Sales Enablement

I'd break this question out into two separate ones: 1) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement content? and 2) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement? 1) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement content? (heard quite often) If you have a tool (e.g. CMS, other platform, intranet, etc.), * Most tools will have several metrics built-in or capable of being extended: * Clicks / Downloads * Social Feedback * Comments * Reports If you don't have a tool, * Sales surveys / training surveys * Ad-hoc reporting 2) How do you tra...

In addition to the above, since most companies are already using SFDC, there is a feature/plug-in SFDC - called altify where you could align content for sales based on type of accounts / segments etc which would include all the things they might need for a successful first conversation - slides, 2 pager, challenger framing (if you are using challenger methodology), vertical insights etc. This is almost like "just-in-time" sale enablement.  We were close to implementing it at Brocade with Sales and marketing leaders coming together. It was discontinued because of the acquisition. Would h...

I meet with the sales leaders and sit with the AEs on a regular basis to understand what’s useful, how they’re using the enablement materials, and where the gaps are. Even though sometimes we think we’ve done a ton of training on a certain topic (new feature launch, competitor), if it’s not relevant for sales in the moment, they might not remember the training or that we even have certain assets to help them. At that point, PMM can join smaller team meetings to review material and/or hold another enablement session if there’s enough interest. We also do certification on things like 1st cal...

We use Workramp for formal trainings - so we can see with that tool completion rates and if there are quizzes or assesments, how folks did on those. We have more informal training sessions called Scoops for our sales / csm team and then a Technical Scoop for our technical teams. We also hold office hours for newer, more technical product or feature releases. The overall questions and engagement - while more qualitative - help us assess how well enablement is going there.

This is tough to measure quantitatively without tooling in place to track how often collateral is used, so if that's an option for you, start there. Then be curious about what assets are used most often because they're familiar/readily available, and what assets are actually the most strategic. Without tooling, the goal is to create regular (e.g., quarterly) opportunities for your sales team to provide feedback on what they use and why. This doubles as an opportunity to reinforce everything that's available, how it maps to core positioning and messaging priorities, and gather ideas for h...

It's difficult to paint a broad brush stroke answer on this, but as a general rule of thumb: * Meet with Sales to understand their expectations and where they need the most help. It all starts with a conversation to understand gaps/opportunities.   * In most cases, Sales will look to Product Marketers to help ensure they have impactful content/assets (informed by research/insights) to help them sell. I have not met many sales reps that are interested (or have the time) to develop sales content on their own.   * That said, you should set the expectation that input from the Sa...

Hello! From a PMM perspective, Sales input is critical to a successful SE strategy. They know the needs of their team so they can help SE prioritize and focus. Usually finding a partner in Sales leadership can help you avoid too many cooks in the kitchen and streamline feedback.   Where SE can add value is providing strategy on delivery (role play, compeition, certifications, etc.), structure, and content. The size of your company and enablement team also differentiates how much effort you can you play as well. Growing companies and larger sales teams will need more enablement and guidan...

When I am starting up a Sales Enablement practice (or it is a new product/market or even a new sales team), I prefer an intense, heavy handed approach, because that helps me develop and fine tune my stories and the assets I use to convey/manifest my stories. Over time, sales will have a bigger role in iterating on these assets, and possibly, to innovate on the messaging too.

Congrats! Can you share more about your current context? Is this a new role for the team, or are you stepping into an established function? This will likely inform how much/what type of expectation your stakeholders have... Are there critical existing deliverables to keep in the air? Do they have pent up anticipation for key value you'll bring? If it's new, I'd start with evaluating the biggest gaps and start where the impact will be the largest. Does everyone fumble through an inconsistent pitch deck? Do they have trouble positioning against competitors on calls? Form an opinion yoursel...

There's a lot of reasons sales playbooks might not get used. When that happens, you need to figure out that reason. Some common reasons are: * It's too detailed or prescriptive: Sales requires a certain degree of improvisation based on customer discovery and what's needed to establish trust with a given customer. When playbooks are too detailed or prescriptive, it gets in the way of reps' ability to customize their approach to meet the needs of the customer. * The story is wrong: Sometimes we deliver a playbook or pitch that just doesn't resonate with customers. Usually it...

