Sales Enablement

There are a couple of different ways to approach measuring sales enablement effectiveness. The main question I ask myself is, "Is the sales team confidently delivering the right message to our target audience?" From there, you can determine which metrics are best for measuring sales confidence. Some examples: * Conversion rates during the deal cycle (i.e., not just Closed Won, but earlier deal stages as well). If the deals are progressing well, it can be inferred that the salesperson successfully utilizes the message to drive progress. * Resource utilization, such as pitch decks...

Measuring the success of sales enablement comes to having clearly defined metrics that PMM can influence. There are a few key metrics you can use to measure the success of your programs. These include: 1. Win rate: The percentage of deals that are won by your sales team. Useful sales enablement materials, training, and collaterals will grow the win rate. 2. Sales cycle length: The amount of time it takes for your sales team to close a deal. Again, the better sales collaterals, answers to typical questions, battle cards, and use-case, the faster SDR/BDR can close the deal....

Similar to the response around growth, adding some color here.  I encourage my team to be the ‘mini CMO’ for the products they cover. That means the single biggest metric to measure is pipeline (with a focus on pipeline generation). Depending on the specific in-quarter activities we have going on around sales enablement, we can see a dedicated focus on sales enablement and education show up in our sales-sourced pipeline in the trailing quarter. My advice here is to track a few things: Attributed pipeline = how are all your content activities showing up in your pipeline efforts, eBooks,...

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I boil down measuring sales enablement success into three categories: * Usage: This would be the volume of assets developed as well as ways to measure how often they’re utilized. For example, maybe you post your sales collateral to a sales team portal where downloads / views can be tracked. * Quality: This is about getting feedback from sales on how useful the collateral you've developed is, which can be gathered informally in discussions with your sales team or formally through regular internal surveys.   * Impact: This would b...

Ultimately is about revenue attainment. Are sales reps being able to make their numbers? If yes, you are likely doing your job well. Now, if we look more closely at how to impact revenue attainment from a product marketing perspective we end up with the following metrics: * Win / Loss rate: this can indicate if the messaging/positioning needs work and if sales reps have the right tools at their disposal. * Competitive win rate: indicates how effective are the battle cards and competitive training. * Conversion along the marketing funnel: this will give you anindication of conte...

Measuring the success of sales enablement comes to having clearly defined metrics that PMM can influence. There are a few key metrics you can use to measure the success of your programs. These include: 1. Win rate: The percentage of deals that are won by your sales team. Useful sales enablement materials, training, and collaterals will grow the win rate. 2. Sales cycle length: The amount of time it takes for your sales team to close a deal. Again, the better sales collaterals, answers to typical questions, battle cards, and use-case, the faster SDR/BDR can close the deal....

Oh this is fun! Adding new features and or functions to grow into a new market or persona is a great way to grow. The sales team on the other hand may not get excited for it, this is new things to learn, new messaging, new persona when they might have gotten used to the last one. I position this as a new market and new sales goals that will increase their effectiveness and they get to make more money off commissions. So I usually show them the size of the new market or how many of these persona's there are in the industries we are going after. Once they realize how big the growth opportunit...

In this case, you would first want to enable your sales teams on the new persona, including what this persona generally "looks like", relevant pain points, and other information to help sales successfully reach these personas. You will have more a heavy lift in educating sales on how to successfully sell this product compared to a product that's built for the personas that your sales team is already used to targeting. Beyond sales enablement, new target personas will sometimes require a broader rethink of the go-to-market strategy. Is your messaging and content properly targeted to this ...

If your sales team is like any sales team I've been privileged enough to work with, your team is full of highly savvy individuals who know what needs to get done to hit their numbers.  As a result, anything you want your sale team to sell must first be sold to them as a way that they can, in the end, meet and exceed their targets.  Your job is to create that excitement. Perhaps this new persona influences the traditional buyer, and selling them the product will help not only net new sales but also grow existing customers. Or perhaps this new persona is an entirely new market full of g...

Go back to the basics and develop the buyer persona assets for this new buyer. You can’t effectively sell to someone you don’t understand. Training and workshops for the sales team to fully internalize this new buyer persona, and ask questions in a group setting or 1-1 is important to get the team ready to sell to a new persona. You should be demanding the time necessary to make this happen if a new product class is introduced to address a new persona.

