Why Enablement Needs Product Marketing Now More Than Ever

Speakers

Jarod Greene
Jarod Greene
Vice President, Product Marketing, Highspot
Jen Bunting
Jen Bunting
Head of Product Marketing for EMEA & LATAM at LinkedIn
Podcast Transcript

Jarod Greene: Hi everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Leading the Way, the sales enablement podcast. My name is Jarod Greene. I’m the Vice President of Product Marketing at Highspot. And today, I’m delighted to be joined by Jen Bunting. Jen is a product marketing leader, currently responsible for go to market strategy, sales enablement, product launches and product adoption. And in this episode, we’re discussing how enablement needs product marketing now, more than ever, thanks for joining me, Jen. Can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

Jen Bunting: Hi, Jarod. And hello, everyone. Thanks for having me. So my name is Jen Bunting. And I’ve been a product marketer for almost 12 years. I’ve been in marketing for about 20 years. I’ve been at LinkedIn for a lot of that time. And I’m currently based in London. So I look after product marketing. Basically if you’re on LinkedIn, and you see our ad products, that’s the suite of products my team looks after, and I focus on the EMEA LAM region.

JAROD: Awesome. So we look at strategy enablement, volunteers and adoption. How do you find time to get anything else done? That is quite an extensive range of responsibilities.

JEN: It is a lot. It’s all about prioritization. We spend a lot of time thinking about the year ahead, the half year ahead, the quarter ahead and trying to work really closely with the product teams, the sales teams, cross channel marketing teams, and my team in EMEA. We focus on me and London is much smaller than our global PMM team. So we really focus on what is going to drive the needle most for our customers and our sales teams. And we have to make those hard prioritization calls.

JAROD: Absolutely. And speaking of prioritization, that’s one of the challenges we see a lot for marketing leaders, they’re under a lot of pressure to do a lot of things. They have to build a tonne of pipeline, they have to now convert that pipeline and improve the win rates they have to improve customer experience. And ultimately, we see that there’s a lot of things that can get in the way of them doing that. Stop me if you heard this before, but one of the things we hear is that buying teams are more sophisticated. They’re larger, they’ve gone from five to 12 to 20, in the latest Forrester b2b statistics. So with a buying team that large in that form, it creates a lot of consternation for things because we find that sometimes the buyer comes in more informed than some of the sellers in some scenarios. At the same time, the product line’s getting more complex. And so to meet the needs of these buyers, some companies are building more capabilities into the products, different pricing models, different licensing models, different skews. So now the products are becoming more complex. And that creates some consternation for marketing teams, your sellers now have to know it all they have to not only be subject matter experts in the products that they sell, but also information connectors across that bond committee. How do I understand the needs of persona A, persona B, and persona C and not tell them contradict your stories? And then most of the things that we hear that sales and marketing, they’re just focused on too many things. Too many initiatives at once too many sales plays, too much content, too much training, too many tools. Jen, again, have you seen these challenges in either your day-to-day or as you talk to other product marketing leaders, of these things that resonate with them?

JEN: Now it’s so easy. Now I’m obviously sorry, just trying to surprise your listeners. But yeah, it is definitely a challenge. That is my day to day. And so I’m a member of the product marketing Alliance. And I’m also on the IAB UK board for social media. And it’s a challenge everyone is definitely facing. And on top of that, so all of those things are true that you said. And I think another thing too, as businesses are returning to growth, for product marketers, the headcount of our sales colleagues is typically faster and higher than us. So that means we have more stakeholders to learn what their needs are, and balanced that with business objectives. But also, if you’re trying to, if your sales team isn’t ready to sell the product, you’re just not gonna be able to go to market, you’re not gonna be able to drive adoption, you’re gonna have high churn. So you also have to all of a sudden, onboard all of these salespeople from scratch, they need to learn your business and your client, or customer or prospect needs to feel like they are part of the team and they always have been there. So how do you help them get up to speed really quickly and like it’s in everybody’s best interest if they can hit their quota and, and their clients are happy? So there’s all of that going on at the same time, as you know, new products, launching all the challenges that you just mentioned?

JAROD: Yeah, yeah, it’s really interesting. You say that because it sounds like that. You put sales in the same bucket as you do your customers. You know, they need to be enabled, aware and powered, knowledgeable, insightful. And the ability to make sure that the buyers, your customers or prospects have that same level of knowledge and context in confidence. Is that an accurate summation of the situation?