Great answers from Gregg.  From enterprise B2B marketing experience, I would say types of content you create example sales playbooks - also depends on where you are in the lifecycle journey. If its still in the product-market fit or even when you are building / scaling, you may not know the story well enough for each segment of the market you are addressing. You are still learning as an organization. Unless product marketing is also in a few sales calls and visits customers, you may or may not know first hand - objections received, improvisation needed including customization by segment....

If the playbooks are insightful and get used... I'm not frustrated! ;)  Creating sales playbooks is frustrating when we're in a loop of perfection over progress. Oftentimes we forget how powerful a small amount of clear, digestible insight can be over an incredibly robust, in-depth asset. I picked up a mantra from a consultant that I love: "consumable over comprehensive." Adding depth over time is both more sustainable for you as a PMM and more digestible and actionable for your stakeholders. Get the most important concepts landed, then expand.

This is a harder question to answer because I have seen it both ways. However, as a rule, sales enablement scales as the company scales, and as a result becomes a separate function. At a company where the sales team is 5 to 10 sales reps, it makes sense for sales enablement to be with product marketing. In this scenario, sales enablement is mainly supplying content and providing positioning and messaging as salespeople sell against use cases and persona. For the other portion of sales enablement like sales skills training and sales process, a good sales ops and sales leader can supplement t...

That’s a tough question, and unfortunately, I think it does depend on your organization. I’ve usually seen enablement added as a separate function when a company reaches the 150-250 employee range. The common change-driver is usually a big push in sales hiring, which often comes with globalization. This creates a need to decrease ramp time for each rep, build custom learning paths by level, segment, and/or region, and run trainings in more places. It can be hard for product marketing to scale to handle all of this without totally neglecting core work, like running product launches. From a ...

Budget wise, PMM is a straight up expense. Sales enablement on the other hand more of a Sales opportunity cost. THe function sits in Sales and that department needs to decide if it wants more 'feet on the ground' or 'hands in the air'. If ability to make revenue is slowed by complex non-documented processes or if there is a wave of new hires or a transformational product launch coming up, its definetly worth investing in a stand alond department

Sales enablement is a function that helps scale learning within an organization. I've seen sales enablement focus on topics as broad as:  * Market/competitive intelligence * Sales skills development * Deal structure * Product or solution launches * Sales compensation * and more As with any function that exists as an organization scales, you will most likely want to think about bringing on the function when you have a large enough sales force with a complex enough offering changing at a reasonable rate. With that added complexity, you'll need a function to help manage the change and ...

Great question! I am biased, but I LOVE having a dedicated Sales Enablement partner, so I'd say the sooner the better.  They're able to focus entirely on the enablement strategy, what's working well for sales, what isn't, the biggest opportunities for impact, balancing their cross-team learning priorities, etc., and share that back to PMM to optimize effectiveness.  PMM will always be juggling sales enablement with product messaging, core positioning, customer research, etc. 

One of the KPIs for the PMM team should be around sales enablement. I have seen this KPI measured when a PMM delivers sales training. After every live session, we would do a survey where we check two dimensions: Quality of the presentation and usefulness of the material. Though this was interesting initially, we noticed that there is general fatigue over time, and most people would give a high average rating of over 8 (scale:1-10). There are sales enablement tools like Highspot that provide more visibility into the content impact by "stage," but I've not seen this action.

This is always a fun topic!  Here are some approaches I've taken in the past:  * Using a collateral tracker like Highspot (you can see # of views, # of times it's been sent, etc.) * Track keywords in Gong and watch the meetings to see if your collateral is being used  * Surveys to gauge efficacy  * TALK TO YOUR SALES TEAM to get feedback!  

Internal sales surveys or qualitative feedback (e.g., 'what decks do you use when pitching?' 'what assets are most helpful?') can work. If you have an internal sales wiki built where you host assets, you may be able to access analytics about how many visits/pageviews/downloads you're seeing across key materials. But most importantly, having strong relationships with sellers and sales leaders can help create a feedback loop for PMM so that the materials that are most needed are the ones being created.   

