How Product Marketers Can Nail Sales Enablement
Product marketers are essential in driving sales success, especially in B2B technology industries. This article touches on areas that lead to greater team readiness and quota attainment.
💼🏢 Understand Your Sales Org
Just like marketing products, the first thing you must do to nail sales enablement is understand your audience. Understanding the backgrounds of your sales team ensures that you deliver the proper training and materials. Discuss sales practices, experience levels, and goals with various stakeholders, including general managers, regional executives, team leads, and sales ops.
It is also critical that you understand organizational structure. For example, enabling teams with Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) may call for different tools. SDRs may not require in-depth product knowledge but benefit from sample email copy and phone scripts for outreach and lead qualification. Account Executives may benefit from competitor reference guides and cheat sheets to overcome objections for each buyer persona.
🧠 Share Your Knowledge
Sharing your knowledge and insights can be done in various ways. Collaborate with sales leaders on how best to deliver training—format, timing, and frequency. Sales enablement goes beyond product information and should include the latest you’ve gathered about portfolio strategy, market trends, competitors, and customers.
🔀 Align Marketing and Sales
Facilitating collaboration between marketing and sales teams tightens alignment and improves the performance of any campaigns or growth initiatives. Educating sales teams on marketing strategies and campaigns offers helpful context to inform their activities and frame prospect conversations, leading to messaging consistency.
🛠 Develop Relevant Sales Tools and Collateral
Creating engaging and informative internal sales tools and customer-facing materials is a must, along with guidance on how to use them. I’ve learned that quality is more important than quantity. Identify the most effective items and scrap those that are not useful. Assets must be easily accessible and continuously updated, so creating a central repository is a good idea.
📏 Measure and Analyze Performance
Determine what constitutes sales readiness and how that can be measured. I’ve worked at organizations where sales teams were given assessments or performed mock role-plays to gauge their product knowledge. Whatever the metrics, regularly assessing the impact of sales enablement strategies on sales outcomes is vital. You’ll get better results refining sales enablement based on both feedback and performance data.
Your goal is to give Sales the information and tools they need to talk with prospects effectively and close deals faster. By excelling at sales enablement, product marketers empower sales teams and position themselves as vital contributors to organizational success. 💼 💵
