What strategies do you recommend for developing and implementing an internal approval process for sales enablement collateral? To make sure all relevant parties are involved but also to keep the process moving forward and getting pieces out the door?

We use the Agile framework and have all approvals go through our review board. Keeps everyone aligned and in the same workflow!

I've found a two tier, "silence = approval" system strikes a good balance between expediency, being respectful of people's time and facilitating a lot of visibility. 

First, agree on your review teams. Tier one should be people with whom you've got a close working relationship, close to the product. For example, you might pick your PM, an SE a sales rep, an SDR and someone from corporate marketing. This will vary a lot by organization, so I'm not making any attempt to come up with an exhaustive list. For the second tier, you'd typically expand the aperature a bit and include tier one plus more senior folks who are more hands off. You may also want to include legal in the second stage if this is going to an external audience like channel partners, or hold them to the end. 

Start with tier one, give them a deadline for feedback and set the expectation that if you don't hear from them by the deadline you will consider it acceptance. Then move on to tier two and set the same expectation. 

Finally, set the expectation throughout the process that these are living sales tools - and that they will evolve over time. This takes pressure off of people to respond if they don't have the bandwidth and gives you a little breathing room. 

I have kept it simple when it comes to an internal approval process for sales enablement collateral. 

(1) A meeting for Sales & CS leadership approval/outcome is sales and cs leadership assigned their
highest performing reps to get them to test collateral 

(2) Meet with key high performing sales reps to go over collateral and timing of the test. 

(3) Meeting to intro to the greater sales team and get any last-minute feedback 

(4) Rollout 

All the above can be done virtually via Zoom or an LMS too for the later stage.

We host an internal sales training prior to the launch of new features and products. During this time, we cover:

1. Why the updates matter to the sales team and the prospects
2. What's new + demo
3. How to access the new feature/product for demo purposes
4. Additional resources (videos, help articles, screenshots etc.)

Additionally, we have a checklist (this includes deliverables from product, marketing, sales, success = key for keeping momentum and accountability) and weekly GTM meeting where a sales representative is included in the cross functional team. This creates transparency and visibility into the new features/products coming down the pipeline, and the sales representative is empowered to influence marketing/sales collateral creation and the makeup of the internal sales training.