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Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement
14 answers
Senior Product Manager at Amazon
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...more
Vice President & GM, Global SMB at Braze
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 ...more
Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager at Adobe
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 ...more
Director, Product Marketing at Datadog | Formerly Mparticle
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.
Vice President, Product Marketing at Marqeta
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...more
Head of Product Marketing, Southeast Asia at TikTok
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 at Instacart
* 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...more
Vice President & Head of Marketing at Fin.com
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...more
Group Product Marketing Manager- Enterprise at Miro
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 at Momentive
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 ...more
Group Vice President, Industry Marketing at Oracle
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...more
Head of Product Marketing at Retool
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...more
Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce
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...more
Director, Industry and Product Marketing at Motive
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.
3 answers
Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager at Adobe
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...more
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform at Google
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 ...more
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform at Google
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...more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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 ...more
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
Congrats, scrappy startup phase is exciting, lots of opportunity to make a big
impact!
I suggest starting by getting a baseline understanding of their sales cycle
today. What has their approach been? Where are they seeing success, and where
are they bottlenecked? Your focus should be different if they're not able to get
in the door (help them with ICP insights and positioning for outbound
targeting!) vs. struggle to get from first call to pitch (work on discovery
questions!).
As you go through the sales cycle with the team, "feed two birds with one scone"
by mining for customer stor...more
5 answers
Head of Product Marketing at Scale AI
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...more
Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI at Cisco
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...more
Head of Product Marketing at Zeplin
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...more
Senior Director Product Marketing at Fivetran
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.
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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...more
4 answers
Head of Marketing at Pinwheel
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...more
Product Marketing at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative | Formerly Udemy
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...more
VP Product Marketing at Medallia
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.
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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...more
3 answers
VP of Product Marketing at Oyster®
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...more
Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI at Cisco
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....more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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.
5 answers
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
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...more
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing at Gem
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 ...more
VP Product Marketing and Sales Enablement at EIS
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
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform at Google
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 ...more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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.
4 answers
Head of Marketing at Transform
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.
Product Marketing at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative | Formerly Udemy
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!
Senior Director of Product - Datafox and AI Applications at Oracle
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.
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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...more
5 answers
Director of Product Marketing at Narvar
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
VP of Marketing at Spekit
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
Founder at BrainKraft
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.
Senior Manager, Strategic Technology Alliances Marketing at ServiceNow
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.
Founder at Enablix
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...more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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.
6 answers
Head of Marketing at Landed
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
...more
VP of Marketing at Builder.io
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...more
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
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...more
Head of Product Marketing, Southeast Asia at TikTok
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...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at Samsara
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...more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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...more