Calvina Cheng

PMM is responsible for GTM strategy, messaging, positioning, pricing, competitive, etc. and managing the overall launch (and success of the launch). Sales Enablement is responsible for the “how & when” this information gets passed to Sales. PMM should work really closely with our SE counterparts because they need to distill down all the great things we’re working on, and make it digestible and easy for Sales to use/understand.

Below are just a few metrics that are useful when tracking sales enablement success: Lead-to-opportunity and/or lead-to-customer conversion rate. If more leads are converting to opportunities over time, and/or if more leads are converting to customers over time, then Sales is getting better at delivering the right message and closing their deals. Competitive win rate. Overall win rate is good to track, but that depends on many other factors. Competitive win rate is more specific to the content and enablement that product marketing and sales enablement produces, and if you work with your Sales Ops team to get a few dashboards set up in SFDC, you can track QoQ whether you’re improving your win rates against top x competitors. Content usage. We’ve used Highspot in the past, and it’s great for tracking views, downloads, shares, etc. for sales materials. If the material I’m putting out there for sales is getting used, great! If not, we should understand why.

I’ve created competitive webpages in the past and that’s been a huge success with sales. Whether you make these webpages easily accessible on your website (top nav or elsewhere) is a good discussion to have with your growth team. These webpages are so useful to sales because any time they are asked about our (top x) competitors, they can easily bring up those pages, talk through the key differentiators, and then follow up with an email to share these pages with their prospects. Slides and/or one-pagers work well too since they are easy to share. I'd say the webpages have definitely gotten more traction and enthusiasm from Sales!

I have a running list of all the sales collateral requests that come in. The list always gets longer, as you can imagine! The sales leads also have access to this list, so there’s full transparency on the ask, who requested it, the level of effort required, and expected due date. I’d recommend meeting with the sales leads on at least a quarterly basis to review these requests (and any new ones that may come in) and expected date for deliverables since that helps with prioritization. Also, by joining smaller sales team meetings, you’ll get a sense of what gaps exist today, and what sales collateral can help them close more deals, faster.

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 call deck and product demos, so we know that sales is using the materials we provide them. When it comes to tools, we’ve used Highspot in the past, which is great for tracking which enablement assets are viewed, downloaded, etc.

The more time, the better! We just had a Tier 1 launch at the end of January, and we had our first enablement session back in October! Our GTM Crew always wants to know more information, earlier, so we always try to start early and include a steady drip of enablement sessions up until launch day. Depending on how big the launch is, you could have an enablement session every 4-6 weeks with topics like (1) Kick-off: [New product launch], (2) Messaging & Competitive, (3) Product demo & resources. Then a few days or a week before launch day, you can follow up with an email reminder which has a summary of everything covered thus far, internal/external-facing materials, and links out to more info. This time around, we also had everyone in Sales/Success submit a quick 10-min product demo on the new feature. The sales leads and I would then judge who had the best demo, with a $$ gift card to the best demo. I’d say post-launch, it would be good to listen in on sales calls and see how sales is talking about the new feature, and follow-up with training as needed. Gong and Chorus are great for this!

We recently held a GKO (GTM Kick Off) with Sales/CS; Marketing attended the ones that were most relevant for them. Here’s a rough schedule: Day 1: CRO kick off, Marketing 2022 Roadmap, Customer story 1, Product 2022 Roadmap, Sales Methodology / Rev Ops, 1st Call Deck training, Customer story 2 Day 2: Pop quiz, Customer story 3, Product demo training, Competitive workshop, Discovery questions session, Storytelling workshop, X-func. panel discussion (topic could be how you use your own product) Day 3: QBR / breakouts for each group. Breakouts could be by function (Sales, CS), by segment (SMB, MM, Ent), industry, etc. In the past, we’ve invited a few customers to join our SKO and the Sales team loved it!! There’s nothing like hearing directly from our customers on they use your products/solutions.

The roadmap deck should be created by PM and PMM. Ultimately PM will have the best understanding of the upcoming features with dates of releases, but PMM is responsible for ensuring that the messaging and benefits are clear in the roadmap deck (you don’t want just a punch list of features). Once the features are clear, we also include a talk track for Sales/Success teams so they are comfortable presenting the information. The flow of the roadmap deck starts with current features that have been recently released, then covers upcoming releases by month/quarter. 

I’d say it’s 50/50. Sales will always have lots of ideas and requests :) On the other side, I don’t want to spend my time creating content that Sales won’t use. It’s a good practice to understand WHY Sales is requesting certain content. Sales might request a detailed feature-by-feature competitive matrix, when you have your key competitive differentiators on a LP/webpage that’s easier to share with prospects. Then, it’s good to have an agreed calendar (w/ the Sales leads) of what you’ll produce that quarter, with some degree of flexibility.