Continuing the series I introduced in my article, “Product Marketing Team-Ups: Welcome to the Hub!,” I’m going to focus on another critical cross-functional relationship that product marketing managers (PMMs) must nurture to succeed: sales enablement.
While sales enablement is the common branding for this organization, I believe it to be incomplete. This is especially true for later-stage businesses (I discuss these stages in more detail below). In my opinion, these teams “should be” responsible for the readiness of all customer-facing employees and partners to support every stage of the customer buyer’s journey – from prospect discovery, through the sale, deployment, and renewal of their business. This means the enablement team really needs to support sales, presales, customer support, professional services, and even external partners if they are truly going to train the entire business to be GTM-ready. Some organizations call this function Field Enablement or Revenue Enablement, which is a bit better. Has anyone seen or used any other valuable names for this team?
In my personal experiences, I’ve had the luxury of working with dedicated enablement organizations that were given decent headcount and resources to make a real impact. But I realize that not every organization (especially earlier-stage startups) has these resources. In these scenarios, PMMs and the broader marketing org are often called on to take on an even larger sales enablement role – typically focused on creating valuable content to support the sales cycle.
Stages of PMM/enablement maturity
Investments in sales enablement often have a correlation with the growth and maturity of the business. While every B2B SaaS business is different, these summaries feel directionally accurate to me:
- Stage 1: Startup. Earlier-stage businesses where the founders and a small number of high-performing sales reps are driving the majority of business. These businesses aren’t yet looking to support hypergrowth or scale, they’re looking to sign those strategic early customers that will prove product-market fit and secure future funding rounds. It’s unlikely there are formal sales enablement resources, and maybe not even dedicated product marketers yet. Commonly content marketers or even product managers are creating assets and website copy to support these deals.
- Stage 2: Grow. Your business has defined product-market fit and secured funding to drive growth. Now you’re investing in go-to-market, with major investments in sales and marketing! Awesome, except you can no longer just count on your small number of experienced and networked early reps to close enough business to satisfy your growth targets. You need all your new reps to contribute, and they need all the training and resources you can provide to succeed. Typically, product marketing has been established at this stage and provides product, market, and competitive content. A few sales enablement experts may have also been hired to start building sales onboarding and continuous training programs.
- Stage 3: Scale. You’re no longer a startup. You’re a proven market leader with multiple rounds of funding (maybe even an IPO) and your product portfolio and ICP (ideal customer profile) have likely expanded as well. You have to continue to grow, but you also need to manage the complexity of your much larger business. Experienced leaders anticipated this need earlier, and have already invested in more senior product marketing and sales enablement leaders to define the organizational plans and operational requirements to support this complexity. Those that haven’t now view these as some of their most strategic hires.
Scope of sales enablement
Beyond the customer-facing job functions that mature enablement teams support, they also have a broader set of responsibilities – many of which require close product marketing partnerships. I tried to summarize these here.
- Product/Launch readiness. As I shared in my article, “Ready to Launch,” product marketing plays a critical role in defining the scope of product launches and creating the necessary messaging, content, and training to ensure all GTM stakeholders are prepared to support. This includes sales-level training to explain what the product and features are, why it matters, and how it should help them in customer conversations. It also includes technical-level training to ensure presales, implementation, and support teams are prepared. Enablement teams are critical partners in launch planning – engage them early! – to ensure this training can be scheduled and delivered effectively.
- Pricing/Packaging/Discounting. Pricing and packaging is another area where PMMs play a significant role, and once the pricing strategy has been defined PMMs must help train reps to understand how the product portfolio is priced and why. Sales reps have the tough job of defending pricing against their prospect’s procurement teams – not a fun job. They need to be armed with both market/competitive pricing comparisons, and explanations for why your offering merits whatever premiums you’re charging. Discounting strategies and policies are usually driven by heads of finance and sales. Sales enablement teams can help train reps to navigate both pricing and discounting conversations.
- Corporate positioning. Not every sales cycle will require a completely separate corporate pitch deck – although it’s critical for the higher cost, upmarket sales opportunities. But even for high-volume, low-cost business models, sales reps should know how to sell the entire business – not just the products and features. Product marketing often owns (or should at minimum significantly influence) the corporate narrative that positions the bulletproof differentiators of your business as a whole, including customer validation, market validation, vision, strategy, and other core differentiators. And yes, part of the corporate positioning is the Marketecture, which I previously proved that everybody loves!
- Sales methodology training. More mature sales organizations, especially those involved in more complex enterprise sales cycles, begin to adopt external best practice sales methodologies to improve overall sales alignment and execution. Sales enablement teams are typically the tip of the spear in leading the assessment and selection of different programs, partnering with the 3rd party agencies to develop the appropriate training materials to meet their business goals, and operationalizing the ongoing training and measurement to ensure value is being delivered. PMMs often play a major supporting role in providing content and messaging to onboard and support these programs. I’ve personally had deep dive experiences with Challenger Sales, Sandler Sales, MEDDIC (aka MEDDICC aka MEDDPIC aka MEDDPICC – Google it!), and Command of the Sale/Command of the Message. As part of their career development, I encourage PMMs to learn more about the many different methodologies being used.
- Sales onboarding. Enablement teams must take all of the above content and more, package it, and build an ongoing process to onboard any newly hired reps. Product marketers are often popular presenters – especially when training new hires on the company and product-level messaging. The enablement team is responsible for partnering with HR to ensure newly hired sales, presales, and other customer-facing reps have a valuable onboarding experience so they can hit the ground running.
- Content management, training calendars, and field communications. I need to give a shout-out to some back-office enablement responsibilities that don’t often receive the necessary support or resources – but are critical for enablement teams to ensure GTM teams are ready to sell. Both new and experienced field reps often complain that while there is so much content, they have a hard time finding what they actually need when they need it. They also complain that there’s too much training, which takes time away from selling. The sales enablement teams can feel stuck between a rock and a hard place because they’re blamed when the content doesn’t exist, but they’re also blamed for making too much noise and distraction. Enablement teams need the ability to build and govern an easily navigable enablement portal, build a training calendar that has top-down buy-in from senior leadership, and have the ability to send communications to the field to share what training is required (aka “Push”) vs optionally available when needed (aka “Pull”). Creating a push vs pull strategy will ensure reps get the training that’s critical to the business, but allow reps to navigate what’s available for just-in-time optional support when they need it most.
I’d love to hear from experienced sales enablement pros to let me know if I missed any key responsibilities or areas where your relationship with product marketing has been valuable!