Alissa Lydon

Just like in marketing, sales enablement is all about knowing your audience. At the top level, that means understanding what motivates them (i.e. closing more deals, expanding existing customer base, etc.), and tailoring your enablement to help them understand how a new product/feature will help them achieve those goals. To refine this, I like to bring sales stakeholders into the enablement creation process so they can advocate for their team's needs. The side benefit of this is that it gives your enablement program a better chance of success. Additionally, remember that there are differ...

One word: retrospectives! For me, the success or failure of a single launch isn't as important as what we learn along the way. However, in every company I have been at this has been the hardest thing to implement consistently - especially in high-growth organizations where it feels like you are sprinting from one project to the next and don't have time to look backward. But make it a priority to sit down with all of the stakeholders from the launch (preferably as one group), and take the time to talk through how they thought it went. A good framework I learned for guiding this discussion is...

I always tell my PMs that the earlier PMM is looped into feature development planning, the better. Of course, we want enough lead time to prep for a successful launch. But even before we think about the launch, PMM should bring their insights to the table when the team is in the planning stages. This allows us to bring feedback from the field and customers, as well as share any market or competitive trends we have discovered. 

Let the data tell the story of your ICP! Use your existing customer base as a starting point. Take your best customers and look at them in aggregate - what patterns emerge across industries, company size, tooling adoption, maturity indicators, etc.? From there, you have a great base to help inform outbound targeting efforts. If you're starting from scratch, then lean on internal expertise across the org (Sales, Product, Exec) and market data to build your hypothetical ICP. From there, you can validate with external research, or test via ABM programs.  In either case, it's all about fi...

For new products and major features, I find it invaluable to go through a complete messaging exercise. This is an iterative process that involves collaboration with Product, Marketing, and Sales. I've developed a template for this over the years that combines the things I liked most from the past messaging exercises. While this list is not exhaustive, these are the things I have found are most valuable to building messaging that resonates not only externally, but also internally with the teams that need to market and sell the product: * Define worldview - What is the problem we are seeing...

There are two levers I think about when deciding how we should measure launch success: * Are users successfully adopting the product/feature? * Are we successfully attracting users to adopt the product/feature? The first bullet point is all about the product experience, and speaks to the partnership PMM must have with PM to effectively measure usage and engagement. Product might have north star metrics that you can align with, or sometimes it requires identifying new usage metrics and partnering with PM to instrument them. The second is all about marketing and sales, mainly how PMM enab...

For organizing and keeping track of launch activities, I created templates that I have carried with me from company to company. They contain all of the best elements from past launches (both my own and other PMMs I have learned from). And frankly, there is nothing fancy about them - they are mostly just spreadsheets! It's not to say that there aren't tools that can help streamline processes - I've seen launches effectively organized in Trello and Asana, for example. But what I like about my collection of self-made templates is that they are easily customizable and flexible to fit my immedia...

When I am looking for messaging and positioning validation from outside the org, I find that people engage more with a story than with a static framework. And as far as stories go, everyone much prefers pictures to reading dense Powerpoint slides! To that end, putting together a solid "marketecture" is a great place to start. This allows you to paint the picture of not just your product, features and functions, but you can also start assigning value and differentiated messaging to each of them. I find this especially helpful with current users/customers. They know the technical details (i....