Lizzie Yarbrough de Cantor

I do think this is highly dependent on the type of product you are taking to market, but here are some go-tos I use. 1. Keep it simple: Make sure you focus any training decks in the simplest, most customer centric language. It’s often easy to use technical terminology and/or internal acronyms and names that will not help that sales rep learn or relate to the customers they are interacting with! 2. Stay value-focused: It is also really easy to go into deep detail on product features and find yourself building a demo-ish presentation. Put yourself in that rep’s shoes, they need to be focused on values and benefits for their buyer over the minutiae of clicks in product. It is your job as a PMM to be able to take all the feature-level details and package it up into meaningful value that a rep can communicate to their prospects. 3. Don’t forget sales is a customer: I have seen too many times, training decks that just focus on tangible product experience or messaging. I think one of the most important perspectives to keep in mind as you work through a new training is that sales will be thinking “what’s in it for me?”. You should always be thinking and framing any enablement content on how this is going to help your sales team reach their quota or whatever target they are pacing toward. If you can’t draw this connection, your average rep is not going to use this material. 4. Bring VOC into your training: By the time you are ready to release a new product, you have hopefully had a healthy amount of customers test the experience. Find simple ways to inject the voice of the customer into your training—zoom meeting clips, emails with feedback, beta slack channels—there are tons of sources! If you can incorporate this as proof into your training, it brings that much more energy for the field teams.

This is a topic I am super passionate about at the moment. We are going through a lot of this with my current team. It can be so easy to find yourself launching and communicating to your customer in the way your product team is organized instead of how that customer experiences your products. Also don’t sweat too much, this is natural because of how most product marketing teams orient themselves to their product and engineering organizations. But let’s be real, it’s a bad habit. Here is how we are tackling it currently: 1. Give yourself permission to organize based on your customer’s vantage point: For us, this means defining persona ownership for each member of the product marketing team. For some of my other PMM colleagues, it may mean owning specific points in the customer lifecycle like activation or growth and retention. When each PMM is given space to go deep and focus on a specific audience segment’s perspective as they search, discover, use, and hopefully find value in your products, they are able to see your product suite with new eyes. 2. Don’t forget to organize for customer impact: My first bullet may sound too rosey. You can’t forget to support your partners in product management as they release and push updates to the product. What we have done at my company is take a really critical look at our product team and allocate dedicated product marketing coverage only to those squads who are shipping features that have an impact on the customer. In an ideal state, I’d like to see my team spending 75% of their time thinking across our full product suite to make sure we are driving the most impact for their persona, and 25% of their time making sure we stay on top of our product release cycles. Also, build a good launch tiering system for yourself to make sure you aren’t spending too much time on small features. A support article is often enough! 3. Find creative ways for your whole team to get together and repackage: I cannot say enough for how valuable I find it whenever the full product marketing team at my company can get together for creative workshopping time—we call it “the braintrust” on our team. :) It is really easy to only focus on what’s new when you are launching something, but that is not giving credit to the amazing product you are supporting! Any new feature may allow you to speak differently about value when packaged up with all the other goodness already built into your product! Using a visual collaboration tool—like Freehand or Miro—to map out customer segments, what they care about most, and then seeing how your different product offerings fit into those is a really good place to start when trying to think bigger about your customer journey. 4. Be willing to test it out ahead of your sales team: I find that one of the most important ways I build trust with my sales org and confidence in a go-to-market plan is being willing to throw myself in the ring first. Most products often go through some sort of pre-release or beta phase ahead of a GA release and campaign. Use this time to start testing out messaging and value statements on real customers, and think about how it might package up better if you look across products. Get yourself a BFF or two in sales and ask if you can try out early cuts of decks or demos on a few of their customer calls. Most reps are thrilled to have a product expert on with their customers!

