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 enable ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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. ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

I have not implemented this but I attended a local marketing-tech session recently where one of the Product Marketers discussed how they are using JIRA to manage their product marketing plans. In a nutshell, they are using an affordable project management software to help with their planning and execution. I can see how this can be helpful. It may take some time to set up a framework. But once defined, it but can be scaled and tweaked as you go along.   Here is a page on Asana's (similar to JIRA ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 peo ...Read More

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 s ...Read More