Daniel O’Dowd, Copywriter for our sister community Sales Enablement Collective, wrote this article on how to get around gatekeepers when dealing with sales calls. We thought this would be perfect to share with those of you who are responsible for the sales enablement function within your organization.

Coming (metaphorically) face-to-face with a gatekeeper can be incredibly intimidating for new sales reps, and endlessly frustrating for more experienced ones.

As a sales enablement professional, you need to equip reps with a wide range of skills that will allow them to navigate their way past gatekeepers while they go outbound into the great unknown.

It’s important to tell your sales reps that while gatekeepers can be difficult to deal with, they’re a challenge that can be overcome with practice and patience. That will channel their innate competitive spirit and help them view each gatekeeping experience as a learning opportunity, rather than finding themselves deflated by the encounter.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What a gatekeeper is
• Your initial interaction with the gatekeeper
• Getting past the gatekeeper
• Information gathering when you can’t get past

By the end, you’ll hopefully be better equipped when preparing your sales teams for their encounters with gatekeepers.

What is a gatekeeper?

Before we get into the tips, tricks, and best practices for getting around gatekeepers, we should briefly touch on what they actually are.

A gatekeeper is anyone – a receptionist, personal assistant, phone operator, and so on – who answers the phone before, or on behalf of the prospect that you’re trying to reach. Their role is to screen incoming calls before they get to the decision-maker and judge whether they’re worth the decision-maker’s time.

They’ll either put you through to the prospect or give you some sort of reason as to why they can’t put you in direct contact with them. They’ll tell you the prospect isn’t available, doesn’t take sales calls, isn’t interested, or something along those lines.

Why can gatekeepers be frustrating or intimidating?

As mentioned above, reps can find gatekeepers either frustrating or intimidating.

An experienced rep will be irked by a gatekeeper as the rep knows they can have a productive conversation with the prospect, but only if they can actually get to them.

A new, more inexperienced rep however may find themselves intimidated by them, especially if pushing through to speak to the prospect isn’t in their nature. It can be easier to just accept a “they’re not interested” from a gatekeeper than to look for ways to get more information.

As a result of these issues, it’s important that you incorporate adequate training for these types of circumstances into your sales enablement training initiatives.

It’s no good having reps who are great in front of a prospect if they can’t even get in front of the prospect in the first place!

Want to master stakeholder management for powerful enablement programs?

Learn proven strategies to influence key players, overcome roadblocks, and rally support for your product marketing and enablement goals.

Get Certified in Enablement Stakeholder Management

First contact: your first interaction with a gatekeeper

First things first, your attitude counts. If you make a call and are greeted by a gatekeeper as opposed to the prospect you were hoping to speak to, keep a positive attitude!

Be nice, polite, and kind – that alone can make the difference. Put yourself in the gatekeeper’s shoes; no one wants to answer the phone and introduce themselves only to hear someone who’s clearly disgruntled on the other end.

Pay attention to what they say, listen out for their name as they introduce themselves, and be sure to use their name in this and future conversations. It shows that you care and are listening to them, and people love being listened to.

The goal is to create as good a relationship and first impression as possible, and it’s really simple. Here’s an example:

“Hello, this is Mary from Prospect Company Ltd, how can I help you?”

“Hi Mary, this is Steve from Outbound Calls Inc, could you please put me through to Mr. Joe Bloggs?”

Doesn’t that sound like a professional, yet pleasant exchange? That can be the difference between a gatekeeper viewing you in a positive light and a negative one.

Tips for getting past the gatekeeper

Now that you’ve made contact with the gatekeeper and made a polite introduction, it’s time to cut to the chase and get in touch with your prospect.

Scenario 1: They put you through to the prospect

The gatekeeper tells you that they can’t put you through to the prospect without a problem. Is your job done? No!

Thank them for their help, and ask if there’s an extension that you can note down in case you need to get through again. Oftentimes they’ll tell you that it’s company policy to not hand the number out, but upon occasion, you’ll get it.

Again, politeness is important here.

Scenario 2: They ask if you’ve already spoken to the prospect

Occasionally, a gatekeeper may ask you whether you’ve been in contact with the prospect already. In this case, you just need to say that you’ve been communicating via email/LinkedIn regarding [product area].

You don’t need to go into much detail here for a few reasons. Firstly, you want to pitch to the prospect, not the gatekeeper.

Secondly, it’s quite unlikely that the gatekeeper has the subject matter knowledge that your target prospect does, so there’s not much use in explaining your product in that much depth.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you don’t want to position it as a sales call, but instead as a back-and-forth conversation with the prospect (which it will be if you’re a good rep).

A gatekeeper is more likely to put you through if it doesn’t sound like a plain old sales call, no matter how much value you know you’re bringing through that call.

Scenario 3: They ask what your call is regarding

The gatekeeper might ask you what the purpose of your call is, or what it’s in relation to. Like in the above scenario, just say that it’s for a discussion regarding [product area].

The gatekeeper likely won’t be an expert in the market so you just need to be vague, while still expressing the value the conversation will bring to the prospect.

Scenario 4: They ask if the prospect is expecting your call

If the gatekeeper asks whether the prospect is expecting your call, don’t lie. That goes against the principle of being polite, kind, and respectful that we talked about earlier in the article.

In this situation, you have a few options, but the most important thing is to remain confident. This question from a gatekeeper can often cause inexperienced reps to be flustered as they try to bluff around the fact that the prospect isn’t expecting the call.

So what are your options? Firstly, be honest and then immediately redirect the focus to the value the conversation would bring to the prospect. For example:

“Is Joe expecting your call?”

“No, it’s about [product area].”

Another option, which works especially well if you’ve had a positive, cheerful attitude throughout, is to be jovial. When you’re asked if the prospect is expecting the call, say “I hope so!” Putting a smile on their face can make a difference in this situation.

Sometimes, total honesty can go a long way. Admit that yes, it is a cold call and that it’s in relation to “something that a lot of people in [Joe Bloggs’ role] are using”. Often that’s all it’ll take.

One last option you might choose to employ is to send the prospect a LinkedIn message or InMail, stating that you’d like to connect and are planning to drop them a quick call as you know they’re busy. That way, the conversation might go as follows:

“Is Joe expecting your call?”

“I dropped him a message to let him know I’d be calling today”

Lying and telling a gatekeeper that someone is expecting a call from you when they’re not is one of the biggest ways to break trust and hurt your professionality. As long as you don’t do that, and go into your answer with confidence you’ll be in with a chance.

Scenario 5: They say the prospect isn’t available at the moment

This is the classic gatekeeper line. If they tell you the prospect isn’t available, there are a few options at your disposal.

Ask them if they know when the prospect will be available, or if there are times that the prospect is usually around. This is a good opportunity to ask for an extension, direct line, or email address if you don’t already have it.

If you’re told that they’ve just gone into a meeting, ask what the best time to call back is. View every pushback from a gatekeeper not as something to sour your mood, but as an opportunity to learn more information.

With luck, you might get a response like “they’re in a meeting at the moment, but call tomorrow around 10 am, they have a gap”.

Lastly, if there’s another individual from the same organization who you’re aiming to prospect, ask for their name instead!

Scenario 6: They say that the prospect doesn’t take sales calls/is only contactable via email

This is always a disappointing response to get, but make sure to thank the gatekeeper for their help regardless.

Tell them you’ll send the prospect an email, and use this as an opportunity to confirm the email address (or perhaps discover one you didn’t know about).

Information gathering from the gatekeeper

Even if you can’t get through to the prospect, there’s a lot of information that you can learn about the prospect and their organization through the gatekeeper if you ask nicely.

We touched on some of it above, but here’s a quick list of some of the things you can learn from a gatekeeper that’ll make your next call easier:

• The prospect’s direct line or extension
• The prospect’s email address
• The best time to call the prospect
• Whether they’re on vacation
• If there’s a better person to contact on the subject matter
• The prospect’s attitude towards sales calls

Summary

While this article has listed lots of scenarios and how to handle them, there are attributes that will always be vital, regardless of what kind of gatekeeper you face. Those are politeness, respect, and confidence.

If a gatekeeper picks up the phone and is greeted by a rep with these qualities, they’re much more likely to lend a helping hand where they can.

Want to learn more?

Whether you’re a sales enablement specialist or an industry newbie, you need to be accustomed to sales enablement best practices.

Led by Sapphire Reels, Director of Portfolio and Integrated Marketing at Pluralsight, the Sales Enablement Certified: Masters course has been designed to help you put effective processes in place that’ll ensure you hit the highest sales enablement benchmarks and convert more prospects into customers.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

Articulate the importance of sales enablement and sell it internally.

Design a sales enablement program from scratch based on business objectives and sales needs.

Launch and iterate on sales enablement programs.

Demonstrate the impact of sales enablement on the business and revenue generation.

So, what are you waiting for?

Get Sales Enablement Certified

The post Getting around gatekeepers appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Learn proven strategies to influence key players, overcome roadblocks, and rally support for your product marketing and enablement goals.

As a PMM, your ability to navigate organizational complexities and unite cross-functional stakeholders is paramount. 

Enablement Stakeholder Management Certified: Masters is an expert-led course that equips you with a proven framework to build rapport, credibility, and trust with key players across the business.

Develop the essential stakeholder management skills to power effective enablement programs that drive product success. 

Become the linchpin that aligns diverse teams and sustains organizational momentum, propelling your product marketing goals forward.

Get Enablement Stakeholder Management certified and…

• Gain ability to quickly secure buy-in for initiatives by aligning cross-functional stakeholders.
• Develop conflict resolution skills to overcome roadblocks and unite diverse teams behind your vision.
• Become a trusted advisor by leveraging stakeholder relationships to drive successful product launches.

Wanna use your L&D budget but need a sign off from your boss? Don’t worry, we’ve done the convincing for you. Get your template here.

Don’t believe us? Here’s some proof…

“Overall I thought the content was useful and insightful. As the leader of a data analysis team, my stakeholders are a bit different, and my role is perhaps a subset of the enablement engagement. I found the content about selling yourself or your team less relevant. They are already sold by the time they engage with us.”

Brian Withers, Leader of Business Operations at Cisco systems

“This course should be at the top of your list! Whether you are starting at a new company or beginning your enablement career, this is a great place to start. Stakeholder management is crucial to enablement success and is something that is always top of mind no matter who or what level you interact with. I really appreciated Theo Davies’ perspectives through this course.”

Annie Johnson, Revenue Enablement Manager at Sayari

What you get when you enroll:

Content

An extensive on-demand curriculum with all the tools you need to master the enablement stakeholder management process. 

Footage

Dive into 3+ hours of exclusive, on-demand course content, and enhance your stakeholder management skills at your own pace.

Tasks

Hone your skills with help from a line-up of engaging activities designed to help transform your theoretical knowledge into impactful stakeholder management strategies.

Templates

13 actionable, industry-standard templates that you’ll use to implement your learning and drive results with no time wasted.

Certificates 

Elevate your career with an Enablement Stakeholder Management certification upon successful completion of all exams. Solidify your newfound mastery of alignment and collaboration, and set yourself apart in the industry.

FAQs

Who’s this course for?

This course is packed with expert knowledge on managing and gaining buy-in from stakeholders. It’s for anyone who wants to elevate their understanding of enablement and the stakeholder management that’s necessary to succeed in the function. 

How does the course work?

Once you enroll, you’ll work through the modules in chronological order and be invited to take part in activities. At the end of each module, you’ll be presented with mandatory exam questions and if you pass all these, you’ll become Enablement Stakeholder Management Certified!

What happens if I don’t pass the exams?

