June’s First Friday was led by Jo for the first time and was focused on sales enablement. We were thrilled to be joined by three fantastic panellists offering their unique perspectives from their work across marketing and sales – Jason Hatch: Senior Director at Palo Alto Networks, Maria Ferrara: Service Provider Marketing Manager EMEA and LATAM and Mark Hollman: Experienced former Vice President of Partnerships.
What does sales enablement mean to you?
To set the scene for the discussion, Jo asked the panellists to take a moment to share what sales enablement means to them. Offering up a sales perspective, Jason kicked things off; “we talk a lot about enablement in the channel, but in fact, I think we should almost move away from the word enablement to activation… marketing can play a key and essential role in that. Activation needs to be hand in glove with sales and with marketing.”
Mark echoed this adding, “Ultimately enablement is all about accelerating and enhancing sales’ ability to sell. The best sales enablement in my experience is fully supported as a programme with cross functional collaboration, not just between sales and marketing, but also the product portfolio and commercial finance.”
Maria shared a marketing perspective, acknowledging the importance of empowerment and confidence and the role marketing needs to play to enable themselves, with suitable levels of product knowledge and commercial awareness.
How much product information is enough?
One of the key questions that came up in our preparations for this First Friday discussion was around how much product knowledge is enough. Sharing her views as a marketeer, Maria says, “it’s important to have a good understanding of what we’re selling, what our customers want and what their needs are. That doesn’t mean we need an in-depth understanding, but we need to be able to confidently do an elevator pitch. To build our product knowledge, every quarter we have a marketing learning day to take a deep dive into the product portfolio. That said, leaning takes place every single day.”
Mark echoed this, “You need to have enough depth to be able to translate the benefits of the technology into meaningful business outcomes; developing a messaging framework that connects the outcomes that are sought by both the technical and the business buyers back to the product features.”
The power of three
Viewing sales enablement through the lens of sales, Jason expanded on Marks point around the need for a messaging framework with short, sharp and succinct messages, adding, “you know those key business outcome messages, there should be no more than three.” And there’s lots of science to back this up. Three is the lowest figure that can be used for patterns in our mind. Our brains often breaks up complex concepts into three parts to make information easier to understand and analysed.
Jason continues, “one thing that I’ve learned from experience is to get commitment from the sales director that once a quarter sales teams learn and master a 60 second elevator pitch, using those key messages. From my experience, no one enjoys doing it. But if you make it mandatory, though it may feel uncomfortable, the next day sales can go out and feel more confident with their pitch.”
Sales enablement with channel partners
Viewer question: “How do you also encourage channel sales to get comfortable with pitching too? Do you make use of incentive programmes?”
This was a fantastic question from one of our attendees, and the collective response from our panelists was that things are changing. Jason highlighted the need for channel, marketing and sales to work as one “At Palo Alto Networking, sales through the channel are compensated in the same way. They’re incentivised in the same way and, because of that, we expect the same kind of level of sales skills. The divide between channel, marketing and sales needs to blur so that people can come together and start operating as one.
Mark reflected on the evolving nature of partnerships; “The notion of what makes a partnership has changed. It used to be the case that you would look at a supplier and vendor relationship almost and call it a partnership. Now partnership is all about what you can do together to get a joint outcome. This includes sell to, sell through, sell with, buy from, buy through.”
Reflecting on the role of incentives for channel partners Jason adds, “We’re certainly finding there’s an appetite to do incentives again. And we’d really moved away from that. Fundamentally, it needs ROI against it, and it requires collaboration between partners. Marketing can as a good conduit between those two.”
Sharing the role marketing plays, Maria discussed the ways in which marketing can help to drive incentive programmes; “There’s lots of creative ways you can do this. Something I’ve found works really is taking a longer-term approach. You may launch an incentive programme at the start of the year, but to maintain momentum and drive the right behaviours, you continually reinvigorate sales teams by reminding them of goals, sharing learnings and focusing their attention on the incentive.”