JEN: Definitely. I mean, these sales teams talk to the customers more than anyone else at the company. So even for like ours, we think about the voice of customer at LinkedIn, but we also think about the voice of the field. And so that’s part of the process in terms of deciding what should we think about putting on the periodic product roadmap. So we talked to sales, prior to talking to customers, and they helped introduce us to customers as well, that are facing challenges so we can have those conversations directly with them. Yeah, they’re, they’re vital, vital to the success of the business and having that partnership.

JAROD: Absolutely. Absolutely. Talk to me a little bit about what that feedback loop looks like. Is that a formal charter? Is it more informal, more, more Lunch and Learn More? stop and chat to the hallway talk about what that structure of the feedback loop between product marketing and the field looks like? I’m sure our listeners would be keen to understand that.

JEN: Sure. I mean, it’s definitely for me anyway, it’s changed over the years, when I joined LinkedIn, we were still technically classified as a startup public, we got acquired by Microsoft. So there’s been changes in that over the course of time. Right now, it is definitely more on the formal side. But even that, I would say it changes. We evaluate how effective the process was each time. Right now the process looks like we hear from sales teams, what customers have talked about from the sales team perspective, since we’re talking about sales enablement. So we hear from the sales teams, we do a lot of account prioritization and talking to, like, how are they going to grow these accounts. And so, in that, what always comes up are all the challenges that salesperson faces to grow that that size of the account. And product is often part of that. So we listen to them. And we do a lot of trying to like size up the price. Like if we make this change, that means we can’t do something else. So what is going to drive the biggest, solve the biggest customer need. So sometimes for salesperson that might be growing revenue, protecting revenue, or it might be making the platform easier to use so that our customers are happy, and they want to keep coming back for more. So we look at all of this twice a year, we have conversations after we talk to sales and customers, we then have conversations with the product teams. And we have to prioritize because resources are limited, like at every company. And then the closing the loop happens, which is we need to now tell the sales team, what we did with all that feedback, we need to show that we listen to them. And we involve their leadership in that conversation. And so the closing the loop session feels maybe formal, but it is kind of formal. So it’s a it’s a Zoom call, the guts of it, it is a Zoom call with head of product and the product teams. So there’s a lot of products. So marketing, the ad solutions or marketing solutions alone has around 100 to 150 feature updates and changes every year. So there’s a lot of different product people and product marketing people on that call, and we invite the sales team. And it’s really a great opportunity for them to hear directly from product, why those decisions were made. Because the reality is they’re not asking for something that they don’t need or a customer doesn’t need. It’s just what is the greatest need for the customer. And so we try to be really transparent, and help them understand why we couldn’t do everything we want to do this coming quarter and show what what the what the vision is to get where we want to go in the future.

JAROD: Love it. Yeah, I’m a big fan of kind of product marketing, setting the table. It’s always been a challenge of, how does Product Marketing get a seat at it. And I love the notion of just setting your own table and inviting people that need to be a part of the conversation. It ultimately is one of those areas where I I think product marketing as I call it are unbiased observer who can understand the go to market strategy, understand the product, understand the market, understand the needs of sellers, obviously understand the needs of customers can kind of be the team or the function that puts it all together. And again, I think that that becomes really important for enablement, because again, they’re not going to be able to create content for every single thing that they need. But your ability to to understand what the company’s strategy is, what the goals and objectives are, how many, how much demand you need to produce, how much demand you need to convert really allows you to set those priorities that that is phenomenal to hear and kudos To you and the team for facilitating that kind of touchpoint

JEN: Thank you. It is an ongoing learning process that always has this other thing I guess for your listeners, one year, it’ll work perfectly. And just when you have it figured out something in your sales team or your own marketing team, your structures change, and you have to revisit the process, but it’s, it’s its product, and also, like organizations are living beings, and sometimes their needs change. So we try our best, and we work really closely with product and sales to make it happen.

JAROD: Yeah, it’s the only constant change for sure. And so I’m gonna give you an alliteration alert. I have a little equation that I use, and I think my team’s tired of hearing it. But it’s a simple one that says, If you give sellers content, without context, you get chaos. They just, they just won’t know how to use, you just throw content over the wall, you just bombard him with all the stuff and say, here’s all the stuff Steve asked for, here’s all the stuff Megan asked for. For you just throw it over the wall, what ends up happening is that you see low pockets of adoption with it. And it can run the risk of being kind of incongruent with a larger set of motions. And so we flip the equation and say, content plus context equals confidence, if I can give you context and how to use the content we’re supplying you with, you now have competence to go execute it effectively. And then that’s where we start to see the adoption, the satisfaction, the retention will go up. Feel free to disagree with the equation, but we would just love your thoughts on that frame to think about the way we arm sellers to be successful.