This is tough to measure quantitatively without tooling in place to track how often collateral is used, so if that's an option for you, start there. Then be curious about what assets are used most often because they're familiar/readily available, and what assets are actually the most strategic.   Without tooling, the goal is to create regular (e.g., quarterly) opportunities for your sales team to provide feedback on what they use and why. This doubles as an opportunity to reinforce everything that's available and gather ideas for high-impact new assets!  This is also a great topic for...

I hope the details and features of the product change and improve often… but hopefully the overarching story of what you do and why does not often change. If you keep the “canned demo” focused on the vision and benefits of your product or solution (rather than features and specific functionality) it should stand the test of time. If you need to include more specifics on “how it works” you could always at the end of the video or webinar point to a more detailed “how it works” page where you dive deeper into features. It’s easier to update as things evolve, and is another good indicator (if y...

More tactically, here's a sample template originally from Salesforce that I use for training sales on demos.    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzSot4wxOi-VUk5TZTlwdVMyQ2M/view?usp=sharing

I second Jennifer's suggestion. Features come and go, but the problems stay roughly the same. As long as the product continues to solve the same problems, the demo doesn't have to change. If you do your canned demos by video you have a lot more flexibility to make changes (and a lot more consistency too). Good demos are alike a play. They tell a good story that has a happy ending. They shouldn't be Greek tragedies. 

Align the demo updates with the larger product launches, so that you're highlighting some of the major product updates in the canned demo. I've found what works best in delivering canned demos is to create a script and get feedback on it from other GTM stakeholders prior to the launch, and then to work with sales enablement to deliver training on the demo and any updated messaging after. 

Recently, we moved from a long demo video (of 20 minutes) to several topic-specific short videos ranging from 1 min to 5 minutes. Having granular content helps us manage these videos easily without reproducing the entire video.  We then use our own product to create a content page for these videos. In some cases, we create multiple pages. A sales rep never has to worry about video versions or product changes. As long as they are using latest video assets published in the portal, they are assured that it is the latest video. Plus, if a video is changed, all shared links automatically show...

We have been experimenting with a monthly recorded demo presented as a webinar. Our teams can then share out that latest recording with customers and they're never more than a month out from the latest product greatness.  By nature of being a webinar, it saves us from the curse of perfection—we record it live, it does a great job of conveying the value, and we don't obsess over every phrasing. 

As someone who does both, sales strategy is deciding the top level messaging, the actual market and persona that you're tackling, and the overall approach. Sales enablement is translating your positioning into actual assets like slides, one-pagers, and talking points as well as when to use said assets in the sales process. 

This question sits better with Sales than product marketing. Also, sales strategy sounds like an oximoron to me. WHo cares how you sell as long as you make revenues (and its legal/ethical). That said, to better plan and align a company needs to decide a few things. Choices to be made: - what is the channel or distribution strategy - what is the Account/Territory plan - what is the targeting/segmentation appproach - how will Sales get compensated  this list can further be expanded with Revenue planning. then you also need to factor in things like: - price and discount levers - win rat...

Sales enablement is about people and technology, and strategically aligning them both behind a common goal: sales successes. It helps organizations streamline sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with better, more relevant sales content and equipping sales teams with the tools they need to be more informed and productive sellers. When executed properly, sales enablement has a measured impact on time spent selling, win rates, and deal size.  But before we can enable sales on how best to approach a given market segment, we need to develop our sales strategy. A sound sales strategy do...

This is a big question, but my simple answer is they're part of an ongoing, mutually-informing cycle. As PMMs we need to inform sales strategy in terms of ICP, personas, motivations, positioning, competitive insights, etc—all the fundamentals. This work only matters if we're able to deeply enable the team by bringing those insights to life and reinforcing them regularly, and then gathering feedback to inform fine-tuning. 

A quick survey can work well. I usually use Google Forms, but higher-end tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics provide a little more flexibility if you have them. Longer surveys get fewer responses, so if volume is most important, definitely keep it short. The best way to send it out is through an official sales communication. I did this recently and put it in the biweekly sales newsletter. If you don’t have one, asking one of your sales leaders to send it out will help boost the response rate. As long as they see the value of the survey, and you write a templated email for them, they’ll l...

