AMA: WalkMe Vice President, Product Marketing VP Product Marketing, Hila Segal on Sales Enablement

Here are some of the guiding principles I like to use when developing a sales enablement roadmap: - Map out the product launches for the coming quarters and use these as anchors in the enablement calendar. Consider tier 1/2/3 launches and the format/audience for each. - Identify key areas of focus for the coming year like value selling & ROI, persona/use-case/industry playbooks, positioning refresh, demo academy, etc., and align them to different quarters by order of importance or urgency. You might be expanding into new verticals or geos or going up/down market and these new motions will determine the areas you'll need to focus on. - Understand what are the key selling skills and techniques that the team needs to master from prospecting to discovery or negotiation skills and work with the enablement team to determine when and how these are showing up in the enablement calendar 

Here are some ideas: - Surveys - Slack channel - Google spreadsheet where sales can add ideas, describe the need and timing - QBR rep presentations - add this to their template deck - 1:1 conversations But always remember, sales will come up with many ideas and asks for collaterals. Always discover and ask follow-up questions to truly understand the need. You might be able to satisfy an urgent request (who's never got those 😉) with another piece of content. You never want to create one-offs and if you end up doing something as a quick stopgap - make sure to productize it and roll it out to the rest of your team. 

I would recommend considering a few tools for the enablement stack (but try not to get crazy here - focus on what your team absolutely needs depending on the maturity of the org): - Call recording to be able to listen to calls in a scalable and systematic way (like Gong, Salesloft, Zoom IQ) - Sales collateral platform to host all content in one central location, track usage, versioning, analytics, etc. (like Highspot, Showpad) - Competitive content platform for up-to-date information and competitor battle cards (like Klue, and Crayon)

It's a great idea to get sales involved pre-launch. A really great idea! Here are some thoughts on how to do that: 1/ Find the innovative sellers on your team and give them early access to content, messaging, demo, etc. so they can start testing and provide feedback 2/ Start enabling and creating early excitement around a new product months before it officially GA. Sales all-hands, roadmap sessions, demo days, etc. 3/ Create a forum for sales to share market insights and what they are hearing from customers and prospects in the new product area

When a significant part of your business/pipeline comes from partners you need to prioritize partner enablement. Here are a few suggestions: 1/ Try to find creative ways to repurpose your core sales enablement programs and materials and how you can adjust them to the partner audience. 2/ Look for opportunities to train and trainer in the partner org and create a network effect for scale 3/ Identify key reps within the partner team that have been successful with your product and build a case study around them - turn them into your advocate 4/ Make sure the partner selling team understands how they make money from partnering with you

Enablement can be delivered in multiple formats. It can be a full fledge broadcast session to the entire team, or it can also be a roadshow going into weekly team calls to deliver the new pitch deck, review new persona playbooks, or roll out new pricing. Think about how you pattern interrupt to get people's attention and make this super relevant to their world - answer the key question: how will this help me sell 10x faster and better? My final advice: work closely with your sales leadership and sales enablement team to align on the timing and the best way to deliver the enablement. Without this alignment, your programs may not land well. Also, from one enablement to another, always ask for feedback so you can continue to improve. 

There are multiple ways to get insights into your selling motion: 1/ Listen to sales calls - that's an obvious one but you can get pretty systematic with it, create a regular cadence for reviewing calls by certain tags and keywords 2/ Join sales calls - highly recommended for PMMs to attend calls, present on these calls and get a first hands experience of what it's like to be on the front lines, how prospects are resonating with the message, where they get stuck, where reps are struggling, etc. 3/ Build dashboards in Salesforce to track deals by product /pricing bundle/ICP segment /geo etc. so you can track performance and identify bottlenecks in stage progression 4/ Talk to your sales team regularly, attend their team calls and QBRs, and have 1:1s with top-performing and bottom-performing reps and SEs so you can learn from them what's working and what's not working 5/ Run win/loss analysis programs and interview prospects to understand what they liked about the selling motion and where there's room for improvement 

The most important KPI is win rates and cycle time - are you seeing an increase in win rate and shorter cycles. While measuring these KPIs and tracking for trends, it's also important to get regular feedback from sales, sales leadership and individual reps on what's working and what's not. You can do this via survey and calculate a "sales readiness score", or collect feedback on 1:1s or team calls. One other way to measure the success of enablement programs is by listening to sales calls and correlating the use of a new pitch deck/product messaging/competitive positioning to win rates.