JEN: I love it, I’m going to steal it. I love a good alliteration, and it really rings true for me. So I guess a story that backs that up. So I was in product marketing when I lived in Sydney for LinkedIn. And then I did a slight career shift. And I went into content marketing, before I eventually came back to product marketing. But when I was doing content marketing, I was still working with all the same sales teams. And one of the people in sales that I worked with was just really sad. He’s, he’s like, Oh, you’re going to content marketing, you’re not going to be working on anything that I need anymore. And it was a learning moment, because anything I produced from whether it was giving feedback to product and launching something to go to market or the adoption, or whether it was okay, I’m going to build a content strategy for your market from scratch. Everything that is being produced is for your clients and you. So I’m still doing everything for you and your team. And so we did a lot of, for lack of a better word like evangelism or branding of our own content marketing with the sales team. So we would have our external launch. And we had an internal launch and said, here’s these resources, this ebook is coming out, it maps back to the product roadmap, so you can sell something that’s coming out but allows you to elevate your conversation, it’ll help drive leads, but we had we it’s similar to I guess, sales enablement for brand new product launch. But even from like, content perspective, anything your client sees, they may ask the salesperson about and so we just tried to make sure they felt completely supported through that whole journey. And I think the simplest way to do this, I gave them the context. So they would know why it’s on the roadmap.

JAROD: It’s fascinating, right? Like that notion of, you know, everything we create as marketers is for the customer, or for the audience. It’s for the buyer, the prospect, the the analysts, sometimes right, there’s a tonne of content we do. But knowing how and when to use it, I think is the most important, you know, lever to pull or consideration to make when you think about before you put pen to paper on it. How is this going to be used? What channel does this sit in? What’s the goal of it? Because I also think there’s the world and I’m sure many can relate to this. It’s, at some point in time, everybody’s a marketer. Everybody’s a content marketer, but as a product marketer, everyone’s built a pitch deck. Everyone’s built their version of an e book, everyone’s written their own white paper. But without that context, it is very easy to live in a world where there are now 20,000 things out there. And a seller is going into a meeting in 15 minutes and has no idea what context they need to be successful in that.

JEN: Yeah, it gets back to the prioritization element to like we have so many products and features at launch. And part of my job as a regional product marketer is to explain to the regional marketing team, this is what is going to make the biggest difference in the EU. This is what’s going to make the biggest difference in Brazil and have the same conversations with the sales team. Because otherwise everything, everything to product is equally important and valuable. And they put the same amount of blood, sweat and tears into all of that. So when it comes to taking that to our customers, we have to do all of that, you know, contextualization and prioritization so that it makes sense. Otherwise, it would just be a continuous waterfall of information. And people wouldn’t know what to do with it.

JAROD: No, definitely not. So I, I hear another element and you talk a little bit about this in the feedback loop with the sellers. But you know, we as product, we do a lot of research on the market in general, we look at kind of trends, we look at win loss analysis, we keep a pulse of what our competitors are doing, we look at shifting buyer needs. And then we use that information to kind of support the notion of campaigns, whether they’re formally structured, you know, multi-channel, omni-channel campaigns, whether they’re internal campaigns to drive awareness of all the great stuff you did, as you mentioned, a few minutes ago. But again, talk to me about the handoff of that content. How does your product marketing team partner with the enablement function, which we haven’t brought up in detail, but we think about the sales enablement world? What role do they play in helping make sure that that context for the content gets landed the right way.

