Bala Vishal

So videos, in general, have been a great asset for moving prospects through the funnel. Having used Vidyard in the past for product videos and on-demand webinars, I have seen more than 60% of prospects in current opportunities viewing the videos as part of the lead lifecycle. In some cases, they viewed right before an opportunity was created, while a bigger portion has been when they are past 50% of the opportunity lifecycle. This is mostly true for products that have a long sales cycle, like around 6 to 12 months. As @James Winter mentioned Wistia, Vidyard will have more industry benchmarks on this. I can connect you to my contact at Vidyard if you need more details on this. 

I think it is important to have a strategy/vision with goals laid out for sales enablement, that is approved by stakeholders ( typically VP demand generation/CMO and VP Sales / Chief Revenue Officer). Once that is good to go is when I would recommend creating a tactical plan which should be your ideas that are aligned with the above vision. I understand this is easier said than done, however, you need the backing of your manager who is prepared to stand up for you in case you face hurdles in going through the above process. Yes everyone in the organization thinks they can do marketing and I feel its the role of the marketing leader to let rest of the company know that his/her team knows what they are doing, are open to suggestions/feedback in their decision making, however, the final decision lies within the marketing function. 

On top of the weekly training sessions or sprint training ideas mentioned before, I have seen the use of tools like HighSpot has been very helpful. These tools help manage all the sales collaterals and content produced, organize them them using tags and then mapping it back to your CRM at the lead & account level. This way when the BDR/ISR and the field sales are researching on a prospect and its company in the CRM, relevant documents show up in their CRM view. I have seen this being more scalable and having higher adoption among sales than the use of Google spreadsheets. However, before investing in one more tool, will first recommend starting with google spreadsheets to understand the adoption, usage and needs fo the sales enablement process. You could even link or integrate these online spreadsheets into your CRM

Great question and something we talked about in yesterday's meet up in SF. Totally agree with all the comments made here. One thing to add, I think every function in marketing needs to dip their toes into the workings of demand gen. or their sales team. Spending atleast 30 mins in a week, just getting feedback or even listening to one of demand gen. sales enablement calls, should be enough to get content or messaging aligned to the pitches that get prospects moving along the funnel.