Jason Oakley
If the phrase sales enablement makes your blood pressure rise, you’re not alone.
But what if I told you that sales enablement was one of your biggest points of leverage for impact in your company?
Here are 6 tips that can help you take sales enablement from being your biggest headache to some of your most valuable work.
First, let me clarify something.
A lot of people hear sales enablement and think "well we're PLG so we don't have a sales function" or "what about customer success, don't we need to enable them too?"
Let's just all agree for the sake of everyone's sanity that sales enablement can mean enabling an SDR team or an AE team, or a CS team, or a support team, or some hybrid growth marketing BDR team. The point I'm trying to make here is that we're broadly referring to the enablement of people inside your company that are buyer- or customer-facing. They all "sell" your product or service to some extent, whether it's to buy it, use it, buy more of it, or continue buying it.
#1 - Think of yourself as a PM, not a support rep
One of the biggest misconceptions in product marketing is that we are a support function.
Reps think we are there to serve their needs, so they can make ad hoc requests and expect them to be addressed in short order. This is an education gap that needs to be addressed in your charter and communicated clearly from day one.
But it's also something that gets reinforced through how you manage your enablement function.
Support reps are expected to respond and close each ticket. And their performance comes down to a matter of speed and how happy the customer is with their response.
Compare that to a product manager who is building features with the goal of helping a customer solve a problem. If you can shift to more of a PM mindset, it will totally change how you think about enablement and sales requests.
The PM gets to decide which requests are most important, and seeks to understand the problem these customers are trying to solve. It's then up to the PM to design the solution.
And like any good PM, you need a system for managing requests. This can be something as simple as a request form and a Google spreadsheet, but having a process in place and following it, shows other teams that everything they ask for will not be jumped on right away.
#2 - Make sales enablement a proactive function
For most PMMs, sales enablement can easily become a reactive function. Reps and sales leaders come to you with ‘ideas’ (aka urgent requests that somehow, always feel life or death.)
But have you ever stopped to think that the requests are flooding in because sellers don't see you offering anything? If the tables were reversed and you believed that someone was there to support you, but you never got anything from them, wouldn't you start asking for things?
Instead, you need to have a proactive approach. A process for identifying the things that will help the sales team, and come to them with solutions.
There are three methods that have worked for me:
- Sales confidence survey - this can be something you run quarterly. A survey to gauge the confidence level of your reps on things like messaging, competitive differentiation, your narrative, and demoing your product. Also how equipped they feel with things like training, competitive insights, and content. It's a great way to diagnose gaps where reps might need additional training, or where content is missing.
- Buyer journey mapping - This is where you really start to diagnose problems within your funnel and can come to the table with ideas that will move the needle on conversion rates, adoption, and retention. What you're trying to do is put yourself in the shoes of your buyer and map the stages in their journey. You can then layer on the specific stages in your company's sales process to spot warning signs in the sales process (aka stages in the funnel where conversion rates are suffering). This could signal a gap in training, effective messaging, or a lack of content to help buyers.
- Make it one of your learning objectives - If you're constantly analyzing prospects and customer conversations or Slack, you are naturally going to spot objections and questions that constantly pop up where there really isn't a solid answer or helpful piece of content. Or where sellers are consistently off-message or saying incorrect things. And when these things lead to buyer doubt, or customers not adopting your product, they should be top candidates for your attention.
#3 - Have clear priorities and protect them
Have you ever heard the phrase “saying yes to one thing, means saying no to another?”
It’s true. But the problem for most PMMs is that they don’t always know what they are sacrificing when saying yes to ad hoc requests.
If you know what your top projects are in a given quarter and the metrics those are impacting, not only does it help you focus on the things that actually matter, it gives you a reason to say no to ad hoc requests.
My best piece of advice is for every PMM to have their own set of OKRPs.
What's an OKRP? You may be familiar with OKRs: Objectives and Key Results. But OKRPs take into consideration the Projects (aka the work) that drives your key results. After all, product marketing is a project-driven role, where the things we work on can change from month to month.
With a clear set of OKRs and an understanding of what projects contribute to them, you can have a clear picture of the work and tasks that are your top priority.
Your most valuable tools then become your task manager and your calendar. Use a task manager like Notion or a spreadsheet to plan your week and schedule in time on your calendar to work on those things. This is referred to as time blocking, and it works.
Now, when a rep comes with a random request it's easier to say no, because you can easily see what priorities matter more.
#4 - Learn how to say NO
And on the topic of saying NO - how do you say no effectively. It’s a hard thing to do, right? You don’t want to be perceived as not being a team player.
When saying no, I try to be Clear, Concise, and Nice.
- Clear - Leave no room for confusion. Don't be wishy washy or use "maybe" in your answer. Make it clear that you cannot do it. And if you don't want to say no indefinitely, be clear about the timeframe. As in "I can't work on that for at least the next two months."