JEN: So we’re really lucky at LinkedIn now that we do have a sales enablement team. But when I first joined, we didn’t. So it was very difficult. But even now, even on LinkedIn, as a big company, we only have a very small sales enablement team. And their responsibility covers, not just making sure that we that they, you know, are there that kind of content between product marketing and the sales teams, but they think about sales best practices, and how do they how do you basically be a better more effective salesperson or customer support person. So they have a whole range of curriculum, they have online learning, they have in-person training, there was a point in time where we used to travel and do like in-office training with different teams. That wasn’t scalable after a while at LinkedIn. But there’s a variety of ways that you can get in front of the sales team. And so the sales enablement team today helps us understand what that is. And they kind of own the roadmap of time learning time for the sales team. So LinkedIn is very fortunate in that we own LinkedIn Learning, which was formerly lynda.com. So there’s all sorts of like learning outside of even their day job, they could be learning Python, or Photoshop if they wanted to. But we have specific curriculum that they are required to learn in order to sell the newest products or to report back to the business on what they’re doing. So the sales enablement team kind of owns that. So we do have a quarterly product release. And the global cams work with the global sales enablement, and they kind of come up with a calendar. So they have, they do have kind of monthly trainings, I believe, but there are required elements on a quarterly basis that map up to like the biggest launches that happened that quarter. And they use an online platform that they can kind of look through and help to understand. Was this training resonating? Did people make it all the way through? How did they go? Were they able to take the practice questions and stuff? So they helped kind of create all of that so that as PMMs, we think through, what what are the main things people need to know? But the sales enablement team thinks about how do we put it into place? And they can also let us know are there other things happening in the business that the sales team needs to be trained for, that’s going to be kind of a conflict on their time, because they want to make sure they spend as many hours as possible selling, whether it’s on the phone, whether it’s on Zoom, whether it’s now back in person with clients. So it’s all about maximizing the sales training time. But also, it’s that kind of, it’s a very delicate balance of, you still have to know about the product that’s coming out. Otherwise, you can’t sell it, you won’t hit your quota. And the worst case scenario, I think, for a lot of salespeople is for a client to ask a question about something they just saw a press release or a blog post or saw something from your company. And the salesperson did not know that is an awful feeling. It feels like you’ve lost face in front of the client. And so my goal, which I don’t know how to measure it, but my kind of unspoken goal for me and my team is to avoid that feeling for salespeople. That way, they at least know where to go to have that information. So there’s all of those trainings. And then also we think about email comms. So how often do we email people like there’s so many different cross functional sales, cross functional marketing teams, so we have to be very careful that we don’t just spam the sales team that otherwise they won’t be able to find what they need?

JAROD: No, no, we say it all the time. It’s like if they find out about the release or capability or partnership or integration through a press release, we all we all messed up something horribly arrived, or or or very likely too, weren’t paying attention.

JAROD: Yeah, the accountabilities that I’ve just done. A big fan of that. But I think when you do have the dynamic, you talked about where product market and enablement are tied at the hip, there’s the notion of a calendar, a forward looking schedule, it might be the case that Jake misses the Tuesday meeting, but the recording is here, and that place to go to get that is context that’s relevant. So I do agree that that is a very, very effective way to keep yourself kind of mindful of what sellers go through exercise a little bit in the empty you talk to, but also we’re gonna hold them accountable.

JEN: Yeah. And sometimes things happen that you can’t predict and product marketing, I think the worst assignment you can be given at the product marketer is to sunset or deprecate or product. No one goes into product marketing, thinking they’re gonna have to do that. You’re thinking about the future, and what the possibilities are and the next new thing, or how do you use what’s existing to grow revenue and grow your company? Sometimes removing a product is very difficult. It’s difficult for you as a PMM, but sales teams, they absolutely loathe it, they don’t like having to tell the client that even if it was something the client rarely ever use, that something’s being removed. And those things tend to happen with shorter notice. And so then, kind of how do you like, like, I don’t want say beg for time. But sometimes it’s kind of like, please let us talk to the sales team, let us come to a sales meeting, let us go to all these sessions. We don’t want to ask sales teams to take away time from their clients. But they have to know this change is coming. And that is also a more emotional conversation if something is being taken away. But they do pay attention.

JAROD: They do, they do. Yeah, I absolutely believe that. You know, salespeople have a very difficult job to do. And, you know, confidence is key to everything. If they can be confident in their abilities to land those messages, whether they’re good messages or not so good messages, they can build the right levels of credibility with their audience. And that’s that’s key to it all. I want to shift gears a minute, I have a question on the way you guys think about personas. We’ve had some debates internally on do we go really deep into persona marketing. Product marketing builds the personas and says, here’s the persona for above the line marketer, above the line sales, above the line enablement. And we’ll have kind of an understanding of a data life and information sources, but then become real. One of the ways we use them is we build content from the persona guides. And we work with our sales team to validate that yes, these are the traits and themes you see amongst personas you work with. There’s also the side that says if you go too deep on personalization, you run the risk of speaking too specific to one persona. And then when you have to now back out and talk to their peer persona that you’ve changed or altered the messaging. How do you deal with that kind of complexity? I don’t think we’ve got this quite figured out yet. But I’m curious how you think about personas and outcomes across five teams. Because with that complexity, the need to do this well, I think is really important.