I have never worked at a company where the sales team did not get excited about a new product or persona - this typically means a larger market for them to sell to.  The goal with any enablement is to make sure you are clearly defining why this is important, and how it will help them sell more to hit their numbers.

Your room to maneuver depends on whether you have a fully transparent pricing model reflected on your website or if it is somewhat general on the pricing page so that your reps can customize.  If I were to guess, this is a transparent pricing page on your website. 1. Package Definition: It could be worth considering what would increase package differentiation more so that your prospects have a clear choice in front of them. To do this correctly it is important to try to reduce the overlap between the segments targeted by the packages. You can also consider adding a decoy package to mo...

Value selling is a really tool you can have in your arsenal. I would do a few things here if you're focused on having them shift to higher selling things. (1) Articulate Value - what is the customer getting for paying more? What are the benefits they would gain with this?   (2) Teach them to place competitive traps - what are questions they could be asking their prospects to place some FUD in their minds? I have done things like "below the iceberg" documents for AEs which teach them all the things that the customer may not be thinking about in terms of all the below the surface stuff th...

It sounds like you may be cannibalizing yourself with overlapping product offerings. If customers are happy to use your cheaper product, it means the value of your enterprise package isn't crystal clear. I'd go back to the value prop on this one, what does your enterprise package offer the customer that's worth the price? If you feel you have that figured out, then it's just a matter of illustrating that through messaging. Show some super specific examples of enterprise brands that have seen killer value from upgrading and you'll have a more convincing narrative. Another option here is t...

This is a typical issue when you have both a self-serve item and an enterprise item. The most important thing is to have clear differentiation in your packaging and then clearly articulate that differentiation for the sales team so that they understand how to pitch the value of your enterprise package. It is also really important that you have a very clear GTM strategy for Enterprise with a very distinct ICP - you should not be targeting the same audience for both packages, to begin with.

Not everything we do is measurable and this is especially true for PMMs.  Unless there is a compelling reason to measure every aspect of sales enablement, I would not suggest you do so.   But if you must, then for most things, a simple survey to the sales org is best. Ask them how useful a specific task was in their sales cycle? And if you should stop, continue or improve that specific task? Remember to give them an incentive to complete the survey.  You can also try other indirect means, like measuring the sales success rate of someone who took a training vs. not, but none of thes...

A mix of qualitative and quantitative data is always the gold standard.  For training, take time to connect sellers both before and after trainings to ask what questions they have, what they took away, or what they might still need. Mix up who you go to so you hear from both your most and least engaged teammates. Then, for consistent quant data, make simple post-training surveys a standard (required!) part of training so your teams provide you with consistent feedback, and you can learn as you experiment with different formats.  For call best practices, build opportunities for role pl...

Qualitative measures require qualitative assessment. I don’t see a way around spending time listening to calls (at 1.75x speed of course) :) The best way to measure performance is to select a random sample of sales conversations - enough to be quantitative (10+) and assess the intangibles on a score sheet - objection handling, trap setting, etc.). I would try to make the scoring as subjective as possible—not how “ideally” it was delivered, but how the prospect reacted to it. You can learn a lot from winning conversations. But also a ton to learn from loss conversations. Reducing insta...

Great question. When it comes to measuring objection handling: * Leverage a conversation intelligence tool such as Gong, where you can report on keywords within sales calls and attribute those conversations to deal pipelines. For training: * The best way to measure impact of a training is to run 'workshops' in addition to a training such as an eLearning. For example... I'd recommend reps taking an eLearning that walks through the 'what and the why' and then organize a workshop where they put it to practice to understand the 'how'. With the workshop, create a simple...

The best way is to use sales feedback to show improvement over time. You can easily do that by measuring things like sales confidence using a survey to show performance improvement over time. You can also just run feedback surveys post-training to capture feedback on the training itself. The other things you can directly attribute to sales enablement can be things like shorter sales cycles over time, improvement in win-rates or improvement in competitive win-rates, etc.

