Gaurav Harode

Sales Enablement is a very broad term. But, content and messaging is an important part of sales enablement. We believe that product marketing is the best positioned to drive content enablement because, * product marketing is responsible for the messaging and majority of the content (directly or indirectly). They know the buyer personas, target markets, own product positioning, and competitive intelligence. * product marketing is better aligned with the other teams than the traditional sales enablement function. Companies need consistency in their messaging across the funnel. Demand Gen, Field Marketing, Sales, Customer Success - they all need to be pitching the same message and value * Prospects/customers start their buying journey in the domain owned by marketing and they progress into the domain owned by sales. It doesn't make sense to drive content enablement half-way through the buyer's journey. It will result in an inconsistent experience for your buyers. Sales enablement (sales ops) is an important function and a key stakeholder. We see the following synergies, * Sales enablement is responsible for training. A lot of training content is based on the messaging and positioning defined by product marketing * Sales enablement is responsible for building tactical playbooks and marketing is contributing the content that goes into the playbook * Sales enablement's outlook is tactical (driven by quarterly demands). Marketing takes a more strategic outlook. In our words, "product marketing owns the ingredients and sales ops (and sales enablement) owns the recipes."

There are multiple ways to go about a client advisory board. At Oracle, we took a more independent approach. Since our solution offering was in the regulatory space, we encouraged our customers to form an advisory board with Oracle as a participant of the board. Some specifics, * The board was not a product-specific or Oracle-specific board. Instead, it was an industry-specific group where we discussed relevant regulatory topics. * The initial membership of the board included most of our customers. * Other market practitioners (who used a competitive product) were welcome to the group. * Oracle employees were members of the board, but there was no product show & tell in these groups. Everything was about industry problems and how the practitioners can improve their performance. * The board did keep track of Oracle customers so that in the event that Oracle-specific information was shared, the group had an option to share with Oracle-only customers. Though that rarely happened and we never pressed too much for confidentiality. * The group met four times a year. Three times over 90 min long conference calls and one time for a one-day in-person session. * We also had topical threads spawning out of this group that were handled by sub-committees. These were called Working Groups. * The group was governed by Chatham House rules This group was quite useful for our brand and for our product roadmap. All the major players in the industry (our customers or not) knew about the group. We always welcomed members who were using competitive products. And they were impressed by the knowledge and insights they gained in these sessions. We rarely worried about product-specific information falling in the hands of non-customers because it was not that difficult to get competitive product-specific information from other sources (people moved a lot around the industry and there were several consulting firms that worked with all the products in the market). I have been part of several user groups and customer advisory boards. This independent structure helped with customer engagement and customer success. And though the group was independent of Oracle, everyone knew that the founders of this group were Oracle customers and indirectly their champions. So the Oracle brand was indirectly associated with this group. This type of structure is not possible for all solutions. It is very much dependent on your product's target market. But if you can leverage such a structure it will make a big difference.

In my career, I have always seen Product Marketing creating content. Product Management and solution architects are also contributing to this content but majority of the thought leadership comes from Product Marketing. For Case Studies, it is a mix-bag. The templates and the positioning (that needs to be emphasized) is something that product marketing owns. The specifics can come from sales or customer success team memebrs. 

Excellent answers here. I agree that revenue is an important aspect of a Product Launch. You don't want the launch excitement to be short lived because of lack of revenue (and adoption). We wrote a blog post on this topic that you can refer to: What is your product marketing's "release to sales" process? In my opinion the three priorities for product launch are: * Start Early. This cannot be stressed enough. Apart from a product-market fit the next big thing that is working against you is time. You need to be smart about the launch and try to adopt some of the lean startup methods to test and revise your strtagey. * Define a Timeline. You need to be working against a timeline with clearly defined milestones. Obviously this timeline has to start way in advance before the actual product release by the engineering team. * Involve different stakeholders inside (and outside) the company. You cannot do this alone. You need the help of customer success, partners, existing customers, prospects and other constituents to help you maximize the impact of your launch.

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 the latest video. So customers always see the latest vetted videos. Here is a screenshot of the video page .