 If you fail the first time around you’ll be given the option to retake the exam. If you fail the second attempt, unfortunately, it means you won’t get the certificate. However, all’s not lost – you’ll have still learned LOTS and you’ll be given access to the course materials for life, so you can brush up on the bits you slipped up on forevermore.

How long will I have access to the course content?

For life! A one-off payment gives you unlimited to all the course’s content.

The post Enablement Stakeholder Management Certified: Your path to organizational buy-in appeared first on ProdSens.live.

This article is based on April Dunford’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in San Francisco. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

Selling is hard, right? 

It seems like everyone believes selling is a challenge; even the founders I work with are terrified of it. That sucks because if we don’t figure out how to sell our products, we go out of business. 

In short, knowing how to sell is vital. 

However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Instead, I want to flip the script and look at it from the customer’s perspective. 

Why? 

Because buying is hard too. 

Now, I know what you’re thinking – “Buying isn’t hard, April! It’s called shopping, and it’s easy! I wish I was shopping right now. Get on with your article.” That’s because when we think about buying, we picture ourselves buying fun things like shoes, t-shirts, or drinks at a bar. 

However, there are definitely some not-so-fun purchases. Have you ever enjoyed buying insurance? No. Have you ever had fun buying a house? Of course not! It’s awful! Similarly, when it comes to B2B software, most of what we sell is incredibly hard to buy. 

Let me give you an example. It’s not related to tech, but trust me, it’ll make sense soon. This story is called “April Buys a Toilet.” Work with me here.

April buys a toilet

Let me set the scene. I live in Toronto, famous for having old, terrible houses. I bought one of these houses and inside was a terrible bathroom, so I hired a guy to renovate it. On day two, he told me, “You gotta go and buy a toilet.”

“Alright,” I thought, having never bought a toilet before. At the toilet store, a sales rep asked what kind I wanted. I was like, “I don’t know – one that flushes?” He said, “Look, there’s all kinds of toilets back there. Check out the prices and features, then let me know which one you want.”

I looked around the showroom and there were hundreds of toilets that all looked the same! Some cost $100, others $1,000 – no idea why. Each had a sticker listing baffling features: “gravity flush,” “trapway,” “flapper”… what’s a flapper?! I didn’t know enough to make a decision.

So, I did what anyone would do – went home and researched toilets online. Turns out, they’re full of technology! Water efficiency, seat heights, single or dual flush, visible trapways (whatever those are), and more. 

Want to know the most disgusting thing I learned? Too bad, I’m gonna tell you anyway. There’s a score. It’s called the MaP score. That’s the maximum solid waste a toilet can flush. 18 ounces (500 grams) is good, but some can handle up to 2.2 pounds (a kilogram) – that’s the size of a small dog! 

You’re welcome.

Anyway, my head was swimming with toilet knowledge. However, I didn’t want to have to become a toilet expert – I’m busy with kids, my job, and a dog that I don’t plan to flush! 

So, I had a genius idea: the old toilet worked fine. I’d keep it until it broke. In the end, I spent three weeks going to showrooms, searching endlessly online… and bought zero toilets.

How hard is it to buy your product?

Now, I’m not saying buying your product is like buying a toilet. Okay, maybe I am. Purchasing B2B software is exactly the same as buying a toilet – perhaps a little worse.

So you can see what I mean, let’s look at a typical B2B enterprise purchase process. I want you to imagine your company sells accounting software. One day, the VP of Finance for an eCommerce wakes up and thinks, “Our accounting software sucks. We’ve outgrown it. I’m trying to do an audit, and this software just doesn’t do what I need it to do.” 

As the VP of Finance, what’s her next move? Does she start researching options online? No way! She goes into the office, finds an underling – let’s call him Joey – and says, “Hey Joey! We need new accounting software. Go make a shortlist. You vet the vendors and I’ll write the check.” 

How’s Joey feeling? Joey’s pissed. He might use accounting software in his job, but he’s by no means an expert on all the possibilities out there. Still, he has no choice but to get on with it. 

So, Joey hits Google. Before long, he’s totally overwhelmed by endless quadrants with 50-plus vendors listed in them. Eventually, he finds his way to your company’s website and requests a demo. 

Demo day rolls around and your eager sales rep bombards him with 59 drop-down menus, clicking through every single feature. Meanwhile, poor Joey is sitting there, hair blowing back in this wind tunnel of tech speak, understanding absolutely nothing. 

And Joey’s freaking out. If he makes the wrong choice, bad things will happen. His boss will think he’s a dummy, the accounting team will hate him, and the company will fail next year’s audit. Joey could miss out on a promotion or even get fired.

What’s the easiest, lowest-risk thing for Joey to do right now? Nothing. He’s gonna go tell his boss, “Now’s not a good time. We’re swamped with audits. I looked, but all the options are complicated and expensive. The software we have is working okay…”

The stats on this are terrifying. Research shows that 40-60% of B2B purchase processes result in no decision being made. And it’s not that they evaluated everything and decided the status quo was best – no, they simply couldn’t figure out how to make a decision, so they kicked the can down the road and decided to do nothing.

The post How to craft a sales pitch that wins appeared first on ProdSens.live.

A simple tool to ramp up sales teams faster and win better

The struggle to sell to an enterprise evolves every year with newer wrinkles. 

To help you empathize with the chaotic nature of B2B enterprise selling, let’s look at a cross-section of three issues below, and hopefully, at least one resonates with you.

We’re seeing longer sales cycles with more people in the mix

You have to graduate from selling point solutions to making the platform sale at some point in your enterprise software journey. This sale becomes harder and harder as companies squeeze their budgets. You have to worry about not only the traditional user and buyer but also a whole set of new groups. 

Don’t want to take my word for it? Gartner estimates that 6 to 10 people, on average, are part of a purchase decision in most B2B enterprises. 

You also notice many non-traditional buying centers – I’m referring to a function or department that holds the budget when I say buying center here. Sales folks are unsure how to speak to every one of them. These buying centers sometimes have conflicting objectives. But your product still needs to be relevant to them somehow.

It’s easy to win small deals, but bigger deals are hard to come by

Different people or teams own fractions of the budget you’re after – another reason for enterprise tool sprawl. You’ve only truly won over the teams in a company if you get them to standardize on your product. 

Additionally, you tend to leave money on the table – both in terms of opportunity and share of wallet – especially if your category is historically under-monetized. A good example comes from the world of developer tools. 

According to Battery Ventures, the budgets for developer tools fall in the $1-5MM range on average. It is the average because not all companies prioritize investments in developer tools. If you’re a developer tool company, you’re at the mercy of the maturity of your customer. 

The step-level changes in spending automatically bring in more scrutiny, too. If you want to graduate from $100K to $500K to $1MM in ARR from an account, the journey depends on how comfortable you are working with so many talking heads in the same room/meeting. Graduating from one level to another immediately triggers additional checks, sign-offs, and purchase policies. 

Sales reps (sometimes) struggle to convey product value

A great way to check if your sales enablement efforts hold any weight is to offer the ‘day in the life’ test to every sales rep within the company. Ask them if they can describe a single day in the life of each of the key personas you lose sleep over. If they’re unable to, you know you have a lot of work left to do.

You want your sales reps to be prudent enough to narrow down to the use cases that matter based on the prospect in front of them. Ideally, you don’t want salespeople to try to boil the entire ocean by discussing every use case in your product. 

Finally, can your sales reps share assets and talk in a way that moves the prospect closer to a decision? All they need to do is create a spark. An interest. Or the initial wedge that forces the prospect to want to explore more. 

I want to offer a two-step playbook to tackle all the prickly issues above… 

A two-step playbook to tackling sales issues

Step one: Start mapping your buying centers

One must appeal to multiple departments with sometimes conflicting interests. Try this mapping exercise if you’re new to the idea of buying centers.

1. Which buying centers do I usually speak to or bump into?
2. Which new buying centers do I see pop up in my deals?
3. Can I categorize them in some way – for example: by role?
4. How do these buying centers connect to each other in a sale?
5. What are (if any) conflicting interests between these buying centers?

You may recognize this mapping exercise as a variation of stakeholder mapping from your MBA classes. 

Who do you lean on to answer these questions?

Start with the teams that interact with prospects and customers day in and day out. Sales, customer success, solution architects, professional services, and support teams are safe bets. As always, do your own research too! Explore third-party research sources, editorials in your space, competitors, and, more importantly, your in-house customer research or product insights team. 

Step two: Create a cheat sheet per buying center

Once you’re done mapping the buying centers, use the template above to create a cheat sheet for each buying center. Let’s say you uncover seven buying centers from the mapping exercise; proceed to create a cheat sheet for each of those seven buying centers. 

Let me walk you through the sections on the template using an example.  

Relevant buying center 

To reiterate, a buying center is a function/department that holds the budget. Depending on your enterprise product, ‘Security’ can be a buying center, and we’ll use that as an example. 

Top three recurring titles 

Identify the common personas within the buying center across levels here. Rely on past sales interactions to fill this out. Otherwise, you do your research to fill this in. It’s also possible that not all titles within a certain buying center are the personas you care about. 

In the case of the Security buying center, the personas can be CISO, VP of Security Engineering & Development, and Global Security Architect. 

Core functional JTBD statement 

Create a product and service agnostic statement using the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) mindset for your buying center. This statement should effectively describe what the buying center is trying to achieve or accomplish in a given situation.

Sample JTBD statement for the Security buying center – “Develop, implement, enforce enterprise-wide security, governance, resiliency policies to enable and advance business objectives.”

Pains 

Compile all the pains preventing the buying center from getting its job done, i.e., preventing them from executing them on the JTBD statement. Prioritize them. Use the prioritized list to pick the top three pains you can address. Again, compile pains, prioritize pains, and select the top three from the list you can address well. 

Enriching personas with jobs-to-be-done

Georgia Diaconsescu, PMM at What3Words shares an actionable nine-step plan & learnings around enriching Personas with Jobs-To-Be-Done.

Product Marketing AllianceProduct Marketing Alliance

Implication metrics 

Identify the top three to five metrics you can link to the pain. Said differently, what are a few metrics that get hurt due to the existence of the pain? Specifically, choose the metrics your prospect directly or indirectly owns. You want to show how your product moves the metrics in favor of your prospect. 

Examples of implication metrics for the security buying center, depending on the pain, can be breach lifecycle, data breach costs, downtime of critical applications, to list a few. 

Relevant use cases 

List the specific use cases from modules under your platform that resolve the pains. There are different definitions for use cases out there. Strictly think in terms of how the user is using your product to get to a specific goal. 

Discovery questions 

Ask yourself the top three potential questions that can come in handy for your sales rep to surface each pain in question. 

Here are a few essential pointers on how you can think about structuring these questions. 

Ask assumption-busting questions. Try building questions around your assumptions about the prospect’s pain, the job they’re trying to do, the hurdles they encounter, etc. Assumption-busting questions force you to validate/invalidate your positioning of the product, uncover better areas for your product to focus on, prioritize specific messages over others, and much more.

Switch between conversational lenses for more productive questions. A couple of lenses worth a try to give you some initial ideas – 

• A day in the life lens – e.g. What are your typical day-to-day interactions? Who do you work with? Which metrics do you send to your boss?
• The ideal world lens – e.g. What would happen in your ideal world? What would the perfect process look like? What’s the gap vs. now?
• The success lens – e.g. When do you know you’re successful? What are the benefits of removing the impediments to success?

Relevant capabilities 

Highlight the modules under your platform linked to the use cases. 

How does every product marketing team benefit from this?

Enterprise-wide selling

You think bigger than personas and unravel the whole landscape, forming the crux of enterprise-wide selling. You identify missing pieces while making your case for the complex and elaborate sale.

Discovery process

You pay attention to not only the users and decision-makers. You consider ratifiers, champions, and influencers. 

