5 steps for product marketing to make sales enablement content more effective

Sales enablement is one of the most important drivers for success in a software business. It ensures that your existing reps can successfully articulate the value proposition of new products/capabilities, and your new sales reps can become productive quickly. To look at what makes sales enablement successful, let’s start by looking at sales enablement along three dimensions – content, process, and technology. In this post, I will talk about content.

At most software companies, product marketing is responsible for creating content for sales enablement. The sales enablement team often takes that content and repackages it for consumption, based on their program.  However, the effectiveness and quality of content is the responsibility of product marketing. Here are the five steps you (product marketing) should take to make the enablement content more effective.

Step 1: Bring a customer perspective into your content: The storyline should not be the capabilities and bells/whistles in your product, but why the customer should care about them. Remember, you are creating the content to help your sales rep engage their customers.  So, the more it is about end customer’s issues, messaged in their language, talking about how the product/capabilities help them address their issues, and examples of how their peers in the industry are addressing those issues with the capabilities from your product today, the more effective the content will be. So, to do it well, you need a very good customer perspective. But most product marketers don’t come from the industry – so they have not walked in customer’s shoes before and lack customer’s ‘day-in-the-life’ perspective.  Here are some ideas re: how to come up to speed on the customer perspective:

• Talk to your sales reps about their customer conversations.  Ask them what is working and what objections they are hearing. The better a relationship you build with them, the more insights you will get.  Also, try to attend sales QBRs or get invited to weekly sales management calls.  They are full of great nuggets and that will be the best one hour you will spend every week.
• Shadow your sales reps on a customer call. It’s easier these days, since many calls are on Zoom, and you can easily be a ‘fly on the wall’ and listen in.  You can see how the sales rep handles prospects—what features they emphasize, the way they make their sales pitch, and how they respond to customer inquiries. And you’ll learn how customers see your product, including information such as features they use the most, use cases for your product and the value they get out of it. This will lead to a better understanding of what your sales team needs to do their jobs better.
• Get to know your sales cycle or sales methodology very well. Different issues will come up at different stages of the sales cycle that you need to ensure your reps are prepped to address.  The better you understand your sales methodology (or sales cycle), the better you will be able to enable your reps to answer the questions that come up at specific places in the sales cycle.
• Keep up with win-loss analysis and competitive analysis. They give you deep insights into what customers like and don’t like about your products.  Ideally, a larger part of win-loss analysis comes from customer interviews (and rather than from your CRM system), so you get ‘unfiltered’ customer perspective.
• Talk to customers and prospects at every opportunity you get.  Seek them out at trade shows, events etc. Volunteer to do win-loss customer calls.

Step 2: The size of enablement content matters: Your customer for the enablement content is your sales rep. You cannot send them a 50-page slide deck –don’t put more information in front of them than they have time to consume. Be succinct, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Step 3: Get alignment with the sales VP on the ‘ideal customer’ they engage with at accounts:  If you are creating your content for a business unit head/lead, but your sales reps are primarily speaking to the IT organization, your content is not going to be effective. This is a very important issue and I have seen so many misses in content due to this misalignment.

Step 4: Put your content in context: Categorize your content by sales stages. Is it something to bring up on their first sales call, or when they’re further along the funnel or when they are close to a decision? Sales will be more likely to use the knowledge effectively if they know the right time to bring it up.

Step 5: Build different types of content – don’t pack it all in one document.  In my next blog post, I will share an outline for each of these content types.

If you liked this blog post, please share it with your network or peers.  If you have any questions or feedback, please message me on LinkedIn.