goals. But if you haven't checked
out profit well, I highly suggest them!
Head of Marketing, MobileCoin • April 13
If you want the highest company valuation possible, you need a recurring stream
based on a value-based and/or usage-based pricing model. Investors and Wall
Street value recurring revenue streams at a much higher multiple than one-time
transactional revenue because they are predictable revenue streams with higher
profit margins that build longer customer lifetime value. This is why many
companies are moving to subscriptions.
There are 4 key levers in determining your recurring pricing strategy for a B2B
product:
* Market Segment: who are your target markets and what are their shared
pr...
Director Product Marketing, Salesforce • April 20
Pricing is hard, especially when the product price has to extract the maximum
customer willingness to pay and still leaves some customer value. There is
plenty of resources on the web you can find and I don’t want to recommend
anything here. From my experience, here are a few things that will be helpful
when pricing your B2B product. Good research from interviews and surveys from
existing / potential customers, supplemented by consulting firms’ pricing models
is a great start. Trade-offs between long-term commit vs discount are a must.
Keep the pricing window open for sales leaders to build...
Director Product Marketing, Salesforce • April 20
Pricing is hard, especially when the product price has to extract the maximum
customer willingness to pay and still leaves some customer value. There is
plenty of resources on the web you can find and I don’t want to recommend
anything here. From my experience, here are a few things that will be helpful
when pricing your B2B product. Good research from interviews and surveys from
existing / potential customers, supplemented by consulting firms’ pricing models
is a great start. Trade-offs between long-term commit vs discount are a must.
Keep the pricing window open for sales leaders to build...
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform, Atlassian • August 4
Figuring out the willingness-to-pay (WTP) by conducting research for your
product with your target market/buyers is an effective approach. I've mentioned
more details in a previous response.
There are lots of good articles on WTP research (including HBR). Also checkout
the Profitwell/PriceIntelligently blog for some good articles on pricing.
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex, Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com • February 21
Your question is about: The go-to-resource to conduct B2B pricing power for a
product.
There really isn't any go-to-resource, its a set of things to consider such as:
1. Brand Power: Is the product the category leader? Do customers trust the
brand? In this case the brand is likely to have more pricing power than
competitors.
2. Net Dollar Retention Rate: Numbers of NDR above 130 generally indicate that
customers increase usage of the product and spend more with the company.
3. Discounting Rates: Depending on the customer segment, say Mid-Market, a
discounting rate <15% is very health...
Developer Marketing Lead, Google Assistant, Google | Formerly DocuSign • July 13
Generally speaking, developer platforms bring about more customer usage and
higher customer retention, so from a pricing standpoint, I tend to not get too
deep on how to price dev tools–because the long term approach of healthy revenue
generating customers is more valuable than a short term lift in charging for
access to the platform. If you’re really getting serious on pricing, I’d suggest
you look to a research firm to do some discrete choice modeling for you.
3 answers
Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager, Adobe • June 23
First, create content that’s in line with what you know they will use. I
mentioned in one of my other answers here that oy need to understand their
selling methodology and ensure the content aligns with it. If they use Demo2Win
then know your content needs to follow a Tell-Show-Tell framework around
problems, solutions, value for each mini-chapter. If they use ValueSelling, know
that your content needs to anchor on a key business issue followed by the common
obstacles standing in the way. The more you understand about how their pitch
will be run, the better you can build content that will e...
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Google • April 23
There's no way to directly ensure that sales uses the enablement content that
marketing creates. You can track using technology options - which provides great
metrics for you to report. But that is more of an auditing mechanism.
What you want is an incentive mechanism. The most powerful, albeit difficult,
one is to hold sales accountable to giving feedback and usage and make future
work contingent on that feedback and usage. You may not be able to hold them to
it all of the time as the business must move forward, but you can form a
partnership with the sales leadership to make it clear ...
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Google • April 26
First, I think you shouldn't expect 100% wholesale usage of the sales enablement
materials you create. Sales enablement materials are meant to create a solid
foundation for reps to use but, ultimately, every prospect and customer requires
some level of customization so expect adaptation.
There's really a spectrum here of tracking and it depends on what metrics you
need to justify the resourcing you put to sales enablement, and to whom you need
to justify that resourcing. On one hand, you can simply use anecdotal feedback
by talking to reps and sales leadership to understand if the mater...
Director of Product Marketing, SnorkelAI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • May 25
Regular reminders and reinforcement! Sales teams obviously face a ton of
pressure to hit quota, and they need to be as efficient as possible... And while
some are awesome at experimentation, many will struggle to adopt new
assets/messaging when they're moving fast and rely on what's familiar.
On the flip side, be sure to manage outdated materials as best you can... If
there are old decks/n-pagers floating around, label them as such, and if you see
things pop up from people's "private collections" send them a note with the
latest and greatest and ask them to replace.
Make it as easy ...