- Concise - Don't launch into an in-depth monologue about why you can't work on it. People don't need all that detail. Just say something like "I can't work on that for the next two months until we get this new product launched. It’s all-consuming."
- Nice - It's important to remember where these requests are coming from. Reps aren't intentionally trying to drown you in meaningless work. When you're saying no, try to come from a place of mutual respect and understanding. Try acknowledging that something is a good idea and encourage them to try and tackle it on their own. Something like "I think this is a great idea, but right now I'm swamped with this launch and can't add anything else to my plate until at least November. But I've seen some of your slides, and they're great. Why don't you try taking a stab at it yourself. I'm happy to take a look and provide feedback."
And if you're still nervous about saying no, ask for help from your leadership team. If your boss, or VP of sales say something like "let me know if there's anything I can do to support you," use that as an opportunity to enlist their help in saying no to requests. Something like "can you give the team a heads up to hold off on additional content requests until next quarter" can work wonders.
#5 - Find a building partner in sales (aka find your Pablo)
At Klue, there was a rep named Pablo who was always happy to share things in meetings. Things he had tried, slides he had made, approaches that worked and didn't.
He was always more than happy to give feedback on things we were working on. It never came from a place of "I know better.” He was just curious and trying to create something useful for him and the team.
One of the biggest unlocks for me was leaning more into that relationship and leaning on Pablo earlier whenever I was working on things like messaging, content, and training.
He was on calls every day, so he was always a great source of intel and general insights around what buyers were saying, what competitors were doing, and what was resonating.
For example, when we acquired a win-loss service provider and needed to change our pitch to incorporate both value props, I worked with Pablo to draft the slides for the sales deck. He was a great sounding board since he was going to deliver this at the end of the day. He also could walk away from our meeting and immediately test the messaging in actual prospect conversations. We were able to quickly iterate and get to a great spot.
And here's the best part. Once we were finished, we already had an advocate on the sales team that could share how he was using the slide and talk track, share clips of calls he used it on, and give the reps confidence to start adopting it.
My biggest piece of advice - go out and find your Pablo.
#6 - Have a system for marketing your work internally
“If you build it they will come” is terrible advice for most things, and sales enablement is no exception.
We’ve all heard the stat that 60-70% of sales content goes unused. One pagers, case studies, slides, talk tracks - even things that reps explicitly ask for - sit on a shelf if you don't share them effectively, and repeatedly.
One thing to implement right away is a repository for all of your sales resources. As a founding PMM, expensive software like Highspot or Seismic is overkill. A great starting point is a simple spreadsheet or database in something like Notion or Airtable. You want a single source of truth that reps can go to to quickly find the resources they need. And you want to constantly send them back there, so eventually it gets bookmarked in their browser.
I repeat - create a single source of truth where reps can find everything you make for them and constantly send them back to that spot until they bookmark it.
The second crucial piece is having a way to let everyone know when new things are available. Essentially launching new content and resources within your company. For this, I've always used an internal PMM newsletter. It can start as something simple that you send on a monthly or bi-weekly basis. It doesn't need to be polished - just a quick update of what's new. Content, messaging changes, competitive or market insights, and upcoming launches.
It’s funny how much of the PMM job is actually internal marketing.
#7 - Make enablement a two-way street
The most fruitful relationships with sales are when it's a two-way street. You need to be valued by, and get value from, your sales team.
Luckily, these days with the use of AI and connectors to things like Gong and Slack, it's easy to synthesize and gather intel from calls and group chats that can give you real insights and shape your strategy.
But on top of that, having a great relationship with your sales team will naturally lead to them sharing valuable information. Imagine having many Pablos ready to share their feedback and help you. That's the ideal relationship with sales you're looking for.
Dan Hamilton, then the VP of Competitive Intelligence at Salesforce told me something that has always stuck. He said that one of the main reasons he was invited into executive meetings with Marc Benioff, was that everyone knew he was the guy with an intimate knowledge of competitive sales deals and why they were winning and losing.
That only came from him being actively involved in supporting sales deals. Many VPs would say that was a bad use of their time, but Dan was willing to strategize with reps, jump on prospect calls, and get into the weeds. And today, he’s still at Salesforce, as their SVP of Corporate Strategy.
If you take that same mindset to supporting your reps, you'll not only soak up insights, but you'll also have a more direct impact on pipeline and revenue, which in turn makes product marketing more valuable to the organization.
Go forth and enable
It's not enough to be "liked" by sales. It needs to be a mutual partnership where everyone feels respected, like they’re getting value from the other.
You need to think like a PM, be proactive in your approach, have clear priorities and protect them, Find your Pablo, have a system for distribution and driving adoption, and make value a two-way street.
If you can do these things you'll move sales enablement from being a reactive time suck, to a strategic function that increases the impact of PMM and makes your job more enjoyable.