Measuring the ROI of sales enablement
The three words we come back to in every session; return on investment. Taking a question from our attendees, Helen asks “what are your measure of success, and how do you report back to the business on investment made?”
Maria kicks off the response by sharing that success for Palo Alto Networking is ultimately pipeline generation or revenue. But that can be difficult to measure, which is why they set a range of softer measures from the outset.
Mark highlighted the importance of calls to action, “One of the measures that I put in place was looking at a combination of direct and indirect attribution. Where we had a defined call to action, we were able to measure the impact in terms of new opportunities raised as a result.”
What about when you’re in the driving seat? Jason says, “From my experience over the last four years, marketing budgets within our partnerships have dried up quite significantly and we as vendors have been paying for 100% of the marketing. It’s a bit like it’s a bit like paying 100% for your wedding ; if you pay for your wedding, you can then determine who you’re going to invite. One thing that we’ve done at Palo Alto Networking is that when we’re paying 100% towards a marketing initiative, we make sure that we are driving it in the way that we want to, including building in how we report on ROI.”
Sales enablement platforms
Another question we received from the attendees was around sales enablement platforms. Is there a particular tool any of the panellists could recommend, and which content format has the most impact?
Maria shares insight into Palo Alto Networking’s sales enablement tool; “We have our next wave partner portal, and our website where our partners can download a plethora of information. When it comes to format, everyone consumes information in different ways, so it’s important to have a variety.”
Jason echoes this, “We’re just running a programme for one of the large telcos in Europe which is a mixture of formats. There is a fundamentals course, which they need to do online, followed by face-to-face training and enablement. We’re then tying that to an incentive which is around opportunity creation, an opportunity hub and deal clinic. Visual and online works, but face to face is still really important.”
Highlighting the changing demographics of sales teams, Mark discusses how he’s used social media style platforms to deliver sales enablement content “We shouldn’t underestimate is considering the demographic of the audience.”
How can sales, marketing and product come together to drive sales enablement?
Throughout the panel discussion collaboration was highlighted as integral to effective sales enablement, so we rounded up the discussion by asking James, Maria and Mark how key stakeholders can best come together to collaborate.
Jason starts by saying that he believes marketing is the conduit for this collaboration; “The key element here is to use marketing as the umbrella. That’s what Coterie has done quite well in the past; linking marketing with the vendor, the partner, to be that observational piece in the middle. Sometimes vendors and partners are difficult to have a conversation with because it can be seen as confrontational.”
Having worked in marketing, sales and product Mark adds; “The agendas of each team can be different, and they may be wanting to push different things to different people at the same time. Sales are usually able to articulate the challenges they’re coming up against in the field, and marketing can really help sales articulate that unique value, but only when they work together with the product organisation and indeed with the partner. A unified value proposition and a Tiger team are essential to fostering collaboration.”
Sharing the role of marketing in cross-role collaboration, Maria says, “I just want to say that marketing is good at bringing people together. A Tiger team is creating a diverse team of people from different departments who can give a unique perspective. This is great when you’re doing something like a joint value proposition as you’re able to look at it from all angles.
“At the same time, you need to keep your Tiger team small. You can’t open the doors too much. You want to keep it quite specific. Too many people can result in too many opinions. You need to make sure you’re engaging the right stakeholders and bringing them together.”
It was a fantastic and collaborative session, and we’d like to say a huge that you to Jason, Maria and Mark for leading such a fantastic discussion, and offering their unique perspectives on sales enablement.
Five in five: things to consider
To help you put this insight into practice, we invite you to spend five minutes reflecting on sales enablement within your organisation. To help you, we’ve put together five prompts based on their conversations to guide your reflections:
- How could you utilise the ‘power of three’ in your sales enablement messaging?
- When was the last time you and your team practiced and refined your elevator pitch?
- What steps could you take to drive and reinvigorate your channel partner incentives?
- What are your sales enablement personas, and how can this insight be used to drive your enablement approach?
- How could a cross-function ‘Tiger Team’ develop a unified approach across sales, marketing and product?
Don’t forget to look at our partner marketing templates to access our downloadable sales enablement resources.