Good question - to have to pick is tough but if I must, here are the main things I think every sales rep needs in their bag to be successful:  (1) First Call Deck / Pitch Deck  (2) Competitive Battlecard(s) (including how to place traps / how to arm against competitor's traps - shields/swords type of thing) (3) Tough Q&A Log with really hard questions that a likely customer is to ask (4) Value Map(s)  (5) Customer Stories

First, divide your efforts into “sales plays” (or depending on your company’s terminology they might be “sales motions” or “use cases”). Sales plays should each have a revenue target attached to them, and collectively, the revenue across all your sales plays should total the entire new business revenue goal. Next, define your “bill of materials” (assets) for each sales play. For our business, we have a Conversation Starter (2-4pg PDF of key market problem and our solution), Discovery Questions/Answers, Customer Pitch Deck, Internal Enablement Deck, Competitive Positioning, and Customer Succ...

1) A (first call) pitch deck. This is a fantastic unifying asset that will help you hone your narrative and it can also serve as an educational tool for the sales team. You can use the pitch to walk through your logic and approach and then refine it based on specific feedback from your sales team. 2) A mid-funnel eBook. It might sound a little strange that this is on the line up so high, but now that we are all working from home, the selling cycle is a bit different. Leaving a prospect with something they can consume on their own time is critical to move the sales cycle along. The benefit f...

If you have product marketing and sales enablement as separate functions, asset creation should be owned by product marketing for the most part. Anything sales enablement creates should be in support of helping sales consume the content that’s already built — such as talk tracks, discovery questions, conversation narratives, etc. I tried limiting to 5, but I’ll share 7 basics (lucky you) I would ensure sales have in their hands to sell effectively: 1. Buyer personas - Can you really sell if you don’t thoroughly understand who you sell to? 2. Solution summary 1-sheet - send ahead or ...

My answer would change depending on what we're talking about (B2b Marketing program vs Sales enablement program). For a sales enablement program: 1. Pitch Deck 2. Product use case glossary 3. Case study 4. Discovery question list or Demo video 5. (this isn't necessarily an asset) Prospecting lists / target account lists w/ enriched data

I don't think there is a magic list of items you must have for B2B sales enablement. Every product is different and likely has a different sales process - which will impact the assets you develop. But the most typical ones can be: * A master pitch deck that can be customized by the sales team * A ton of great case studies * Competitive battle cards against your top 5 competitors * Demo videos - videos are always high on every sales list * one-pagers to summarize your value prop

Are you perhaps stretched too thin with multiple/various buyers. Do you need to do a buying persona exercise vs accelerated sales enablement? Sometime Sales Enablement is over thought. Ultimately it is about facilitating/suppporting the selling process. If you are pursuing many varied buyers, what is the lowest common denominator that covers them and work backwards. For instance, can you get away with the same proposal template? Can sellers be trained at the same time? Is there a common use case? In the abesence of this, simply aling yourself with a few sales leaders and take it from there. 

Prioritize the top sectors - pick 2-3 and then build a playbook you can replicate. I would also say, set realistic expectations with your GTM teams so they understand your limited bandwidth and be clear on what you can get to and what you can't. Work with your sales and CS leadership in terms of focus and priority (product training, onboarding, systems training, etc.) so that there's clear alignment as well! 

If you have limited resources, the only thing to do is to prioritize. You cannot try to do it all at once, so focus on the ones that will make the biggest impact.  For instance, if you are moving into new sectors - chances are you already have existing enablement materials for existing sectors - so for a quarter or two, you can potentially just focus on the basic list of deliverables you need to get the sales team selling into the new markets. Figure out what is doable with the resources you do have and then focus on a few things at a time!

This is really dependent on your org, how big you are, and your overall coverage model. In general though, it's a partnership. I view the relationship with my sales enablement partner as one of the two most important relationships I need to build in the company (the other being product). You need to build tight alignment on what each team does and doesn't do. At the highest level, I think about the division of duties as an input and output model. We (PMM) work on all the enablement inputs, content, decks, objection handling, other assets and collateral, and the sales enablement team works ...

Here’s how I see both roles coming together  * Both: Either can bring up if there’s a topic of interest either from sales or there is a specific product activation/training need * Sales enablement – Expertise is to ensure curriculum design and also project managing the entire process; They tend to have a broader view on what other trainings are happening and are invaluable to ensure that our teams are not overtrained. * Product marketers – Working on the content and bringing it to live for the teams taking the training. They tend to have specific expertise on a ...