Competitive positioning

You own the mind faster and proactively better than the competition. 

Content strategy 

Prioritize your content. Customize it to speak to the interests of the buying center. Does it move the person I’m talking to closer to a decision?

Sales strategy and feedback

You reduce the onboarding time for new sales folks and improve the effectiveness of existing ones. Furthermore, you can create a feedback loop for your team to understand what resonates or doesn’t in the field. Also, rely on sales feedback for updates to cheat sheets and to uncover new buying centers. 

Check out the presentation on this topic from the PMA Chicago 2023 event.

The post Sales sells, but who’s buying? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

As I apply to product marketing roles, I’ve come across a few companies that talk about ‘first principles.’ First principles is a problem-solving method that lets you break down complex issues into fundamental parts. 

You may know some companies that adhere to this concept like Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Apple, and more. After repeatedly coming across this term, I decided to delve into first principles and specifically look more deeply at marketing first principles.

Dave Kellogg, a marketing leader, has an interesting blog post on his take on marketing’s first principle: Marketing exists to make sales easier.

I love it because it’s so simple. Some marketers may argue with this saying that marketers don’t ‘report’ to sales but, to me, this makes sense. My job as a marketer is to help sales sell the product. If sales doesn’t sell the product, everyone in the company loses.

So, how can marketers help sales?

One of the easiest ways is to enable them with collateral.

What is collateral and why is it important?

Collateral is marketing material (either digital or printed) that promotes a company’s brand, products, or services. Collateral can inform and educate buyers, support sales, help progress deals, etc.

However, not all collateral is the same. Collateral can be a blog, one-pager, a flier, or even a presentation. In order to really help sales and convert a lead to a customer, you have to understand where assets and collateral fit in the buyer’s journey. 

Let’s take a look at the buyer’s journey…

Understanding the buyer’s journey

A buyer’s journey is the process a customer goes through to purchase a product or service. This depends on who the buyer is and the product or service. A B2B purchase is more complicated and might involve more people than a B2C purchase.

How to leverage user intent to increase your conversion rate

Mastering conversion rate optimization is paramount. Discover how you can effectively double your conversion rates.

CMO AllianceIhor Sokol

To illustrate, let’s consider the classic B2B buyer’s journey with three steps: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness stage

At this stage, prospects know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. They may turn to Google or social media for answers.

As a product marketer, you need to think of the types of questions your prospects are asking and where they are going to find that information. Are they in a specific Slack community or internet forum? Do they attend specific conferences and events? Where do they live online?

Typical collateral for this stage could be an educational blog post. A blog post shouldn’t be a sales pitch where you’re talking about your product, but rather an informative article that helps the buyer clarify the problem they are facing and introduces potential solutions to that problem.

Below are some examples of these kinds of blog posts:

• Tray.io’s “iPaaS vs RPA: What’s the difference?”
• Hightouch’s “What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? The Complete Guide”
• RudderStack’s “What is Data Activation?”

The objective of this collateral is to educate an audience on a problem or challenge they face, and a potential solution to the problem. 

If the prospect is ready to take the next step (which by the way, isn’t always the case), they will try out the product or service or schedule a call to learn more and see if it can be a potential solution to their problem. At that point, we can move on to the next step in the buyer’s journey.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the prospect is already thinking about your product. They’ve done their research, talked to colleagues and might even be trying out the product (if there is a free trial or free version). 

Think about the buyer and what they need at this point in their journey. The best collateral is not an educational blog post. They’re past that stage. They know what the problem is and are already scoping out your product (among others) to see if it might help. They need something that will help build confidence around your product since they will likely need to pitch this internally.  

Case studies are one way to build credibility and trust in your product. It helps your champion learn how this product has helped other customers. 

A compelling case study will be from a recognizable company (or a company in the same industry), with tangible proof of results (ideally ROI or some form of a return), e.g. a 300% increase in ROAS (return-on-ad-spend). Some case studies are accompanied by a video showing a customer using the tool and the value it provides to their team.

Below are some examples:   

• LATAM Airlines achieves 90% employee satisfaction with Zendesk
• How Domino’s decreased cost per acquisition by 65% with Twilio Segment
• How Deel Scaled Their Team from 75 to 2k+ Employees in 3 Years with Ashby

Decision stage

The last stage in the journey is the decision stage. Sales is in the final sprint to having a deal close. The sales team has convinced the champion of the value. However, a B2B buying decision usually involves other stakeholders. 

After all, a purchase could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The account executive’s job is to help their champion sell your product internally. You need to understand what flags or obstacles could block this decision.

At RudderStack, one of the main reasons for a prospect not to buy was the resources and time it would take to migrate from their current Customer Data Platform (CDP). This would involve engineering resources, several months of work, plus the additional time and effort to learn how to use this new tool.

For some people, it was too much.

Even when the legacy product was more expensive, they preferred to stick with what they knew. 

We realized we needed to create collateral to assuage buyers’ fears of migrating to a new tool.

I created a few slides on how easy it was to migrate to RudderStack. We wanted to show that migrating to RudderStack could be done in a matter of weeks and with only limited engineering resources. The slides were used in the presentation that AEs showed the champion plus other stakeholders involved in the decision.

That asset worked. The fear of migrating to a new tool helped them understand the resources and steps needed for a seamless transition. It addressed apprehensions expressed by other stakeholders and ultimately helped convince some prospects to sign a contract with RudderStack.

The collateral for this stage is not as readily available as a blog post or even a case study. 

It’s important to understand the obstacles and any flags that could block a deal and think of ways to minimize those risks. Other types of collateral include an ROI calculator and detailed comparison guides. 

Final thoughts

Collateral could come in different formats. It’s not always a blog post or a one-pager. In order to have collateral that helps your sales team sell, you need to understand where collateral fits in the buyer’s journey. Look at your conversion rates and your funnel. Talk to the sales team and understand where the gaps are. 

Once you start creating collateral and tracking the effectiveness of these assets, you’ll start to build a good relationship with sales and help make sales easier.

Ready to start creating collateral for your sales team? 

Check out these other useful blog posts from PMA:

How to create product collateral

In reality, the fundamentals and processes for building product collateral requires crucial collaboration throughout the organization — and it’s not drastically different from what’s needed to succeed in product marketing.

Product Marketing AllianceNadia Basil

What product marketers can learn from salespeople

Salespeople and product marketers are two sides of the same coin. Learn how PMMs can collaborate with and learn from sales to strengthen the business.

Product Marketing AllianceZach Roberts

Sales assets – choose your weapon

If the initial point of contact with a prospective customer is a battle, sales assets are the weapons you equip your reps with, and better equipped sales reps close more deals, it’s a fact.

Product Marketing AllianceEmma Bilardi

The post Sales collateral that speaks to buyers: Match content to the journey appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Tell me if this sounds familiar…

You’ve spent months preparing for a product launch, new positioning, or major initiative. You’ve crossed all your t’s and dotted your i’s. You’re feeling good and ready.

Until you present it to the sales team.

At best, they’re skeptical about what you’re launching. Worst case scenario, they’re actively, publicly criticizing your new launch in front of the entire sales team. 

And the worst part? They probably made some good points. 

But guess what? This could have been avoided with just a bit of planning. 

Aligning with sales leaders isn’t enough

Any PMM worth their salt aligns with sales leaders during major initiatives. 

That includes looping them into kick-off meetings and regular check-in calls. Plus, you collaborate with them to determine packaging and pricing, develop sales collateral, train the sales team, and more.

So, why isn’t this enough? 

By only including sales leaders, you’re getting a distorted view of reality – it’s like playing a game of telephone. 

You haven’t included individual contributors in the process, which means…

1. You didn’t get their insights, and 
2. They don’t trust you to know what they’re going to experience when the rubber hits the road. 

The solution: A Sales Advisory Council

A Sales Advisory Council (SAC) is a group of sales team members that provide feedback on packaging, pricing, selling rules, sales collateral, etc.

The goal of a SAC is to ensure that individual contributors in sales have a voice in key initiatives – from product launches, to revamped positioning, to new marketing collateral.

Imagine launching a new product knowing that there are influential account executives, account managers, and business development reps vouching for and promoting your new product launch. That would feel fantastic, right?

Plus, you’ll have a better product with enhanced positioning and pricing – and a sales org that’s eager and enabled to sell it. The SAC will make you, your team, and your outputs better and it’ll make your sales team happier because it will be easier to sell.

Let the members select themselves

For the SAC to be successful, sales reps can’t be forced to join; they must opt in voluntarily. 

Your job is to share your vision for what this SAC will be and how it will make everyone’s lives better – hopefully, you sell it well enough that your sales reps are eager to join.

I don’t believe in half-baked solutions, so I’m sharing the Sales Advisory Council deck I’ve used to get sales orgs’ buy-in.

Download your Sales Advisory Council deck for FREE and get started today!

Include the right people

Once you get the sales org’s buy-in, make sure to have the right teams represented based on how your sales org is run. 

You’ll typically want a few business development reps, account executives, and account managers. If your company has partnerships and success managers within sales, it’s always a good idea to include them too. 

You’ll want to keep the group small, aiming for between one and three representatives from each group, for a total of no more than ten. That’ll make the conversations more manageable.  

To get diverse opinions, I recommend setting up a maximum term for membership, so new, fresh voices are added to the council periodically. I’ve found six months to be a good rule of thumb.

Consulting the SAC

Every company and PMM team is different, but here are four stages where you’ll want to collaborate with your SAC:

1. Ideation stage: Share general feedback on a high-level concept
   Example: We’re thinking about offering professional services as a monthly subscription. It would include X, Y, and Z. Thoughts?
2. Testing stage: Provide input on packaging, pricing, and selling rules
   Example: The proposal is to offer two tiers of professional services for $XX and $XXX per month. They can be discounted by 10%. What do you think?
3. Pre-launch stage: Make requests and provide feedback on proposed sales collateral
   Example: The plan is to create three email templates and two PowerPoint slides focusing on X, Y, and Z. Would that help you sell this new product, or is there different collateral you would prefer?
4. Post-launch stage: Periodically asking sales what they’re hearing from prospects and customers after the launch.
   Example: Prospects are saying it’s a bit too expensive, but they love it! Customers can’t get enough of it and don’t mind the price.

Five steps to get your Sales Advisory Council off the ground

So, we’ve established what a Sales Advisory Council does and how it will benefit your company. Now let’s dive into how to get it up and running as smoothly as possible. 

Step one: Meet with sales leadership and explain your goal

Explain your vision with passion. Reassure them that PMM will continue working directly with sales leadership; this is simply an expansion of that partnership to include individual contributors. Key callouts to include: 

1. The SAC will make sales leadership’s jobs easier: Their teams will be more receptive to new initiatives because they’ll be part of shaping them from the get-go.
2. The SAC will increase sales: Sales reps will have influence earlier in the go-to-market motion. That means positioning and pricing they stand behind and sales collateral that actually helps them sell.
3. Ask if they have any reservations or if they will support you: You must get sales leaders on board and nip any doubt in the bud for the SAC to succeed.

Step two: Give leadership a heads-up

Once sales leadership is bought in, make sure you or your manager let the company leadership know. You’ll want to get alignment right out of the gate to avoid any unwelcome surprises later down the line.

