By Poornima Mohandas | 3 min read

Meghan, a sales rep walked by my desk one sunny morning. She saw me working at my desk, picking images from Adobe Stock for a deck. “So this is what you do in product marketing?” Meghan remarked cleverly. “Yes, this is among the fun stuff we do here,” I replied. That made me think, can sales enablement be more than just deck making? Hell ya! Read on if you want to make your sales enablement function more meaningful. 

Let’s Get the Definitions Out of the Way

What is sales enablement? While start ups may struggle to put a finger on what it is and who owns it, medium to large companies often have a department dedicated to it. 

According to Gartner, sales enablement = “The activities, systems, processes and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with clients and prospects.” In this mix, product marketing most contributes to the information and knowledge piece, while letting sales operations worry about the systems and processes. So how can PMM deliver the knowledge, below are 10 initiatives you can drive. 

10 PMM Initiatives to Add Value to Sales Enablement 

• Present the product overview at sales bootcamp for new hires
• Set up a discovery process for your BDRs if it doesn’t exist today
• Find the typical sales objections and turn it into an FAQ. This will make the sales process faster. 
• Don’t just create product positioning and a body of foundational sales collateral. Train sales on how to use it and when
• For every major product release, host release training webinars. Train sales on messaging, the ideal demo click path along with a demo script
• Create product demo videos for each of your key products if it doesn’t already exist
• Develop an ROI calculator to showcase the value of your product to your buyers
• Spend time on competitive intelligence. Create battlecards on how to tackle competition
• Research and write well-thought-out product whitepapers around customer concerns and questions. These are particularly important as Gartner expects 80% of all B2B sales interactions to be digital by 2025. When buyers research your category, they should refer to your whitepapers for direction. 
• If you have a sales enablement platform, track the metrics to identify the most popular and least popular content. For more qualitative feedback, survey your sales people at a regular cadence. Find out what is working and what is not. Identify gaps. Readjust your sales enablement initiatives based on the metrics and feedback.  

You may not be able to execute on all of these initiatives because product marketing is always stretched for bandwidth and there are competing priorities. So start with a few. Present some of these ideas to your boss in your plan for the next quarter. That can help make a case for additional headcount. 

Conclusion

Sales enablement is not a one and done. It is not a sprint but a marathon. PMM can contribute to sales enablement from the moment sales reps are onboarded. It is an ongoing effort that needs constant attention every time your product, market, or competitors evolve. Be realistic, you will never be able to meet every sales rep’s every need. You will have to prioritize the initiatives that can have the maximum impact for the field. 

For starters, you should aim to create a set of standard, high-quality sales collateral that sales reps can readily use in every deal with a few tweaks here and there. Once that foundation is laid, you can keep adding to it to cater to more complex and nuanced requirements. I hope you found this checklist I developed based on my years of experience valuable. Write to me if you have more initiatives you can suggest.