Jeremy Wood

You have to be very clear up front around the objectives of the enablement effort itself. That is to say if you're running an enablement session on X product and its for sales that are brand new to the product, then outline within the calendar invite itself that this is a '101 level' training and you should not expect deep dive nor overly technical information to be part of the delivery. This helps level set first and foremost what they're going to get out of the session (and what they aren't!) ...Read More

This is definitely one of the trickier elements of sales enablement and the quantifiable value driven through product marketing into sales enablement. In short much like the majority of PMM KPI's and metrics, its hard to have 'absolute' metrics but I have no hesitation in owning the influence on key business metrics by way of strong sales enablement. A good example of this is things like decreased Time To Close (TTC), increased Average Contract Value (ACV), and higher win rates. If PMM is enabli ...Read More

I always like to go back to basics and follow the same principals that we as PMM's follow when it comes to positioning to our customers. What is the customers pain point? What use cases are they trying to solve for? How can our products/solutions help them achieve their key business objectives? If we take those similar principles and apply them to an enablement curriculum you ensure you're aligning and delivering value to sales. How are you helping them? What will they be able to achieve from be ...Read More

This is a great and highly relatable question as I've been a product marketer both at HQ (central) as well as in the region and this has happened frequently! As a 'central' product marketing team rolling out a product or solution in to the regions I think the first thing thats really important is to value the expertise of the regional PMM's. One of the core responsibilities of these teams is their regional market knowledge and expertise! They know the market best and also know what solutions/pro ...Read More

Great question and to be honest in 25+ years in product marketing, I'm not sure I've fully cracked the 'measurement' topic in general! That being said what I attempt to do is two things. 1) Try to 'attach' ourselves to the key business KPI's i.e Revenue, Won Deals, ACV, Time to Close etc. PMM contributes in some way to all of those so it's important to ensure your plans and your activities/.initiatives correspond with those core business objectives somehow. A good example of this might be the pr ...Read More

If you legitimately have zero budget (and assuming this is the case vs just a very small budget) then you have to lean on your owned "resources." I'm using the term resources intentionally because I don't just mean owned properties such as your website etc but I'm also talking about your sales team(s), your partners and so on. Word of Mouth is still a very powerful marketing 'channel' and arguably one with some of the highest trust factors so I would absolutely leverage it! Make sure you're whol ...Read More

In my experience customer testimonials and case studies are always the #1 most requested asset from sales. In a couple of my roles we ended up polling the sales teams on what their most requested item(s) might be from Product Marketing (because we were all bombarded with various requests!) This way we could stack rank them and focus on one or two key items based on the inputs. Furthermore this gave us a strong mechanism to take back to Sales when they demanded more items or ones not prioritised ...Read More

Probably an obvious answer but for me it's always started with the talent..people people people. Poor hires have always plauged folks and its very hard to translate that into high performing teams. Spend the time defining exactly what you need and the right fit of PMM that will be able to deliver on your expectations. Sometimes you're forced to make compromises (levels, salary, backgrounds, locations etc) but try to maintain a core set of skills and capabilities that will be the foundation of th ...Read More

The rule of thumb (in my opinion) is to always work backwards from the audience..i.e the customer! Who are you trying to speak to? Where are they? What 'version' of them do you get in the morning? on their mobile? on social vs other networks? There are a lot of different variations of an audience you're targeting and you have to be mindful of that when building out your activities. So if I have a target audience thats been segmented by propensity to purchase, correct demographic, vetted in other ...Read More

Ah I remember this stage a few times ;) Again, I think keeping things simple is key. Don't overthink as it will only complicate things and in turn likely create the opposite impact you're aiming for! Prioritise a handful of key initiatives and activities that are inline with the business. Think along the lines of these steps: Based on the product or service you're selling, ensure your value proposition, messaging, competitive differentiators, and other USP's are clearly articulated. Again, keep ...Read More