Step three: Present your shining vision for the Sales Advisory Council to sales

Join a standing meeting that includes the entire sales organization and use the sales advisory council deck to present it to them. A few tips:

1. Go for the layup, not the hook shot: To maximize attention and receptiveness, ask a key sales leader – ideally the CRO or the VP of sales – to introduce you and reinforce what you’re saying. 
2. Set the scope: Define the bounds and scope of the SAC clearly to keep everyone on the same page and eliminate confusion. That includes explicitly stating what the SAC does not do. I typically include that the SAC does not: 
   1. Determine what initiatives the PMM team works on
   2. Serve as product marketing’s “official spokesperson” to the rest of the company, 
   3. Use SAC time to propose new product ideas. 
3. Pass to the right team member: Ask sales leaders to encourage the most influential reps to apply – it’s important to have them on board so they can motivate the sales org.
4. Set a deadline: Ask reps to let their sales leaders know if they’re interested in joining by a specific date. If there are more volunteers than spots, ask the relevant sales leaders to choose.

Step four: Announce the Sales Advisory Council 

The formation of the Sales Advisory Council is exciting – announce it to the rest of the company during a company meeting or the next sales meeting and via internal Slack or Teams channels. Include a quick blurb about what it is and tag the folks that are members.

Step five: Set up an initial kick-off meeting 

For the first meeting, I like to reintroduce what the SAC is and does, introduce PMM team members, have the members introduce themselves, and have a short brainstorming session about an easy topic to get momentum going.

And that’s it! You’re off to the races. You and your team can meet with the SAC as needed for key initiatives. 

Try to meet with the SAC a minimum of once every six weeks to keep a good cadence and to facilitate team cohesion.

Remember to switch out members every six months, or as often as needed for fresh perspectives 

Download the FREE Sales Advisory Council deck to get started!

The post Sales Advisory Council: How to get sales on your side appeared first on ProdSens.live.

While it’s satisfying seeing your product sit pretty on the shelf after months of refining personas, selecting the right pricing strategy, and planning for potential barriers, there’s one thing, and one thing only that’ll make the top brass sit up and take notice.

Cold, hard sales.

If you’ve burned a small hole in the pocket of company stakeholders, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll wanna see tangible results post-launch, otherwise, you could be in for a scalding.

Putting the relevant sales enablement plans in place for your sales team to tackle their role effectively is critical in helping your reps optimize their performance, and show you the money.

Jerry Maguire style.

In this guide, you’ll learn quite possibly everything you need to know about sales enablement, including and not limited to:

• What sales enablement means,
• Why sales enablement is important,
• What a sales enablement person does,
• How you can get support for sales enablement,
• What a sales enablement strategy is,
• How you can measure sales enablement success,
• Sales enablement platforms and tools,
• The difference between sales enablement and marketing, and
• How you can get into sales enablement.

Unlock our sales enablement resources here.

Sales enablement toolkit | Product Marketing Alliance

Step up your sales enablement game. Learn from the best.

Product Marketing AllianceProduct Marketing Alliance

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is the process of providing a sales team with the necessary tools and resources to help them effectively sell your product to prospective customers and close more deals.

What is the objective of sales enablement?

The purpose of sales enablement is to ensure that your sales team has all the appropriate resources needed to sell products or services to prospects. In other words, it’s all about empowering sales reps with the right knowledge, skills, and collateral, so they can have more effective and productive conversations with potential customers.  

The success of a sales enablement program can be measured by considering “rep readiness”, as well as by examining uplifts in productivity, win rates, and revenue growth.

In short, the objective of sales enablement is to onboard, inform, educate, and motivate members of the sales team in an effort to drive more revenue.

What are the components of sales enablement?

There are five important components to a sales enablement strategy that are useful in equipping sales professionals throughout the sales process. These are:

• Sales training/coaching
• Content/assets
• Sales enablement solutions/tools
• Strategy
• Metrics

Throughout this guide, we’ll cover each of these components in more detail. Let’s begin with sales enablement assets.

Sales enablement assets

A company’s weapon of choice will vary, depending on its product, industry, and market, and there are an array of sales enablement assets available to drive organizations towards their end goal, including:

• Battlecards – short, snappy, to-the-point sales docs documents designed to help your sales team gain a firm understanding of a rival’s strategy, as well as key sales messages, essential info about your product, and value propositions to oust the competition.
• Sales script – Say ta-ta to the days when your reps are tongue-tied when you’re speaking with a prospect. Sales scripts provide the perfect opportunity to equip your team with a set of talking points and guidelines to help them navigate the trickiest of scenarios.
• Sales one-pager – As the name suggests, a sales one-pager is literally a one-page document providing an overview of a product, service, or business.
• Product sheet – A product sheet serves as a reference point for sales teams if they’re asked to explain a product’s or service’s more technical features.

Sure, the benefits of these resources stretch far and wide, but the key is nailing yours down to a T so they’re uber useful for your team.

To help you with things like battle cards, sales scripts, and sales one-pagers, we’ve put together a bank of editable templates and frameworks to make your life much easier, for PMA members and PMMs who’ve either enrolled in our Product Marketing: Core [On Demand] course, or Product Marketing: Core [Live + Online] accreditation.

Why is sales enablement important?

There are so many benefits of sales enablement, and advantages to adopting a sales enablement strategy for your business. The main one is that it’s an opportunity to revolutionize your selling technique, bring in more customers, confidently help customers through the buyer’s journey, and rake in increased revenue for your organization.

Why do you need sales enablement?

But that’s just one reason. Let’s take a closer look at how this technique can help your product marketing function.

An opportunity for collaboration

In the State of Product Marketing Report 2023, we found that 80% of product marketers were responsible for creating sales collateral for their organization, an increase from the 2022 report at 78%. In the same report, when asked which team(s) they worked most closely with, the results showed that 75% of product marketers worked closely with sales.

Helping your sales teams improve their technique will only improve your relationship with them and allow them to help you out more in the future when creating or sharing sales collateral, and so on.

Help to hit more KPIs and sales goals

It’s important to increase your knowledge on how to enable sales teams to become the absolute best they can be. It’ll help you to improve, refine, and increase the number of customers they bring to the organization, how many products they sell, and ultimately hit more sales goals. These steps will only benefit you and your company in the long run.

Increase customer and competitive insights

Sales teams are constantly on the frontline, talking to prospective customers and discovering the characteristics that are beneficial to know when marketing to them. If you actively work towards improving your sales team’s approach to selling products, in turn, they can help your team with the insights and data they gather from their sales calls.

Through these sales calls, you can gain a deeper understanding of your prospective customers, including their pain points, how they like to be spoken to, and so on. They can also help to gather more information about your competitors from what your potential customers are saying about them. For example, the product features they prefer, pricing and discounts, etc. These insights in turn will improve your product marketing approach. It’s a win-win!

A fresh perspective

While sales and product marketing are working on similar aspects of the industry within their respective roles, understanding how the sales teams work will give you, as a product marketer, an opportunity to learn different ways to sell to the same customers.

What does a sales enablement professional do?

A sales enablement manager is responsible for ensuring that the sales team is equipped with all the tools, content, knowledge, etc needed to confidently carry out sales calls and processes.

So, their job is to create training programs, sales content and assets, research effective tools and platforms, and share sales best practices that the whole team can share and use to optimize their approach, bring in profits, and confidently help prospective customers through the customer journey.

Sales enablement team structures

Almost three-quarters of PMMs surveyed said that creating sales collateral was one of their key responsibilities. With that number in mind, we decided to delve deeper into the data to see how PMMs structure their teams in over 400 B2B and B2C companies.

Product Marketing AllianceEmma Bilardi

How do you get support for sales enablement?

There are plenty of times when a product marketer believes introducing sales enablement initiatives will be the best thing since sliced bread.

But before you can begin planning anything, you need to have the powers that be on board, as is the case when building a business case for a new product.

Sure, you may see the many benefits of using sales enablement assets, but if your stakeholders aren’t on board with the idea, you’ll sink, rather than swim.

Here’s how you can present your case effectively and get the nod to begin your sales enablement efforts:

Evaluate your organization’s requirements

This may seem fairly obvious, but we don’t apologize for starting with the bare basics; if it wasn’t necessary, we wouldn’t include this step at all.

It’s important to establish what success will look like in terms of sales enablement at your company – what do you want to accomplish, and which problems could this solution if it’s successful?

Remember, clarity and confidence are key when you’re pitching an idea or suggestion. Enter your meeting with clear goals in place to be sure you can focus your budget requests, and put every possible measure in place to get an understanding of facts that can solidify your case for introducing sales enablement.

Some might say curiosity killed the cat, but we say ask plenty of questions and seek advice from people who can give you the steer you need. For example, if the reps in the sales department aren’t cutting the mustard, buddy up with sales ops and find out why. This could highlight areas where you can place particular emphasis.

Add to that, stone-cold evidence gives you credence and highlights why they need it in place; companies willing to invest in sales enablement tools because you assure them how awesome it’ll be are as rare as an eight-legged unicorn.

Look at the requirements. Seek evidence.

Don’t get giddy and go all guns blazing.

Strategize

So, you’ve got the problem fixed firmly in your sights. Now, it’s time to plan a solution, and a sales enablement charter is used as a means of presenting your plan to execs; consider it a sales enablement equivalent of business case messaging.

Your charter needs to provide decision-makers with the information they need to make the final decision, including:

• What the program’s responsible for,
• How it’s going to be staffed,
• Target audience,
• Key investments,
• Which metrics will measure success?

Speak the local’s lingo

Imagine an Apple sales rep selling their latest mobile phone to a tech-savvy buyer. They needn’t dumb down the jargon for fear of confusing the interested party; they can go about their business naturally and use every acronym and technical term under the sun.

On the other hand, if a technophobe entered the store and asked about the same product, the rep would have to change their approach and simplify the explanation previously given to the more adept buyer to close the sale.

In the same way, reps need to communicate clearly with their customers, the same logic applies when you’re trying to convince internal teams to buy into your sales enablement proposal. Use your charter to demonstrate how passionate you are about bringing this to life, and how much you think it’ll improve the services being offered.

After all, when it comes to the crunch, if you can show your idea has financial legs, the likelihood is they’ll run with it.

To have them eating out of your hand, rather than chewing you up, communicate your messages clearly, and highlight how they’ll be the beneficiaries of your suggestions. Also, tailor your plan to the priorities of the company, if possible. So, if the CEO has made it clear they’re keen to increase customer retention, specify how the plan will address how account managers can improve the renewal process.

Get the support of the wider network

It’s not just the support of stakeholders you’ll need to begin your sales enablement quest. Sales reps and their managers also need to buy into your pretty plan, and to get them on the side, you need to understand their requirements and let them know what they’ll gain from buying into your proposal.

Focus on the positives; good news will always prick the attention of your audience. So, if you’re speaking with sales representatives, if there’s a rep who has secured new business following enablement-led training, don’t keep your cards close to your chest, let them know how your plans could help them do the same thing.

As far as your sales managers are concerned, communicate with them regularly, and liaise with front-line leaders throughout your push for new initiatives.

How to measure sales enablement success

Let’s face the facts: there’s zero point in putting in all of this hard work if you don’t know whether it’s been worth the effort.

There’s a simple solution on the table that’ll let you know whether your master plan has been a resounding success, or somewhat of a disappointment.

OKRs, objectives, and key results are commonplace for sales teams, there are questions you can pose to your reps that’ll allow you to assess what’s working, and what isn’t.

Need a hand getting started putting OKRs in place? Download our free eBook – we’ve got you covered.

How do you build confidence in a sales team?

A sales rep with confidence is like a runaway train – it’s pretty hard to stop. The more confident they are, the better equipped they are to bring home the bacon. So, it’s important to empower your sales leaders, and even your marketing teams, with sales enablement best practices so they can improve their sales performance, and improve their win rates.

Five tips for selecting a win/loss analysis service

In this article, we take a look at the five things you need to do when choosing the right win/loss analysis service for your company.

Product Marketing AllianceWillem Maas

Put yourself in the shoes of your representatives, for a sec; if you were responsible for selling a product with little to no experience of what it is, how it works, and how it differs from your competitors, would you seriously be rollin’ into the office with a swagger and spring in your step?