In addition to David's answer, I will also add the following points that should help build the credibility. Consistency You want to continue to deliver fresh content consistently. Consistent doesn't mean high quantity. But you need to follow a consistent cadence. Too many times, marketing will create content in these bursts and then stay back and watch. If your company is selling, then there is always an opportunity to gather insights and share them with your sales team to help them with their selling. Make it easy You need to make it easy for sales team to get access to this information. At the very least, it should be in a central space or centrally accessible. You do not want to give content silos. They will not engage and eventually the engagement will die down. However, it is quite difficult to create a central content portal for sales. It needs a disciplined process and the right tools. Use Insights Constructively Today, several tools offer engagement insights so that you know who is using the content and who isn't. When you see lack of engagement, make sure you approach it in a constructive fashion. Instead of reporting on lack of engagement, ask the reps why are they not engaging with the content. These insights from sales will help you up your content game and also build credibility with sales.

To measure effectiveness you need a tool. Just using a cloud storage platform like Google Drive or Sharepoint is not going to be enough. I also agree with Steve Fayer that the bigger an organization, the more expensive to deploy this kind of a tool. However, as the sales enablement industry matures and expands, this problem is bound to be addressed. If you can have a content management/knowledge management tool in place, you can focus on the following metrics: * Sales Engagement. Though some people may consider this metric to be superficial (since it doesn't tell you much about prospect engagement), we definitely see value in this metric. If your sales team is engaging with a certain asset regularly or is engaging with a particular content type frequently, that should give you an insight on what matters to the sales team. As other answers have pointed out, measuring sales decks are an outlier because they are expected to be tweaked and customized before they are shared with a prospect. But Data Sheets, Case Studies, White Papers, Blogs, Webinar Videos, etc. are usually used in their original format. * Prospect Engagement. With most content, once it is shared with a prospect, you lose insight. However, if you can measure prospect engagement with your content, you can use that data to measure effectiveness. This does require that your content management tool is not only serving as a repository but is also integrated into the channels of communications. That includes email, CRM, sales engagement platforms, etc. * Revenue Attribution. If you can capture the context of an opportunity or a lead when sales or a prospect engages with a particular asset, you can derive attribution data. This is not an exact science and will never be. However, this can give you further insight into the effectiveness of the content. To get these insights, there are several internal processes that have to work. The important one being "sales using the content management system for meeting their content needs." This requires that your content is always current, relevant, targeted, and on message. If sales is not engaged with your content management tool then it will be difficult to get any usage based insights. Organizations usually underestimate the effort it takes to keep your content house in order. It doesn't take much for clutter to seep in and mess up the experience. You can always rely on surveys and direct feedback as other answers have mentioned. But a better option is to couple the direct feedback with insights that you can gather from daily engagement.

Full Disclosure: I am founder of one of the products that addresses this exact problem. You have vast array of options. As Anand mentioned, on the high end, you can look at HighSpot, Showpad, Seismic, and Docurated. There are also other options for the mid and lower tier market. Our product Enablix is targeted for SMB market for sales and content enablement. We also have other competitors in play here. I would recommend checking out G2 Crowd and search for Sales Enablement category. You will see the available options. If you plan to use any of the cloud storage platforms, please tread with caution. You have to make sure you do not cede control of that folder/repository to everyone and keep it under strong quality control. The biggest risk using Dropbox or Google Drive is that they can very soon get busy and unusable. Ofcourse it will be hard to get any usage metrics. 

While I like the spreadsheet idea, I don't think it is practical and scalabe. It may help marketing keep track of where you have coverage and where there are gaps to filled in but expecting sales team to open a spreadsheet to look for Case Studies is going to result in lack of engagement and email requests for case studies. One of the key challenges of a sales enablement program is not the lack of processes and tools but the behavioral inertia that you need to overcome. And in today's world of instance gratification and short attention span, I would strongly suggest that you invest in a tool (or an approach that leverages your cloud storage platform) to organize your case studies (and other assets). You can refer to one of our blog posts that talks about managing marketing and sales content on dropbox. Though this approach also has its limits.

Agree completely with the other answers. However, at Oracle, when there was a minor or major release (not a software patch), we always created a What's New Deck that included bulleted items that were coming new in that release. This helped our sales and customer success teams to engage with prospects or existing customers. It is worth noting that we did not have a SaaS offering then, so these What's New Decks also helped when decision makers at our customer org were deciding on spending on upgrades.