Lizzie Yarbrough de Cantor

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...

This one ties back up to the question about good sales partnerships. :) I think the best way to create successful scripts is to do so in partnership with your pre-sales team. They have more knowledge of what is going on in a buyer’s head during each stage of your sales process. Hopefully, this means someone in sales engineering or solutions consulting that can partner up with you on any new demo or updates to existing demos. If that is not available to you, then go to your account executive BFF. You need to make sure it is the type of AE who is more strategic and can think on their toes. T...

This is a great question. If you are referring to a strapped product marketing team, I think dedicated resources for areas like partner enablement and competitive intelligence are a pretty big luxury. If you have the ability to hire someone specific for partner or channel strategy, then go for that. If not, I truly think this falls lower on a priority list. The way I’d recommend handling partner enablement is to take a look at materials you provide to your reps. Is this collateral you could give to your business development and/or partner team that they might be able to adjust slightly to ...

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 mak...

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...

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 van...

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, t...

This feels like the ultimate question for this topic!! Balancing strategic vs. reactional requests coming out of sales is a tough dance. I typically stay away from promising things like a one-sheet or any request that is so specific it will not scale or have a long shelf life. My approach is to try and dig deeper into the source of these types of requests, it is usually reactionary and based on a single customer interaction which is any easy way to shed light on why it is not a good use of product marketing time. What I do focus on is how we can enhance our core “sales kit” that is availab...