Never underestimate the impact confidence can have within your respective teams. Throw yourself whole-heartedly into the sales enablement process and provide your team with the tools they need – believe us, their confidence will sky-rocket.

Battle cards are just one of the many tools you can provide your sales reps as part of your sales enablement process. But how can product marketers create battle cards that are useful, and that their team will use, continually?

Follow the link below to find out more.

How to create continually useful (and used) battlecards

Creating useful battlecards is a multi-step process that includes a lot of research and work. And as important and useful as all that work is—once your battlecards are out there, they can quickly become outdated.

Product Marketing AllianceKompyte

How to successfully introduce sales enablement to your organization

Throw your full weight behind introducing sales enablement methods that’ll instill confidence among your team and provide individuals with the tools they need to thrive – before you know it, your prospects will be flocking to your product and you’ll rake in cold, hard $$$.

Product Marketing AllianceLawrence Chapman

In addition to battle cards, there are several other sales assets you can introduce to inject some zest into your team, to help them turn mere prospects into bona fide customers.

These resources differ, depending on whether they’re being used externally or internally. So, without further ado, let’s check out the options at your disposal, shall we?

Sales assets – choose your weapon

If the initial point of contact with a prospective customer is a battle, sales assets are the weapons you equip your reps with, and better equipped sales reps close more deals, it’s a fact.

Product Marketing AllianceEmma Bilardi

How do you excite your salespeople?

Salespeople are a fundamental part of the overall success of your product; they’re the ones who’ll be speaking to your customers and trying to push the sales over the line.

We’ve all been in a scenario where a sales rep lacks verve, and panache, and are quite frankly, dull as dishwater – it’s a huge turn-off, and can prove to be the deciding factor in a prospect downing tools and having a nosy at your competitor.

This is why you need to pull out all the stops to get people uber-excited about your launch. Enthusiasm is contagious; in the same way, your customers pick up on a lack of enthusiasm, they’ll lap it up when the person at the end of the phone is demonstrating a genuine interest in not only the product they’re selling but the person on the other end of the phone.

It’s all well and good saying what you need to do, but the question you’re bound to be interested in is how do you get salespeople excited about your launch?

How to get salespeople excited about your launch

You can put hours upon hours into nailing your product’s positioning and messaging but the reality is all that hard work can be undone in a matter of minutes if it’s not understood and acted on by your sales teams.

Product Marketing AllianceBryony Pearce

Unlock your reps’ potential with sales enablement sessions

Sales enablement sessions are the ideal opportunity to put the sales reps on your team in the right frame of mind. They should be encouraged to ask questions to establish a firm understanding of your product and its features.

Product Marketing AllianceLawrence Chapman

Selling with humor

Some might say when sales reps let their masks drop, they’re leaving themselves open to being walked all over by a prospective customer.

From our perspective, this philosophy isn’t true, by any means. Sure, there may be times when making jokes left, right, and center may not necessarily be the best approach to take, but there’s certainly a spot for encouraging your reps to inject an element of humor into their style.

When you’re speaking with a prospect, they’re much more likely to do business with you and your team if they like you – so what better way to get on a person’s good side than making them smile?

Comedians within the community will be pleased to know we’re not alone in promoting a happy-go-lucky style to your sales dynamic. Rebecca Geraghty, Director of Product Marketing at Publicis Media has previously outlined how comedy can impact sales enablement and prospecting.

So true! 7 ways comedy can impact sales enablement and prospecting

I was browsing through forums on the Sales Enablement Society’s website recently when one thread stuck out to me. It mentioned “roasting a prospect’s pain points” as a sales tactic — making them laugh at a common frustration, and opening the door to a conversation.

Product Marketing AllianceRebecca Geraghty

What is a sales engagement strategy?

Sales engagement refers to the interactions that occur between a salesperson and a prospective customer throughout the sales cycle until they close the deal. This could be through meetings, sales calls, email click-through rates, e-book/playbook downloads, and so on.

So, a sales engagement strategy would be the approach your sales team members take to actually have these interactions with the customer and increase the number of interactions that occur.

What is a sales engagement process?

A sales enablement team will often develop a sales engagement process for the sales team to follow so that there’s more structure to their sales strategy. This is with the hope that the sales cycle runs more smoothly, and ends in a closed deal.

A typical sales engagement process will have a set of stages, similar to this:

1. Planning: Gathering the sales team to see how the sales engagement process should be approached.
2. Prospecting and research: Time to identify prospective customers, research them to build strong personas, and add them to the database.
3. First contact: This is the outreach stage, but shouldn’t be with the focus of closing a deal. This is to nurture any potential relationships with your prospective customers, teach them about the product or service that your company provides, and get that initial link of interest.
4. Lead nurturing: This is where you begin to really develop those relationships with the customers you first reached out to, with the hope of leading them through the sales process and getting a closed deal. You can do this through follow-up calls or emails, answering any questions they may have, and essentially supporting them so they feel more comfortable and connected with your organization and solution.
5. Closing the deal: As it says on the tin, hopefully by now the first four stages have been successful, and you should be moving on to closing the deal with your prospective customer. It’s important that this entire process isn’t forced, and that both ends are feeling happy with the deal that has occurred. This leaves the potential for a longer relationship between both parties.

Best practices for sales engagement

Successful sales enablement is when your sales teams use the correct marketing content to improve the sales communication, and ultimately lead the sales engagement in a way that gets them to the end of the sales funnel, and closes the deal they’ve been working so hard on.

Use your resources correctly

To get the most out of the sales engagement process, you must remember to keep on top of your content management, publishing, analytics, sales training, sales operations, and so on. This way, you know you’re using the correct channels and measuring the success of the approaches you take to close the deals effectively.

Providing the sales team with the relevant content, whether that’s whitepapers, one-papers, battle cards, or playbooks is essential to keep the prospective customer interested, and provided with information so they can make the correct purchase decision.

When is a sales enablement training program needed?

This article explores the question “how do you know if your company actually needs a sales enablement program?” to improve sales and growth.

Product Marketing AllianceCharley Gale

Develop your personas or ICPs

But, it’s important that you’re using the right content for that particular prospect, which is where developing personas or ICPs (ideal customer profiles) come in.

A great way of developing these personas is through social media, like LinkedIn, Twitter, online forums, review sites, and so on, to see the kinds of conversations they’re having, what kind of information they seek about similar products, how they like to be communicated with, and so on.

Use the correct channel

Along with the correct resources, the prospect is going to have a particular preference for communication. This is where your personas, or ICPs, will come in handy.

Time your communication correctly

Another important factor in a strong sales engagement strategy is well-timed communication.

For example, you discover they don’t like communicating through calls, so you put a form on your website they can fill out requiring certain pieces of information. Then, it takes you over a week to get back to them. By then, they’ve likely already found another option. So, you’ve picked the correct channel, but timed it incorrectly.

So, you need to ensure that your team’s response times and sales productivity are up to speed by analyzing your prospect’s availabilities, the average times where it’s busiest, and so on, and adapt your engagement strategy to meet their availability and timing.

Best practices for sales enablement

Roopal Shah, Head (VP) of Global Enablement at Benchling, shared her best practices for sales enablement in her presentation for the Masters of Product Marketing event in October 2021. Catch up on the presentations from this event using our OnDemand service.

For now, this is what she had to say:

Make it fun and entertaining

“Learning cannot be boring, and frankly, we’re just too busy to keep it like that. How are you going to get your content across to your sellers? Videos? Cartoons? Costume simulation? How are you going to make them want to take your sales training and learn in the process, rather than just checking a box? Think about entertainment, not just education.

Flipping the classroom

“The idea here is that the classroom can become a more engaging, interactive experience, rather than me just talking at you for 15 minutes. This is true whether it’s online or in-person.

“You don’t have to rely on recordings. It can be articles, it can be blog posts, it can be whatever you need for them to come in with as much context as they can have. The important thing is that they’re able to apply it.  When they come into the virtual session, they already have a lot of contexts.

“When you get your breakout rooms set up, have your product evangelists be in each of them. Get in those breakout rooms yourself. You’re there to really ask thought-provoking questions and prompt them and get them to think about this. You want to ensure you’re getting feedback as well. Is your messaging resonating? It’s a great way to get on-the-scale feedback from various folks in your sales team.

Gamification

“As you’re thinking about working with your enablement team and thinking about how to get content to stick, you really need to think about gamification. Whether it’s competing teams with prizes and rewards, the important thing is that your team is having fun. Prizes show that you are celebrating that learning. It also gives positive reinforcement to those who have done good work.  

“Ultimately, organizations that have done this have better seller engagement. If your sellers are engaged, you’re more likely to have your sales move forward. My final takeaway: Don’t just focus on customer or buyer engagement, focus on seller engagement.”

How can you measure sales enablement success?

As is the case with any process, if you’re putting in the legwork to set the ball rolling, you’ll want to make sure it’s worth the effort, right?

Sales enablement falls into the same category. After all, if your sales team’s conversion rates remain the same (or heaven forbid, decrease) after your sales enablement intervention, then there’ll be plenty of questions that’ll need answers.

Kelly Esten, VP of Product and Partner Marketing at Toast, gave her insights on effective sales enablement tools, measuring the effectiveness of sales enablement, amongst other useful snippets of expertise, all of which you can check out right here.

An expert insight into sales enablement

Kelly Esten, VP of Product and Partner Marketing at Toast, gave her insights on effective sales enablement tools, measuring the effectiveness of sales enablement, amongst other useful snippets of expertise.

Product Marketing AllianceLawrence Chapman

What are sales engagement platforms and tools?

Ever tried making an omelet without eggs? Suffice to say, it’s a complete waste of time.

The same logic applies to sales enablement and sales enablement tools – to execute the sales enablement process successfully, you need to have the appropriate resources in place.

Sales enablement tools are platforms and systems designed to give visibility across the sales content lifecycle; they close the loop between marketing, sales, and customers, to help teams track content performance, from publication to pitch.

For instance, SalesLoft is an ideal sales enablement tool for people on the lookout for templates and support with A/B testing, while Gong gives businesses clarity on any areas failing to convert, so necessary amendments can be made.

There’s no end of nifty tools product marketers can use to improve their sales enablement.

Check ‘em out.

What is the difference between sales enablement and marketing?

Often, content marketing (not just marketing) and sales enablement are confused. This is because both teams create content, but on different levels, and for different audiences.

Content marketers create external content specifically for the consumer in order to sell specific products. However, sales enablement creates content and assets for internal use – specifically for the sales team, so they can effectively sell products or close deals with prospective customers.

Is sales enablement part of marketing or sales?

Product marketing sometimes takes on the responsibility of sales enablement when there’s no SE team, but the whole purpose of sales enablement is to help the sales team feel confident in their knowledge, tools, and resources to effectively carry out their sales process.

Because of this, oftentimes, sales enablement is referred to as “the bridge between marketing and sales”. However, it’s not actually either, because it’s its own role, with its own responsibilities.

What is the difference between sales enablement and sales engagement?

The difference is rather simple.

Sales enablement: The process of training and providing resources to your sales teams so they can have the best interactions with their customers possible.

Sales engagement: The interactions between the salesperson and potential customer.

How do I get into sales enablement?

There’s a fair chance you may be reading saying to yourself: “Do I need to introduce sales enablement tools?”After all, your sales figures may be through the roof, right?

As we often say, you’ve gotta ask questions to get the answers you’re looking for. And we aren’t in the mood for bucking the trend yet. So, if you’re unsure whether sales enablement tools are needed at your org, consider:

• Are you hitting your sales goals?
• Can you say with confidence your reps are always on-message?
• Are you positive reps are using sales tools to their full potential?
• Can you improve seller quota attainment?

