AMA: Zendesk Senior Director Product Marketing, Mozhdeh Rastegar-Panah on Sales Enablement

There are many ways to measure whether Sales is properly enabled but the goal setting is just as important as the measuring. A few key things to remember, goals should be: realistic, agreed upon before enablement content is developed, and measured in a way that supports qualitative and quantitative feedback. Why you might ask? 1- Realistic: our enablement team always reminds us that sales will only remember 10% of the content you shared. Really! 2- Agreed upon: taking a moment to work with your content teams to understand what are truly the key takeaways. What do they want to make sure Sales remembers? It is okay to nudge them into a direction that lands on the 10%. 3- Qualitative & quantitative measures: proper enablement is subjective in many ways so ensure you are taking into account volume of replies with a quick thumbs up/down alongside the opportunity to provide comments/color into how you can continually improve. Finally, don't measure in isolation, understand what all is going on across all enablement. You can find that list for sales gets longer pretty quickly. Work with your functional teams to develop an intake process and throttle the enablement throughout the quarter.

I will assume this question is meant for a growing startup who has just started hiring a more formal enablement team. Sales enablement at its core is meant to ensure the business is providing the right training at the right time, that is aligned to the company's objectives and future direction. This calls for a bit of discovery to help you validate that you are building a curriculum to solve the RIGHT problems. In order to understand the areas of opportunity, a bit of discovery is in order: 1- Talk to Sales leadership: understand where they believe the gaps are and push for a stank ranking if the list gets long :) 2- Shadow reps: sometimes you can learn the most from listening to some phone calls or ride along in mtgs with some of the best performing and some of the worst performing reps. Reps themselves are also a good source of information on where they are struggling. 3- Audit current content: how are reps learning about your target buyers, product messaging, competition, etc? Who built that content? Is there a new team that can help define that content (ie Product Mktg!)? At the most basic level, your reps need to know who they should be selling to (prospect characteristics) and what that messaging should be (founded in your company differentiators). If you can start there and ensure there is a proper onboarding, you can stop the bleeding as new reps join your company. Once that's set, you can think about tackling more complex training.

Great question! This is where a tiering structure comes in handy. Despite what some folks might say, not all enablement needs are created equal and neither should their delivery formats and timing. Here is one way to think about it: Tier 1 - Live Training: time sensitive, more-complex content, highest impact, could get value from live Q&A Tier 2 - Lab Course Training: time sensitive, less-complex content, high impact, live Q&A not required Tier 3 - Async Training: not time sensitive, less-complex content, can be batched together, lower impact but tactically still needed

We did this at Zendesk with a two prong approach: survey for quantitive feedback and focus groups for qualitative feedback. 1- Survey: We sent out a VP-backed survey to all reps that helped us understand the value of the assets we currently provide (stack ranked), what content they would like to have that is missing, and what self-made content they use most often. This was also sliced & diced at a regional level to ensure we had a global lens. Once we developed some hypothesis around what worked and what needed adjustments, we used the focus groups to help provide some validation to our revised approach. 2- Focus groups: ensured representation from segments and regions to help us validate our hypothesis and ensure our revised approach would actually solve the challenges. Finally, make sure that readouts are provided back to the Sales leaders alongside a plan to deliver adjustments. If you can also plan to survey those same recipients in 6-12 months, it would be a great way to validate the changes you made had the impact you were hoping for.

Prioritizing enablement is such a difficult question but ultimately I would ensure that you have alignment with: where you see the business is focused, timing of upcoming launches, and complexity of content. I've shared a tiering structure as well in a prior comment based on a variety of delivery methods. Ideally you have a tight connection with your Sales / Sales Strategy team - but if you don't, a good rule of thumb is to follow the $. Understand the price points of your products and what the business intends to sell in the coming quarter. Sales will likely prioritize high ADS products that will help them hit quota - so aligning to that isn't a bad start. Timing of launches are important as well - hopefully there is a natural throttling that will make it easier for you but if it is one massive launch, I would think about a plan that builds up to the launch day. Work closely with Product Marketing to understand what updates can be groups together, what must be live versus in a lab course, etc. Having regular touch points with your content creators will certainly help bring predictability which is great for everyone.

We have done a variety of things over time which I'll list out here: 1- Leveraged tools like Gong to get reporting on critical topics, key ways of selling, and also understand gaps in messaging 2- Align a GTM PMM team whose role is to stay connected to your field team. They are expected to have contacts in every sales role & region who can act as stakeholders when we have key questions or want to get a pulse on the business. 3- Leverage underway programs that are happening like Deal Reviews led by sales management to support sales strategy or Leadership Forums that Customer Success uses to bring customers together. Don't reinvent the wheel but be an active supporting participant in these programs. Ask questions, offer help, and yes, also learn!