I have a couple of weekly touchpoints with my sales team. We hold a weekly pipeline review where all of marketing and sales leadership sit together and review the state of our pipeline and try to get ahead of any major problems before it’s too late. This is typically a sales-driven meeting, but is a good way to make sure we can spot challenges before they become overwhelming. The second touchpoint is a weekly “standup”. Let me be honest, it’s not a standup like most of us know. It’s a weekly commitment from our sales leadership and product marketing to align on any high priority initiatives or work we need to track. We have the time held every week, but do not always meet. If there isn’t anything to review or this can be done asynchronously, we opt for that. There are a few principles that I think are pretty important to keep in mind to make sure you are staying plugged into sales without setting your team up to be constantly responding to field requests. 1. Make sure there is full representation in any regular check-ins with sales. If your company is global, make sure you have a time where all regions can be present. Also, it is easy for your largest customers to get the most attention—this sucks for more junior reps. Have leadership representation from all of your sales segments when you meet. For me, it is our global team leads from the strategic, enterprise, and growth segments to be sure I’m hearing from everyone. 2. Do not set up weekly 1:1s with a specific manager. This is a really easy way to skew your own resourcing and get out of sync with your wider customer base. It can be tempting, but I really discourage it! Whenever possible, go to existing sales meetings. Your sales team’s time is super valuable. Anytime they are not engaging with customers is time away from driving revenue for the business. Keep that in mind as you schedule time. For me, it’s usually easier to ask for 20 minutes of an existing meeting vs. finding a way to schedule something new. What time already exists in your sales team’s weekly engagements, and how can you take advantage of that?

When it comes to PMM core duties, typically who are the best partners in the sales org, who has the knowledge and the customer touch points to really help PMMs win? I imagine this is specific to each organization, but for me it’s all about identifying your power players within sales and customer success. In my team’s onboarding, I actually recommend finding a “BFF” on sales and marketing in their first 90 days. It pays major dividends in their success down the road. Here are the teams and personality traits I find myself looking for: 1. Sales engineering or solutions consulting: Just make this entire team your best friend. I have never found a bad partner in my pre-sales team. They are typically super connected to buyer perspective and are more likely to be strategic thinkers that can test things on the fly for product marketing. They are also a great extension of any launch strategy and change management for things like existing demos or collateral. 2. Customer Success: I can’t say enough for finding a CS BFF. Customer success engagements are often the best leading indicator of general customer health and what to expect during renewals. Find a customer success manager or two who will allow you to ride along on calls or build things like Chorus or Gong playlists for you to listen into and commit yourself to actually listening! 3. Account Execs: This is a tricky one. If you make yourself too open, you may find yourself at the end of a never-ending request list from certain folks on your sales team. My approach to finding good partnership with specific reps comes via sales management. I typically ask managers for a rep or two to connect with on an initiative as it arises. Also, pay attention to who is proactive to your communications. Certain reps are more likely to respond to your slack messages and requests for help in team channels. That is a good signal that they are eager to partner. 4. Sales & CS Management: The last group that is important is your frontline managers. I find from an enablement perspective, any material or program you release is only as powerful as your sales management adoption. If the managers aren’t bought in and won’t reinforce with their teams, you are not going to see success. And on the flip side, they are great to get better insight into challenges and focus areas for their team that can help you prioritize what you work on at scale vs. the loudest voice in the virtual room or slack. :)

That really depends on the focus of the event. In my experience, product marketing and sales enablement typically run about a 50/50 split on content sharing. The last few days of our kick-off are often deep in sales training or process updates which typically don’t involve product marketing. What we do often own is any product or program spotlight that is of high focus for our customer facing teams. Figuring out what is “high focus” is a joint decision with Sales and CS leadership. In one kick-off, this meant a half day dedicated to a new product we were releasing. In another, we carried a large part of the content to lead the full team through new persona trainings and workshopping discovery methods the team might start using. All-in-all, I find that product marketing typically has a pretty important seat at the table for content development of your kick off event. But I think agenda and overall programming should be owned by your sales enablement and/or sales team leadership if that’s available to you. Also, get your general marketing team involved to make sure your sales team understands all of the activities marketing will be doing to drive top of funnel demand for them.

Cross-functional alignment and support of measures you will be focused on is probably the most important factor in actually achieving a KPI in my experience. This all starts with the relationships you have built as a product marketer and how well you are in-tune with business priority and what is motivating other teams. Here's my suggestions for staying in strong communication and alignment with other areas of the business to ensure your goals are aligned and supported cross-functionally. 1. Have a go-to-market leadership team that meets regularly to discuss progress, blockers, and action needed for the products or buyers you support. At minimum this team has participation from customer facing teams, product marketing, and product. My current GTM leadership team has representation from: Product Marketing, Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Onboarding and we meet weekly. 2. Utilize company planning cycles to force more structured alignment. For me, this means getting organized and aligned with my partners within the business during our annual planning cycles which gets airtime with our most senior executives. We then check back in on that plan at quarterly cadence to ensure we don't need to shift our goals or focus depending on business performance. This year we had a major shift in our primary KPI halfway through the year— we were over-performing against our original plan and were lagging at a different point in our customer lifecycle. Because we already had an established team for decision making and reporting in place, that shift was much easier to make mid year. 3. Make sure you are agreeing on KPIs that your full go-to-market team can support. It's really easy to quickly sign up for a sales target or a delivery-based goal without really stress-testing: does this measure require us to focus on the original goal/business priority? If you sign up for just a $$ amount for a product line, it can be easy for initiatives to slip or other paths to successful sales to take priority. Make sure your KPIs and the language around them encourage accountability from you and your partners. A good example here is instead of signing up for a certain $$ amount in new sales for a product line, why not sign up for a win-rate goal with a particular ICP you are trying to target or a sales goal for that particular audience? Those extra details means product has incentive to stay on track with roadmap that serves that audience, just like marketing and sales would stay focused on more than just new sales and top of funnel creation, but those activities for a particular ICP.