Answered ‘no’ to any of these questions? Then it’s time to put on your thinking cap and consider the most suitable sales enablement tools for your company.

You may have answered every question with a resounding ‘yes’ and think you’ve passed our test with flying colors; we hate to rain on your parade, but this isn’t necessarily the case – businesses change like the weather, and your situation today could be completely different tomorrow.

For example, if you make additions to your sales team or sales organization, you may need to formalize your onboarding process. Perhaps your reps have been tasked with selling an ever-changing product or service, in which case, the buying process could become more complicated, or your messaging or go-to-market strategy may be revamped.

The aforementioned scenarios aren’t far-fetched, or beyond the realms of possibility; every instance is often faced by companies at some point. Having the appropriate sales enablement software in place can work wonders for companies seeking to maintain sales figures during a transition period.

Still not 100% convinced? By completing a sales enablement scorecard, you’ll get a concrete idea of how strong your current sales enablement setup is.

What skills do you need for sales enablement?

There are a lot of hard and soft skills you need to effectively carry out the sales enablement role. Here, we’ve highlighted four of the most common and important skills you’ll need.

Knowledge of sales processes and methodologies

It makes sense that if you’re going to be the ‘go-to’ person for the sales team to learn about how to successfully close deals with their customers, you must be knowledgeable of the sales processes and methodologies.

You need a level of expertise that you’re going to bring to the role in order to fully support your sales teams. So, ensure that you have a strong knowledge within this area so you can effectively carry out your sales enablement.

Collaboration and communication

A large part of the sales cycle is being able to communicate effectively with the customer, or prospective customer. After all, poor communication can be detrimental to closing deals.  

You must have strong communication and collaboration skills with your sales team that they can then transfer into their own roles so they can successfully carry out their sales calls.

Tech-savvy, with a wide range of knowledge in SE platforms and tools

Having a suitable and strong tech stack is another critical asset to the sales enablement role. It’s up to the sales enabler to be able to teach sales teams which platforms and tools are the most successful solutions for the sales process, and how to use them correctly for the best outcome.

Part of the sales enablement role is to also continue reviewing and auditing the tools and automation platforms, keeping them up to date with the new integrations and functions that occur within the market, and continue to find new emerging technologies that would help to improve the competitive advantage of your organization.

Metrics/data-driven

Another part of the SE role is to demonstrate the impact of their efforts through the use of quantitative data.

Through methods such as win/loss analysis, they’ll be able to tell how successful their efforts are, understand how they can close more deals, and essentially optimize and streamline their entire approach to sales and sales enablement.

Project management

As a sales enablement manager, you’ll be in charge of many projects, and you’ll need to oversee their implementation. You’ll also be responsible for the sales team and how they carry out their sales processes, meaning you must be able to strategize with them in order to receive the highest impact and success rates.

So, it’s important to be strong in your project management and organization skills to effectively carry out your sales enablement processes.

How do you learn sales enablement?

How does anyone learn anything?! Practice, practice, practice!

To make things easier for you, we’ve got the perfect solution.

Enroll in our Sales Enablement Certified: Masters course and gain key knowledge needed to launch powerful sales enablement programs.

Join highly-distinguished sales enablement expert Sapphire Reels, Director of Portfolio and Integrated Marketing at Pluralsight, and discover how to:

Convey the importance of sales enablement and sell it to key stakeholders.

Design a sales enablement program from scratch in line with business objectives and sales needs.

Launch and iterate on sales enablement programs.

Communicate the impact of sales enablement on the business and revenue generation.

Refine your strategies

Sales enablement templates

We’re always looking for ways to make a product marketer’s life as simple as possible, and you’ll be pleased to know we haven’t bucked the trend where sales enablement is concerned. Here is a collection of resources you’ll have at your disposal with a PMA membership plan.

Battle card template

Although your battle cards will be specific to your business and product, our editable template includes the key components of an awesome template.

Customer case study master list

Customer case studies are like gold dust for your company’s sales enablement efforts; they provide you with the opportunity to showcase the raving reviews of customers who’ve bought (and loved!) your product. With this in mind, you’ve got to ask the right questions and make the most of the opportunity. Enter our list of 80 questions to choose from.

Sales script templates

Similarly, the same dynamic applies when you’ve finally managed to get hold of a lead or prospect; the last thing you need is your sales reps to fluff their lines and let a golden opportunity slip, which is where a sales script can come in handy.

Sales one-pagers

Add our sales one-pagers to the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for red-hot reps, if we may say so ourselves.

The post What is sales enablement? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Whether your teams are working in an office, taking a hybrid approach, or fully remote, the ability to drive outcomes for Go-to-Market (GTM) teams across all of these environments is a key skill set for enablement professionals in today’s world.

Each setting poses unique challenges and requires distinct approaches to be successful.

Regardless of the approach your team has taken, the ability to enable teams remotely is an ever-present need with the distributed nature of today’s global workforce.

Below are areas to consider when setting up your remote teams for success:

• Get the right digital tools and solutions
• Create a culture of sharing
• Use a variety of mediums
• Make live virtual sessions engaging
• Establish a check-in cadence

Ensure you have the right digital tools and solutions in place

Ease of enablement in a remote environment depends heavily on the strength of your tech stack and ability to leverage it in your enablement programs.

When building out your tech stack, you’ll want:

• A centralized location for your customer data.
• A shared place to meet, communicate, and collaborate remotely.
• A consolidated hub to create and distribute Enablement content.
• A way to record and store customer-facing and internal calls.
• A space to build and facilitate live virtual learning and e-learning programs.
• A system of action to streamline your sales processes and ensure remote teams are able to work efficiently.
• A tool to track and analyze performance, as well as monitor and report on key metrics.

Once you have your tech stack in place, it’s important that you document and share with your GTM teams how they should be interacting with these tools to minimize confusion.

Foster a culture of sharing

An emphasis on learning together and from one another is key to any GTM team’s culture, and enablement professionals are often asked to be culture creators within their organizations.

To do this remotely, enablement teams must find ways to encourage knowledge sharing across teams, to celebrate wins, and to document best practices.

While there are many sales readiness platforms that can aid in this area, there are also ways to do this in an instant messaging platform.

For example, create a dedicated channel in your instant messaging platform and encourage teams to share their wins, best practices, and their failures and learnings with the broader team.

Consider boosting interaction by offering incentives for those who share often, offer great insights, or engage in productive exchanges with their peers.

Ensure leadership and frontline managers are also engaged in the channel, while monitoring the space for any negative contributions that put the culture building objective at risk.

Provide a mix of live virtual training, e-learning, video, and practice sessions

Mixing up learning modalities to provide an engaging Enablement experience is as important in a remote world as it is in an office setting. Consider building programs that offer a mix of the modalities.

For example:

• Start with a live virtual training to introduce a new topic
• Create an e-learning to reinforce what the teams heard during the live virtual training
• Share short videos of best practices from the field week over week to keep the information top of mind
• Provide managers with resources to conduct practice sessions within their teams to help reps apply what they have learned and receive coaching on an ongoing basis.

Conduct engaging live virtual learning

Teams do not have to be in person to experience fun and competitive engagement with enablement programs.

Breakout rooms during live virtual training can provide an avenue for role plays, experimentation, and collaboration.

Bringing in examples from the field is also a great way to make live virtual learning more engaging. Even though enablement professionals are often great facilitators, GTM teams also like to hear from those who have hands-on experience with the different topics.

Additionally, creating challenges and awarding prizes during live virtual sessions can boost the willingness of reps to engage.

For example, say you are training your teams on how to engage with a particular buyer persona:

• Provide your teams with a template and have them complete an individual deal strategy activity before dividing into breakout groups to discuss their plans and receive feedback from their peers and managers.
• Then consider having a few reps prepped to “stand and deliver” their plans back with the broader group and receive feedback from leaders to align the group around the attributes of a strong plan. Be sure to highlight both the wins and areas of opportunity.
• Prepare a few reps who have had success in the past engaging with this persona to share their experience with the group. Ask them to share context for their deal, what they did, what the outcome was, and what they learned about how to engage with the persona based on their experience.
• Share a recorded call in a live virtual training of a great conversation a rep had with the focus persona. Be sure to highlight what it was specifically that the rep did in the call to engage the persona effectively.

Set up operating rhythms to support feedback and ongoing practice

Feedback and insight into what is happening out in the field may be captured in different ways in a remote world than it is in an office setting.

Consider establishing a check-in cadence with a group of GTM reps or front line managers to get a sense of how your different initiatives are landing in the field. Then, leverage this input to inform your reinforcement plans or adapt your approach in the future.

Additionally, consistent practice and coaching likely needs to be set into an operating rhythm to remain top of mind for teams.

Therefore, determine a frequency that makes sense for your organization and add either manager- or enablement-led practice opportunities, where reps can try out new skills and receive coaching.

Having a standardized cadence will increase traction for your programs and offer insight into how reps are retaining the information they have received.

The path forward

By implementing the above tactics, you will be on the path to helping GTM teams thrive in a remote environment.

To get started on this path, ensure you have the right tools in place as a strong foundation.

Then, build on your foundation by offering avenues for sharing, creating engaging training in a variety of forms, setting up practice opportunities, and supporting strong feedback loops to iterate over time.

Katie is Senior Revenue Enablement Manager at Outreach, and a Sales Enablement Collective Ambassador.

Carve your path to the C-Suite with our expert-led masterclass. Over six weeks, learn from experts who’ve been there and done it and expedite your path to the top.

Limited seats available, so secure your spot today.

The post Making enablement work in remote settings appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Batman and Robin, Mario and Luigi, Kermit and Miss. Piggy; some things need to come as a pair – product marketing and communication fall into the same bracket.

Communication’s a key trait that’s often considered an indispensable characteristic for product marketers, so much so, in the State of Product Marketing Report 2021, a resounding 77% of people we surveyed identified strong communication as the skill they valued the most- only falling from 79.8% since 2020.

There’s no doubting how much communication’s valued by PMMs, yet, it’d seem the true battle lies in convincing colleagues outside the product marketing teams of its extensive benefits.

We’re not one to put the cat amongst the pigeons, but sometimes, you’ve gotta get the record straight. So, without further ado, let’s start with the basics…

What is internal communication?

Internal communication is all about promoting effective communications throughout an organization and fostering a philosophy built on collaboration.

When PMMs communicate effectively with teams across their organization, they incorporate a strategy involving multiple steps, such as:

• Creation and delivery of campaigns for management teams,
• Communication with key stakeholders,
• Implementation of new practices (i.e. personas, battle cards, etc.),
• Collaborating and sharing ideas leading to and during product launches,
• Conducting audits and assessments – and sharing the results.

So that’s the what, now let’s take a look at the why.

Why is internal communication important?

Communication provides an opportunity for product marketers to bring their skill sets to the fore and boost understanding of the role within the organization.

Silvia Kiely Frucci, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Castor– formerly Wilmington Healthcare at the time she was surveyed- was amongst the 21.2% of product marketers working alone in her role, and outlined why communication forms a vital part of her role:

“My work is generated by communicating with other people. It’s a window of opportunity to make yourself recognized both inside and outside of your organization.

“I’m the only Product Marketing Manager at Wilmington Healthcare. While my boss is a Marketing Director and knows about lots of things such as campaigns, product marketing is an area where people think they can do it and in some cases, don’t consider it to be essential. Therefore, you need to communicate with others to show them the role is indispensable and change negative perceptions.”

If you adopt a mindset whereby you’re hell-bent on working to your own agenda, it’ll only have one outcome: it’ll stifle overall effectiveness, and prevent you from getting key jobs over the line.

