Jeff Chamberlain

That's really a factor or where you are in your career. I started my product marketing career at HP (back in the 1980s) and that was fantastic as they had processes in place and great employee education opportunities to help accelerate my knowledge and provide a framework for getting things done. Some of those fundamental aspects such as the product life cycle, product/project teams and management by objectives have driven my work habits and career. I have since worked at larger, more political companies and very small start-ups. I find it more enjoyable and challenging (there's a relationship) at start-ups as there is very little friction between having an idea and executing on that idea. The downside is less resources and less process to depend on for driving necessary communication or action. I have had success in both environments (large and small) and take pride in those accomplishments. I was able to participate in a global product launch via sattelite to our worldwide field when with HP which was an amazing experience. At start-ups I have been able to drive an entirely new pricing strategy and define and launch new products which has been very challenging and rewarding as well.

That's a very tricky question as I'm guessing you know. I work in a smaller company so I simply poll my sales team and ask what is working and what isn't (and why). The sales team generally knows what content is having an impact. We do provide a lot of customer facing content via the resources page of our website and track downloads as an indicator as well. This problem gets a lot more difficult when you have a large, global sales team and don't have an adopted, centralized mechanism for accessing updated sales content. You ideally want a mechanism where sales can build their decks from the individual slides and access the content from a central location. However, I have never seen this work very well. Sales will inevitably keep decks on their local drives and modify them and use them as they see fit. It's always gotten back to some means of getting insight from your sales team directly to know what works and what doesn't. As mentioned in another response, you should be getting on several calls and, ideally, driving a sales certification process to make sure they understand and can use the content as you intend. Sales Enablement technology continues to progress quickly in features and capability and, if adopted and sponsored by sales leadership, can provide great insights and information on this issue as well.