* Generally, product marketers and sales enablement should work hand-in-hand as they are some of the most cross-functional roles in any organization. Because of their cross-functional nature, these roles need to be closely connected in order to coordinate messaging, launches, new asset distribution, new campaigns and more across multiple functions and departments.  * Organizationally, it’s not uncommon to have sales enablement and product marketing sit in the same org, with some of the roles of sales enablement (such as time to ramp, % of reps at quota, etc.) owned by a ...

If you build it, they won’t come. Product marketing assets are ineffective without proper sales enablement efforts - whether there is a separate team for it or not. The simplest analogy I use is that product marketing creates the juice, and sales enablement makes sure the sales team drinks the juice AND keeps it down. Now that’s oversimplified in some ways. The partnership between both functions begins at the problem identification phase. Both teams should be on the same page about the gaps in driving effectiveness for the sales teams - whether it is a recurring challenge in core perform...

This depends on how your organization is structured and what responsibities you define for Product Marketing. Sometimes product marketing plays a big role in enablement, while at other companies they just provide the messaging/value props/etc that enablement then uses as a framework for their enablement. But generally, product marketing focuses on: * Product positioning * Value props * Feature naming * Pricing and packaging * Talk tracks * Overview of what a product is and why it matters * Core assets, such as pitch decks While enablement might focus more on: * Creating traini...

PMMs should be partnering very closely with sales enablement teams.  * The role of PMM is to bring subject matter expertise -such as product knowledge or competitive messaging. PMMs should be responsible for creating sales content and leading training sessions * The role of enablement is to understand enablement needs and own the process, and the execution of sales enablement. Sales enablement teams are often thinking much more holistically about sales enablement - its not just product training or messaging training - they are also focused on onboarding or training te...

Two things to consider here: if they are resisting your product messaging, it may be worth asking yourself if it’s the right messaging to being with. Then consider how you’re framing the messaging to the sales teams based on who they are talking with. Let’s look at both of those. To evaluate if you’re using the right product messaging/positioning do an audit using this formula: Positioning = Market Problems + Our Offering – Competition. In other words, what are the market problems you’re aiming to solve, how does your offering solve for them, and how is it different from what your competi...

The best incentive is to show them the opportunities it will unlock for them.  Example: Let's say you are trying to shift reps from talking about single products to a suite. There is resistance because they worry that will make it a tougher sell since it's a bigger decision. What do you do?  First, acknowledge their anxiety and triage that effectively. In this case, that means making sure you deliver a way to make sure that new messaging continues to support existing sales motions.  Secondly, show them the potential for what the messaging can unlock. In this case, potentially higher AS...

I think if messaging is done right, the incentive lies in buyer comprehension and ultimately more closed opportunites. Great messaging means understanding the buyer and their pain points and being able to speak to those pain points with the value propositions of your product. This type of value based selling will resonate with buyers in a way that is proven to have impact - and therefore being able to highlight that to the sales org, and showing them the impact of selling product values - should be incentive enough. 

I don’t incentivize sales for this. Any such incentives will be short-term band-aid attempts. I dont see them solving a problem.  A well-trained salesperson should know when to focus on product benefits in their sales conversations. It’s never the lead. If you want them to use specific product messaging, then the best incentive is to build trust that your output is reliable and effective for others on the team. Seeing proof of impact within the team is very effective in getting others to use your messaging.

The best way to encourage the sales team to use the right product messaging is to create useful and actionable sales materials with that messaging. If your messaging is simple, easy to understand, and battle-tested to work with prospects then you won't need incentives. Good messaging should make the sales teams' jobs easier. Secondly, make sure you have done a ton of training - just giving the sales team messaging is not helpful if they don't know when and how to use it. Creating certifications is one way of doing that as well.

Fintech is definitely a dynamic and ever evolving space – which makes it super exciting! What’s interesting about Visa’s role here is that we sit at the center as a network and have exposure to and partner with fintechs of various shapes and sizes. So speaking a common language is less of an issue at Visa given our extensive engagement in fintech (we like to think of ourselves as the world’s first fintech). That said, this is a super valid question. Standard messaging documents that sales reps can utilize to ensure there is a common talk track are beneficial. These sometimes operate as st...

The only way to ensure that is to have a really strong and clear messaging strategy that is documented and shared across your entire company. That should also consistently reflect in any sales content you create to make that more actionable - so if you deliver really great sales pitch materials, the team will actually use them Secondly, do continuous training.