Teams pulling in different directions is as useful as a chocolate fireguard, hence why it’s essential to instill a company culture with internal communication at its core.

So, if you were initially wondering: is it worth the effort to smash internal communication out of the park, we’re responding with a resounding ‘yes.’

Communication is considered an integral part of the PMM role, contributing to the facilitation of goals and objectives in product marketing teams, and beyond, with Erik Mansur, VP of Product Marketing at Crayon, highlighting product marketing’s prominent role in cross-functional communication:

“I think that product marketers need to be available and ever-present amongst other teams of colleagues. Companies too often shove their PMMs off to the side, effectively making them into a glorified sales enablement team. Product marketers are natural collectors and disseminators of information, so clear lines of communication between PMM and other departments can only be a good thing.

”If done properly, product marketing could be looked at as a focal point between key revenue-driving departments and can serve both as a conduit of information between these groups, and as a source of truth for the entire organization on topics like messaging, packaging, pricing, and more.”

Similarly, Jasmine Jaume, Group Product Marketing Manager at Intercom also gave her two cents on why she considers internal communication to be a core characteristic for any PMM:

“It’s kind of cliche, but communication is so key in a product marketing role. It helps people build relationships with different teams and know when something is happening.

“Whether it’s a feature announcement, or a change to the UI, knowing who that’s going to impact, being able to consider which teams need to know about it, and then being able to communicate messages clearly and concisely to people so they know A) why it’s important to them, and B) why they should care about it is typical of why good communication skills are key. I don’t think you’d get very far in a PMM role if you can’t communicate well.”

Internal communication not only helps others enhance their practice but also enables them to share knowledge, and improve your product or service. This will keep your customers happy, and keep them coming back for more, which is something nobody should turn their nose up at.

So, if the cat’s got the tongue of your org, here are more reasons you need to move heaven and earth to embed a culture of internal communication.

Move from tactical to strategic product marketing with Advanced Product Marketing Certified.

Grasp why it’s essential for PMMs to embrace cross-functionality, learn how to map out your organization, gain tips for communicating yout Go-to-Market vision, plus much more.

Communication establishes (and maintains) understanding

If people are struggling to understand an idea, they can develop a tendency to bury their heads in the sand; this can also be the case for product marketers and other teams you’re collaborating with.

The more you communicate with your product marketers and other teams within the company, the more familiar they’ll become with the methods you’re implementing. Speaking with team members is your opportunity to refine your PMM profile, and in some cases, communication is imperative to prove the skeptics wrong.

With only 5% of product marketers recently surveyed in the 2021 report indicating they felt their role was clearly understood, suffice to say, the more product marketers demonstrate their value to  in-house teams, the greater understanding people will have of the value they bring, a philosophy echoed by Holly Watson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Web Services:

“Product marketers do add value, but it’s been said before – product marketing has a branding problem. To overcome this hurdle, add value, do work, be vocal. What I mean by this is to leverage the cross-functional nature of a product marketer’s role to help connect teams and streamline communication and collaboration.

“Add value by crafting the right story and helping your colleagues promote their work on the right channels to the right audience – be a good marketer; even for internal channels. And finally, your audience, your sellers, your teams have a lot thrown their way daily. Gracefully use multiple channels to educate, inform, advise and direct teams to the resources being developed. Get on regional team calls, global team calls, use slack or other chat channels, email, email again to share resources.

“You might feel like it’s redundant. That’s ok. Don’t get fed-up or frustrated. Empathize and help craft a reliable, trusted voice that adds value to your teammates and end users. It’s not about you as a product marketer, it’s about the value you’re providing to your teams – the recognition will come.”

Communicating with stakeholders during monthly meetings and implementing frameworks can help people understand what needs to be achieved without overwhelming them with a barrage of information.

For example, simply agreeing on clear-cut deadlines for tasks will allow people to see what needs to be accomplished, and when; reaching a mutual understanding negates the uncertainty within a team member when they’re asked for work to be submitted and the process is much smoother.

Whether you’ve made revisions to your buyer personas, or tweaks to your sales enablement assets, communicating will help product marketers and other people in the organization to understand the essential information they need to perform to their optimum potential.

Holistic thinking is pivotal

In the eyes of many, internal communication is a process led by senior figures, who bark orders directly to employees. However, an effective internal communication strategy is a two-way process.

While you could place the responsibility solely with your team members, you’re dicing with the possibility of losing their trust. After all, if team members aren’t allowed to voice their opinions and make suggestions, this can be demoralizing.

Passivity not only breeds poor performances, but on a personal level, staff morale can wane, and given product marketing teams aren’t always appreciated by outside teams, some PMMs feel less valued, according to our research.

Communicate effectively, massage the egos of your team members, and provide encouragement! Give internal teams a platform whereby they can see their input having a tangible impact.

Derek Osgood, Founder & CEO at Ignition, said:

“To develop a cohesive GTM strategy, and align teams around it, we must first be great at using other teams’ unique insights and objectives to extract a holistic picture.

“You’d be amazed how often Feature X is a core selling point for sales, yet a suboptimal/deprioritized product experience causes headaches for support, and nobody knows. Just like with customer insights, internal insights start with discovery chats with your various stakeholders.”

Communication increases engagement

Establishing a two-way communication process needs somewhere near the top of every product marketer’s agenda. Encouraging interactions among your team and other areas of the company will keep your team engaged.

When your team members are encouraged to make their voices heard, this makes them feel valued; when people feel good about themselves, they’ll run through brick walls for you, and that’s worth its weight in gold.

Louise Dunne, Product Marketing Manager at Linnworks, agreed, saying:

“There’s very little I could get done as a Product Marketing Manager without input from my cross-functional stakeholders. There are standing meetings on a quarterly and weekly basis, and we also use a RACI model to stay on top of communications for major projects, as well as joining other team’s meetings ad hoc to share updates and gather feedback.

“That two-way dialogue is so important so our cross-functional stakeholders see how their input feeds into our process and ensures the door is always open, whether for a quick question, feedback, or just a chat!”

Talking can steady the boat

Wouldn’t life be awesome if things went swimmingly, all the time?

Even in the largely wonderful world of product marketing, challenges tend to materialize, now and again.

In such cases, an effective internal communications model can work wonders. For example, if a long-anticipated product launch doesn’t go to plan, communicating with your product marketing team and the wider business can establish whether:

• The right personas were targeted,
• If the right messaging was used,
• What changes need to be made to avoid a repeat occurrence.

It’s equally important to follow up with other internal teams, as well as product marketing. After all, if they don’t know the latest information, they can’t be expected to help you in the future.

Communicating generates  ideas

We’re not a betting bunch, but we’re willing to break the mold in this instance.

We 100% guarantee the likes of Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike communicate all the time.

Wondering why we’re so sure? When people communicate, ideas are born, and these companies epitomize innovation.

Let’s look at things from two perspectives:

1. Company A – This company’s initial ideas come from its creatives. The company is staunchly against teams sharing ideas.
2. Company B – While the creative team at this company form the initial idea, they proactively seek feedback from other teams to develop the initial concept.

Company B is in a far stronger position than company A. By introducing a company culture centered on internal communication, they’ll form more ideas than company A, with a strong possibility of stowing away a suggestion to craft into their next product or service.

The world’s best creations stemmed from an idea. When people talk, new ideas are born.

Internal communication during product launches

From concept to the eagerly-awaited launch day, everyone needs to be on the same page, and have a consistent understanding of what’s expected when a product is being launched.

Once a product is on the roadmap and a go-to-market plan has been created, communication is critical, particularly for strategies spanning several months when responsibilities can slip under the radar. Fortnightly meetings are just one of many ways that can be introduced to maintain communication and keep on track of product launches, with Castor’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Silvia Kiely Frucci outlining how she’s previously used the method:

“Our products tend to have a very long life cycle, somewhere in the region of six to eight months. Because it’s such a long cycle, I keep everyone on track by holding meetings every two weeks, until we get the work started.

“The meeting serves as a reminder for the team: which marketing pieces are needed? What are the next stages? Which materials shall we use in our customer advisory board? In short, we use the meetings to shape the overall ideas surrounding the product.

“Once we get validation from customer advisory boards, a business case, and budgets in place, communication becomes much more frequent.”

Similarly, Anna Shutko, Brand Marketing Strategist at Supermetrics also acknowledges the role of internal communication in facilitating a smooth product launch. However, she communicates with necessary teams, rather than adopting a wholescale approach.

“When we’re introducing a product to the roadmap and creating a go-to-market plan, we adopt different approaches depending on whether it’s a self-serve or sales assisted funnel.

“If it’s self-serve, we tend to communicate mainly with the growth team, marketing, and support teams. However, if the priority is on the sales assisted funnel, we liaise with the aforementioned teams, plus sales, as they’ll be provided with extra materials.

“In terms of communication, I usually have regular meetings with the managers as I’m building the GTM strategy. Then, I give a presentation to whoever else needs to be briefed and share the folder with all the organized materials.

“Accountability and responsibility are pivotal when creating a go-to-market plan. So, I have the presentation and we have a process outlined and documented; the document is updated at regular intervals, so everyone can always take a look in case they have a question. The key is to have all the info structured so that everyone knows where to look for it.”

Product launch challenges

Product marketers are integral to launching a product. However, the process can be complicated by issues associated with internal communications, or a lack of, such as:

• Unclear expectations – In niche markets, the market sizing process can be difficult. Therefore, there are instances when businesses don’t set clear, quantified targets. Without targets in place, it’s impossible to gauge what went well, and which areas need to be improved.
• Separate work areas – It’s common for companies to have dedicated workspaces for different teams. While this can improve cohesion within each team, this can hinder the quality of the launch itself, as the set-up encourages people to limit communication in the confinements of their respective set-up, without interacting with the product launch team.
• Jargon – Different teams speak their own respective languages. If there isn’t a consensus of what’s being communicated, this can cause confusion and plans can begin to unravel.
• Skepticism – Sure, the reputation of product marketing is improving, but the skeptics remain. It’s human nature for people to tread carefully around areas they don’t understand, and this is common with product marketing.

How to improve your internal communications

These are just some of the challenges product marketers can face when launching products. Nonetheless, internal communication can play a fundamental role in creating an awesome product launch.

Here are some of the areas to focus on to improve your internal communications:

• Customer interviews – Take the time to complete interviews with prospective customers so you can establish whether there’s demand for the product.
• Product positioning – Communicate with key stakeholders throughout the process. This’ll ensure you have a shared understanding of what to expect. Create a unique value proposition for your product, who it serves, and where it fits in the market. Leave no stone unturned.
• Content planning – Quality content is a powerful form of communication; it’s an essential part of your inbound marketing efforts. Don’t assume your content is at the appropriate level. Conducting a content audit and holding a session where you can communicate with your peers is an ideal avenue for collaborating ideas and forming the king of content plans.
• Use a style guide – Nothing screams ‘zero communication’ more than a company with umpteen different styles. When a person visits your site, they should either a) know your brand’s tone, or b) know what it is shortly after reading your content. A style guide serves as a compass for your team when they’re writing supporting content. For example, do you use a formal or informal tone? Americanized spellings or not? This captures specs, key messages, and product naming conventions.
• Data-driven approach – Metrics matter. If you don’t use data, you’re delving into the abyss with your eyes closed. Marketing conversion rates, sales stats, and churn figures fuel the fire of discussion and encourage communication between your teams. If there aren’t numbers available, this seriously hampers your areas of discussion. Make the most of the magic numbers can conjure up. The insights are golden.

Communicate with the right people

We’ve already alluded to the fact communication is an essential trait for PMMs, as Melanie Linehan, Director of Growth Marketing at WeTransfer explained:

When you speak to the wrong people, your message tends to go in one ear and sail out of the other.