I have a running list of all the sales collateral requests that come in. The list always gets longer, as you can imagine! The sales leads also have access to this list, so there’s full transparency on the ask, who requested it, the level of effort required, and expected due date.  I’d recommend meeting with the sales leads on at least a quarterly basis to review these requests (and any new ones that may come in) and expected date for deliverables since that helps with prioritization. Also, by joining smaller sales team meetings, you’ll get a sense of what gaps exist today, and what sales c...

I'm excited to hear others' thoughts here... I've tried a number of approaches in the past, but haven't nailed a totally scalable one.  In an ideal state, it starts with Product Marketing doing the critical work of establishing positioning and messaging, including the key long-term themes for market comms. Your sales team is a critical conduit to defining this together.  Once you have your platform defined and documented, then it's about inventorying what you have available and discovering from your team what they're aware of, what they use, and what's working/not. You'll also use thi...

The simplest and fastest way is to talk directly with your reps! Not sales managers but the reps that are actually having the daily conversations - ask them (this is from the lens of B2B/enterprise SaaS sales) - 1. what deck do you use for first calls? Second calls? (ask them to send it to you - is there messaging in that deck that didn't come directly from PMM but is still working? Or is there messaging in that deck that doesn't align with the company's strategy) other than that -  2. check your conversion numbers for first call to second call, second to third call, and later. If ...

This is a passion area for me! I work to carve out time for learning and exposure. It's always tough when you have pressing timelines for deliverables, but that work will be far more efficient and strategic when you invest in time for the fundamentals. Here are a few things I invest in doing: Know the team. Be of value to them.  * Go where your sales team is, be a fly on the wall in the places they discuss their goals and strategies (live or async). Have Gong? Download the app. It's a treasure trove. * Build off of your familiarity from these team settings to reach out to a d...

I think that list is correct and you should prioritize this list depending on your business. In addition to the above, I would advise getting a tool like Chorus.ai or Gong.io. Chorus or Gong will help you scale as your team scales in getting customer feedback both on the new business side as well as current business. In reality, you can't be on all the great calls as that is physically impossible.  

Aim high, and ask for more than you think you'll need - but not by more than 15-20%. People will always be your biggest budget line item in PMM - we're the most valuable asset because structured thinking and positioning can't really be outsourced or delegated to software. However, key items that I would examine for fit in your budget: * Content creation for top-of-funnel assets, separate from Content Marketing * Video production (think $5-10K for an animated explainer video) to fill in gaps in your content * Competitive and market survey data. Plan ahead to learn more about your ...

I would recommend doing a listening tour with your key stakeholder teams in the organization (product, sales, growth, enablement, partner) to help inform your priorities, as budget items could be almost limitless. It's also important to understand the state of your product and where it might need the most help, to help prioritize your asks. E.g you might need to invest more in awareness / thought leadership content or third party validation research, or maybe you have needs lower in the funnel such as demo and video creation. Some good buckets could be: content creation (white papers, webi...

This is a good list to start with. I will add a couple: * Analyst/3rd party thought leadership pieces: Having independent, 3rd party content is very helpful. If you are focused on the Enterprise, having content from top tier analysts is helpful. I have worked with Gartner, Forrester, The 451 Group, Ovum Research and IDC in the past * Graphics/multimedia: you will need to generate lots of great content that you deploy across channels. You may have good writing skills in your team but you will likely need support for research/graphics/multimedia. I have typically relied o...

You have all the right line items! In addition, I'd recommend: * Focus groups for messaging/positioning/pricing & packaging: I'm a huge fan of getting feedback from prospects and customers on any new changes. This helps to have impactful content.  * Video editor/agency: Having a 3rd party video editor helps speed up content creation considerably. Plus, they can usually handle multiple projects at the same time and you can create new sales or external-facing collateral pretty fast. * Tool to track sales content adoption: Highly recommend a tool to track content adoption...

A few other things to consider: * Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant)  * Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts) * Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed * And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)

Great question. Looks like you've captured a lot of the big rocks that normally go into the budget, but a few additional things to consider: * People Budget: Depending on the planned growth of your team for this year, and near-term priorities, knowing your people budget can ensure you can bring in consultants (as necessary) to bridge any gaps and help support short-term strategic initiatives.  * Tools: Beyond Sales Enablement/Content Management, you may want to consider Competitive Intelligence as another tool category if you don't have one already. * Win/Loss: If you're ...

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.