Sales Enablement

This continues to be an evolving process but we leverage a few things: Lead time - sharing the info early so the sales team can disseminate it via the right channels with enough notice (for example,

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

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, an

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 t

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

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 com

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

One of the things I think many PMMs struggle with is realizing that different styles of messaging resonate with different people. Investors like to hear one thing, prospects another, influencers somet

This really requires a dedicated effort and should be owned by Product Marketing. Different industries change at different paces – in some cases, a quarterly review process is needed, in other case, i

Your CMS (content management system) should have some sort of archiving parameters in place that should remind the PMM team when things get stale. With that said, all the reminders in the world won't

Align on needs and get buy-in on the program from key stakeholders upfront, otherwise, you will just be reactive and the expectations will be that every request is handled and every asset is up to dat

In the "real world" this is a function of whose responsibility sales collateral is. If it's product marketing, the answer is simple: Supply new collateral when it's time for an update. However, if pro

There's two parts to keeping all the above content up to date, including content creation and content delivery: Content Creation: This is all about capacity planning of the Product Marketing team on

Make it jointly owned. Your team will (almost certainly) not grow as fast as sales, success, support, etc. Even talented PMMs struggle to keep these things relevant and useful for every season of the

This really depends on your product and industry. Let me outline a framework with four elements: The customer perspective The competitor perspective The technology perspective, and The marketplace p

This is tough, but you can prevent foundational PMM assets from going stale by having (1) defined processes (e.g., establishing which components of your market intelligence are most important to updat

I'm big on updating information based on actions that need to be taken / decision that need to be made.  When it comes to market research and personas, clarify what decisions you need to make based o

Starting with the customer insight is always the #1 job of a product marketer. Ideal customer profile, target verticals, buyer personas, etc these are things that aren’t going to change on a weekly or

The good news is sales people notice when materials are out of date, and will let you know it is time for a refresh. :) Joking aside, here are some proactive tips on how to keep materials up to date.

You have to establish a cadence of updates for different assets, which will vary based on how they are used and your market dynamics. Personas don't change often, so revisting them every 6 months migh

Talk with at least 1 customer a week and you'll never be surprised by any changes! I like to follow Gartner and Forrester for changes in the market, as well as keeping a pulse on new PLG companies who

Outdated information is almost worse than having no information since you might be making decisions from data sources that are no longer relevant or valid.  To make sure this doesn't happen to you, c

I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge specifically is around balance. A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND What you

Hopefully I don't make this answer overly complex.  I think the more important question here is what are you actively working on? Because product marketing can cover such a wide variety of activities

Definitely echo the fact that Product marketing KPIs need to keep evolving with the focus that the organization currently has.  When I was at Amplitude, we came up with some strong *impact* metrics t

Agreed with the other answers about aligning impact with focus areas for the business as a whole. Though I also like to have some consistent metrics to be able to see some longer term trends. There's

Full disclosure - I work for Highspot - but we do use our own platforrm and one of the benefits of it is that we can see usage and buyer enagement analytics for all of the content we create. It's a qu

Curious to know if there are any metrics that the Product Marketing function is accountable for any metrics?I know there is such a wide variety of jobs that Product Marketers do, but for example, if t

That's a great question. It depends a lot on the product of course. There are some products that lend itself to a soft launch before we put any marketing effort behind it in which case quantifying mar

Recently PMM has been very involved with top-of-funnel marketing and campaigns, so a lot of the typical metrics you might suspect in a campaign are ways we measure success for these (Leads, MQLs, MQL&

While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing, my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen, or product depending on what you're workin

The question comes up a lot in product marketing. It is particularly challenging when you are in a product marketing role or on projects that lean heavy into influence or when your organization is sta

Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rateMake sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to trac

While you can have really compelling per-product pitches, the real challenge of selling a platform is getting prospects and customers to buy into a vision that unifying their systems is going to be a

This is a tough question to answer because it is so multifaceted. So let's start with the basics when you are moving from product to platform, you're moving from selling one solution to selling multip

It depends on where you are in the growth journey. If this is a strategy change - in terms of no longer selling a product to selling a platform, it's more about messaging & the art of the possible

Let's start with the difference between a platform and a product: Almost every SaaS product has APIs that let it integrate with other applications. A platform, however, plays a more active role in c

In my experience the shift from Product selling to Platform selling has meant that we've had to update the buyer personas we sell too, or at least expand them. It has meant we're no longer selling to

When selling a platform, you're selling what a customer can accomplish, less what a customer is buying. Obviously in the SaaS world, a lot of our marketing is based on the product being the thing that

Sales enablement programs have to be designed with a hierarchy in mind, just like how there's a messaging hierarchy. You lead with the hero and follow with the supporting cast.  Based on the way this

Good question! Over my career, I have seen release cycles shrink a lot and fewer and fewer requests for datasheets! My advice: 1. Minimize the number of "sources of truth." If you can get away with j

There are several steps that you can take to ensure that you have the most accurate description and version of a datasheet when features are changing constantly. These steps include: Work closely wit

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

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

One way to measure the success of sales enablement efforts by product marketers is to track key metrics such as the number of sales-related resources that have been created, the number of sales reps w

Background: Worked as a Community Manager and Product Marketer for an open source database software company DataStax; we sold a proprietary version of the open source database Apache Cassandra, target

Sales enablement changes when your company is "business to developer" to point at a different stage in the funnel: the charismatic, knowledgeable developer who probably already has a solution.   When

Selling to developers can be difficult, often because they have a ton of say over the decision but not explicitly the budget, but marketing to developers is simpler than people think. Quickly and conc

I love this question, <3 Developers! The fundamentals of sales enablement dont change, it's more the way you communicate the needs of your audience to your sales team that changes. If we unpack dev

Great question, something I think about a lot. I’m a huge proponent of specialization with technical products. I wouldn’t expect every member of our enterprise field organization (which is in the thou

When selling to developers your enablement activities are likely to take on a different focus so that the team understands how to engage in a discussion and build a community while keeping their sales

I love this question. First, I would say to save your company's BDR/SDRs time and avoid trying to set up calls with developers. You'll avoid a lot of frustration on both ends. Gating content content

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thrivin

B2d follows a whole different motion. A developer is not eager to talk to Sales (and they don't want to be sold to). Developers want to try out the product themselves, tinker with it, and only if they

It depends a bit on how your sales team is organized today. But in any event, your product value pillars should always translate to both individual and company-wide gain, so your core message is alway

I'd say the mindset shift in B2D is that it's no longer "sales enablement", but just "enablement". And that should be a shared goal across your organization, whether it's the marketing team, sales tea

Your sales team needs a higher level of technical proficiency when you're a B2D company. It's important to hire sales reps that can form their own mental model of how your product works and integrates

For companies targeting developers, it's a good habit to build up a culture of developer empathy. Practical exmaples include: Provide them 101 sessions, enough for them to be dangerous and speak the

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

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 of

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 fr

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

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 lea

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 successf

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, a

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 internaliz

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 t

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

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 w

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 cl

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 differ