However, instead of talking to people for the sake of it, you need to be sure you’re speaking with people who’ll be interested in what you’ve got to say, much of which will be dictated by circumstance.

For example, if you decide to change tact with your sales enablement assets, this will have a bearing on how your sales team operates. The necessary information can be communicated to team members during a sales enablement session, during which time expectations surrounding team responsibilities can also be reinforced.

Similarly, we’ve all bought a product at some point and encountered some degree of difficulty. Therefore, it’s important to communicate with the support teams to ensure they’re able to go above and beyond in helping your customers overcome their difficulties.

Rene Kardtke, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Ontic, gave an insight into which people are informed of new products or features, once a product is on the roadmap and the go-to-market plan has been created, how key information is communicated, as well as how the team establishes what they’re responsible for:

“We inform multiple teams, including marketing, revenue/sales, customer service team leadership, sales ops, sales enablement, support, and pro services, as well as finance.

“To keep them updated, we have a cross-functional NPI process – New Product Initiative led by a project management function. JIRA tracking and regular meetings. The NPI process clearly defines responsible parties and deliverables.”

Regardless of who you’re talking to, it’s important to keep people in the loop, yet this needn’t be a laborious chore. Regular meetings not only serve as your opportunity to communicate key updates, but they also enable team members an opportunity to bring their ideas to the table, raise any pain points, or iron out any uncertainties they may have.

Given the State of Product Marketing Report 2021 revealed just over half of the people taking part (63%) said a product marketing rep attended meetings and has increased from 59% in the 2020 report, we’re viewing this as a step in the right direction.

Create a plan

Those who fail to plan are preparing to fail. It’s one of the oldest cliches in the book, but let’s be honest, it’s stood the test of time because it’s true. Orchestrate a clear-cut plan and present it to your team so they have

everything they need to know, including:

• Deadlines,
• Responsibilities,
• Action plans.

There’s no such thing as a plan with no flexibility. You need to allow for a degree of leniency, given you don’t know what the future has tucked up its sleeve.

Add to that, always have a plan B in tow. If things go belly up, you don’t wanna be caught flat-footed.

How to build a communication culture

Although a product marketer contributes to the creation of communication culture, the company itself has a huge role to play in consolidating the principles of a cohesive communication strategy.

There are ways companies can, and perhaps should, implement measures to encourage internal communication. This will vary depending on how the company structure has been built.

For instance, if there’s a horizontal structure in place, this will present more avenues for product marketers to collaborate with senior management figures and attend meetings with CEOs. On the other hand, if product marketers are stifled in their efforts to communicate with respective teams, this can seriously hinder their productivity and efforts, a notion held by Senior Product Marketing Manager Silvia Kiely Frucci:

“I think product marketing is the first job that encompasses everything, but also if we’re unable to interact with everyone, in some cases, the role doesn’t make any sense – in my opinion.

“To bridge these gaps, we need to make sure we’re constantly in conversation with one another; reach out to your manager and create a cost model which obliges you to speak with everyone. When I’d finished and spoken with each team, they A) knew what I did, B) understood the value I could bring and C) were more receptive to talking with me in the future.”

After more info on internal communication? Our Product Marketing Core course is home to a whole module dedicated to just that – plus 10 more jam-packed sections too.

The post The importance of internal communication (plus how to crush it!) appeared first on ProdSens.live.

This article was adapted from Sapphire’s appearance on Leading the Way: The Sales Enablement Podcast.

Having spoken to many people in the PMA community, I’ve found that data and system limitations are one of the biggest challenges product marketers face when trying to understand the performance of their sales enablement content.

Some people simply don’t have a tool for sharing content with sellers. They’re still using their intranet or just sending things out on Slack when what they need is a dedicated system to give sellers access to content. Worse, they don’t know which assets sellers are using or how.

These can be huge challenges to overcome because IT teams are often so bogged down that when sales enablement folks ask for a tool they can find themselves at the bottom of the priority list.

On top of this, as anyone in sales enablement will tell you, it’s hard to get sales reps to use new sales enablement assets and build new behaviors. It’s not just about having a system to make content available; it’s about making it consumable and actionable.

Part of the problem is that marketers often have less-than-great relationships with sales. We can be so focused on creating awareness of who we are and what we do that we forget about what comes next. There’s definitely a gap there, and we need to bring them down the funnel, so to speak.

And it’s not just about building relationships with sales – our customer success, professional services, and support teams are in the trenches every single day.

When they don’t trust that we understand what it’s like for them to be in the trenches, they’re probably not going to want to use the new marketing assets that we’ve created.

In this article, I’ll focus on:

• How to build the case for investing in sales enablement analytics
• How to measure the success of your enablement assets
• How to use data to improve your campaigns
• How data has helped me to optimize my content

How to build the case for investing in sales enablement analytics

So, how do we fix this? How do we create awesome, actionable, and relevant content that our sales teams will actually want to use?

This was one of my first projects when I joined Pluralsight as a product marketer back in 2017. But first, I needed to build trust and understand what content was already available and how it was being used.

I started by going to the sales leaders and saying, “Look, I know your teams are using some sort of content, whether we provided them or they created it themselves. Who are those sellers that are super high performers? Who are those sellers that are in the middle of the road? And who are those sellers that are struggling and need a little bit of help? Can you give me five names from each of those groups? I’m going to talk to them and figure out what they’re using.”

In those sales interviews, I’d ask them questions like, “When you get a lead, where’s the first place you go to look for content?” and, “What content have you used, and what’s been successful?”

Through those conversations, I was able to uncover a lot of the issues they were facing, which often included not knowing where to find relevant content.

Then, on the marketing side, I reviewed about 200 assets that we had created, and I mapped them to what the sales team told me they were using.

I found a massive gap between the volume of content we were creating and what they were actually using. From there, I could see which content was helpful and identify the content we were missing.

Armed with all that manually gathered data, I had a very straightforward conversation with my leadership and sales leadership.

I explained all the assets we had available and how they were mapped to different conversations. I also showed how challenging it was for the sales team to access the content we had created.

Plus, I made sure they knew that despite there being a lot of content available, there was no data to show how it was being used or if it was successful.

Not having that data helped me create a vision of what we could achieve if we had data and analytics. I painted a picture of how we could use data to show which content was helpful for a first-line sales call or a competitive conversation.

Sales leaders would then be able to help their teams by suggesting content that could help them when they were running into challenging conversations and better coach their team to success.

Going through this process and showing the value that the right data would bring set me up for getting the sales enablement analytics we needed.

How to measure the success of your enablement assets

Every time we go into a campaign, I look at what assets our reps are actually using. If I know we created a series of content for this campaign for sales and they haven’t used any of it, I need to figure out what’s going on.

Do they not know about it? Are they not confident in it? There could be so many different reasons that content is not being used.

In other words, internal usage is my leading indicator. I want to know how many reps are using the content, which segments they’re servicing, and how frequently they are engaging with it.

This information helps me understand if we need to do some additional training or enablement to ensure that people are aware that this content is available.

What’s even more important is understanding how internal usage maps against external engagement.

For example, while it’s useful to know if a sales script has been used 100 times, it’s even more powerful for me to know that it has led to a second conversation 80% of the time.

By mapping out usage data and external engagement like this, you can better understand if you’re hitting your goals.

Let’s say you’re launching a product and you want to drive adoption, so you’ve created assets to help your customer success managers with onboarding and product adoption – first, you want to see if those assets are being used, then you’ll want to see if that’s leading to higher adoption.

While it’s not always perfect, having a sales enablement platform provides valuable data that allows you to map how goals were defined, who used the content, and how customers or prospects engaged with it.

It might be that there’s a particular vertical or persona that your content resonates with. That’s great to know – all of those insights will feed back into your marketing engine.

Once you have data aggregated over time, you can start benchmarking the success of your assets and nail down what good looks like.

Let’s say one asset saw an average engagement rate of 50% over the last six months, but one of your CSMs says it doesn’t work – well, 50% of the time it is working, so let’s talk about why it’s not working for that person.

How to use data to improve your campaigns

Having data on how your sales reps are using your content and how customers are engaging with it gives you a really good starting point for figuring a few different things out – for one, who you should be targeting with marketing.

If you know that this specific talk track and messaging are working well in sales reps’ conversations with people in financial services, then you know that you should probably make sure that vertical is a focus for this campaign.

Not only does having this data help you see who you might want to target; but it also shows what’s resonating. A lot of the time, the content that marketing teams create (and I say this lovingly) is not very actionable for sales. There’s no real way for them to follow up on it or send it to somebody to add value.

Using data to understand what resonates with prospects and customers is super important. It helps us figure out what makes follow-up conversations easier, what topics we can build on, and ultimately inform our marketing strategy.

For example, we noticed that a lot of sales reps ask discovery questions in the sales cycle, and customer success managers conduct planning sessions with customers where they talk about their goals and challenges and map the platform to that.

These conversations usually happen later in the funnel, but by using data insights, we were able to bring those topics and areas of discussion earlier into the funnel and put in place some best practices.

We built planning worksheets to help customers make the most of 2022. The content of those planning worksheets mapped exactly to sales’ discovery questions and customer success’ planning process.

That marketing content perfectly sets our customer-facing teams up for conversations with customers and prospects. That gets us all on the same page and makes sure we provide a consistent experience for customers at every touchpoint.

How data has helped me to optimize my content

To wrap things up, I want to talk you through a few examples of how data has helped me with my content creation process throughout my career.

Speaking the sales team’s language

When we first launched our new sales enablement platform and started to gather data, we saw very low usage. We initially thought that was just because changing behavior is hard.

However, as I dug deeper into the issue, I realized there was more to it than that, so I talked to our sellers to understand why. They explained that the platform was built around top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content, but nobody knew what that meant.

This allowed me to go back to the drawing board and realign my content to the sales cycle. It was a fast learning experience for me at the start of my product marketing career.

Filling content gaps

The second big thing we noticed was a steep drop-off in content usage when folks started going into the proposal stage. That helped me recognize that we didn’t have a good proposal template.

Of course, not every deal needs a proposal, but there’s no harm in sending a very well-thought-out document outlining exactly what we’re going to do for the customer.

Once we recognized that content gap, we were able to create a proposal template for reps to use, and they started using it and driving more deals.

Now, as a product marketer, I love to access our enablement platform because I know our sellers are using our content and representing our product with the messaging and the value we intended.

Optimizing my team’s time

The third huge benefit we’ve seen is the optimization of our PMM team’s time.

We’ve all experienced sales reps requesting any number of assets from us – often assets that we’ve already created or assets that we’ve tried but turned out not to work. Having that data helped me and my team optimize our own time and respond to those requests better.

It also helped us make sense of the other data we’re tracking. Imagine we’re seeing closed-lost rates ticking up, but when we check the content usage, sales reps aren’t using our battle cards – maybe part of the reason we’re losing more deals to competition is they’re not using the stuff we’ve already created for them.

Now, if they ask us for fresh content to help turn this win-loss problem around, we’re not going to do that. Instead, we’ll start by training reps and making sure they know how to use these battle cards and that they’re actually accessing them.

Sharing sellers’ stories

Sellers want to hear from other successful sellers. That’s one of the biggest things we’ve been able to make happen thanks to our sales enablement platform. I can go into the tool and see that Sally used these 10 assets, shortened her sales cycle, and landed a bigger deal. Plus, I don’t have to tell you about it – Sally’s gonna tell you about it.

We let sellers lead those conversations. That saves time for my team and provides way more credibility. Getting sales folks to tell stories about how they’ve used the assets you’ve created will do wonders for you and the work that you do as an enabler.

The post Why it’s time to start measuring the impact of your sales content appeared first on ProdSens.live.