Honestly, I have no issue with shared KPIs as long as each team knows what they are contributing to influence the KPI. I think the most common example here are KPIs around a product or feature launch resulting in shared accountability with product and engineering, or product expansion/growth campaigns where accountability is largely shared with sales. This is where a strong plan comes into place—know what your KPI is as the over-arching metric and then be ok with delivery or outcome-based measures that can be attributed to different teams and detailed in a project plan. Each contributing team can list out milestones or delivery targets they need to meet in order to achieve their part of the KPI you are looking to achieve. The last point I want to make here is don't sign up for a KPI that sounds great, but can't actually be measured. Make sure you are meeting regularly with your partners in marketing, revenue, and product operations to have a strong hold on what you can measure. Fully understanding metrics you already have, or making a case for ones you need, is more important and influential in my experience than being able to attribute every single thing between contributing teams.

I personally prefer measurements like OKRs, KPIs, and other goals to be shared by at least one other cross-functional partner. I don't want any PMM on my team to feel like a single point of failure or like they don't have others within the business prioritizing the same goals they are. So for me, performance is certainly gauged by are you moving the needle on the metrics we are committed to, but they are also a great way to prioritize what is most important to work on each quarter. For me they are guiding metrics to decide what tangible work and deliverables we should tackle first.

Just to share an opinion: if you need 5 separate measurements to ensure a campaign is successful, then you probably need to go back and reprioritize/reframe what you are looking to do. I think 5 KPIs is too many for a campaign to really be focused and effective. My suggestion would be to have a singular north start metric—ex. pipeline generation, new bookings, product or feature adoption rate—with one or two additional KPIs if needed. Here are KPIs I find myself defaulting to a lot lately: 1. Marketing (or campaign) attributed opportunities for sales 2. Win-rate increase with our target persona 3. Product success outcomes (like feature adoption or customer health scores) If you are in a 0-1 product or campaign launch, don't shy away from KPIs that may feel less "scientific". Here are some examples of questions I ask myself when the product is less mature.: 1. How many customer or marketing references might you target to consider that product GA or ready for prime-time sales? 2. What is your company's treatment for more established products and go-to-markets and what gaps are there in your product to get there? Examples: launching product pages, committing to content targets to make sure you've established clear share of voice, aiming for a certain number of customer reviews on third-party sites or analyst inclusion, etc. 3. How often is sales trying to include this product in deals? Does it make sense to target an inclusion rate to ensure sales is more confident in this sales motion?

I love this question because Sales Enablement is one of my most consistent partners on any initiative. How you measure success of sales enablement really depends on what tools you have in place. Lots of sales enablement tools now have ways to measure usage which can be very helpful. We use Highspot and Workramp at my current company and it allows me to track usage on things like training/resource pages, completion rate on specific enablement tracks, or how often sales is sending out specific sales assets to their prospects. It isn't perfect, there are lots of gaps in the process, but directionally it will show in general if your sellers are adopting what you deliver. Call listening tools are also amazing ways to track effectiveness of sales enablement. Tools like Gong now have amazing AI and call summary capabilities that can allow you to catch when calls mention specific keywords, assets, discovery questions, demos or anything else that might clue you into uptick in a particular enablement focus. Beyond capabilities of tools that may be in place, you can never replace good sales feedback. You should have key partners in sales who can help you to listen and learn: 1. What enablements need to happen and what assets to prioritize for your sellers 2. How things are or aren't being adopted and how to continue to adapt and improve upon what you've built This isn't a list I've personally vetted, but here is Gartner's take on current sale enablement tools if you are looking to adopt something to help with measurement.