JEN: That’s a very good question. And we also haven’t cracked that puzzle yet. Our teams in the US have done tons of work around persona building. I think it’s very, very challenging, especially if your organization is international, and your customers’ levels of sophistication and company sizes, like it can just be so so drastically different. For me, what is easiest at the moment is thinking. So we have clients that are kind of segmented, how do we do it? There’s lots of different perceptions and segments, I guess, is the long and short answer. So when I think about my role, specifically in product marketing, and something that is launching and coming out from an app perspective, I’m off, I’m often more kind of in a persona of someone who is the user of our ad products. So they are an individual contributor. They have to have their hands in the weeds, but we also then have to influence all the different decision makers, stakeholders within the organization. It’s really difficult and the sales team may have what I have found most challenging is where we’ve tried to build a persona. And what we needed from a marketing standpoint didn’t match exactly what the sales team needed. So I guess my my, my short thought is, it’s really complicated. And the only way to get better at it is to constantly be trying and testing and see which which persona is going to work but I think for us we definitely, I definitely find it easier when I think Think about, here’s your C suite, here are your kind of leaders who are not quite in that sea level yet. And then here’s your individual contributors, and then thinking through who needs what product information along that journey, because A, A person who is going to go, for example, we have something called campaign manager, that’s where you set up your ad campaigns on LinkedIn. In most cases, unless you’re talking about very small startup, your CEO is not going to be in there. And the CEO is wanting to think about how can LinkedIn solve a variety of problems even including attracting and retaining talent with for Furthermore, at marketing org, as well as how do they use LinkedIn to to get buyers and leads to know about their company? So it just becomes, for me thinking about what does that individual—what’s their role within the decision-making process? And then I can map how much information they need given time. I feel like I’ve waffled a bit, I think that’s just testament that it’s a very difficult nut to crack.

JAROD: Very difficult. Yeah, we would love the adoptive touch base offline and get a sense of some of the ways, you know, we can do it better, too. And we haven’t solved it yet. And I think my biggest fear sometimes is, you know, we’ve told a marketer, this salesperson this and enablement person, this and they should all aligned to the same set of outcomes, they should be the things that they all want, right, you want to make more money, you want to reduce your sales cycle time, you want to increase your average deal size, but the house is a little different for each of those roles. Market is gonna have a different angle on that the enablement team is gonna have a different angle on that so that nuance becomes really important. One more question for you. Before I ask you the final, you talked before about prioritization, and notion of how you can’t do all the things. One of my mottos is that, you know, less is more, let’s be super specific and super intentional about what we do create and provide because we’ll get better leverage out of it. But Product Marketing at any moment in time can be grabbed into any room, whether it’s the customer success room solving adoption problem, the sales room to solve a complete problem, the marketing room to figure out how to jumpstart a campaign, the product room to figure out how to talk about the value of the thing, there’s so many rooms you can get pulled into. And this is just Monday morning, before you sit down and had your coffee. How do you prevent your team from being pulled into so many directions? And diplomatically saying? No, we’re not now in a way that allows you to maintain the credibility you’ve worked so hard to build?

JEN: That’s a question we think about every day. And also, we just had, like our.. we plan on our fiscal year, which starts in July, we just had a team off site where we had a reminder training called the necessity of No, and just trying to get everyone on the team, whether they’ve been here for three weeks or 12 years like me, reminding them you have to say no, you cannot do your job without saying no, we even had our head of sales for the region. Come and buy him for like a fireside chat. And he talked about how important it is for him to prioritize as well. So I think one thing that makes this a lot easier is when everyone from the top down knows it is not humanly possible to do everything. So you knowing that they’re prioritizing and we are going to prioritize that kind of puts us in a really good position to, Okay, let’s prioritize together now. Then the next part I try to think about is, there’s from a strategy perspective, what are going to be the big bets, a lot of people at LinkedIn use something called the I think it’s called the Eisenhower matrix. I don’t know if your listeners have heard of that. But it looks at your, your responsibilities, as I believe it’s critical and urgent, and then you put it in like a four by four and think about critical to urgent, and then that helps you prioritize your day, but that doesn’t always help me personally, when I’m thinking about building the strategy and we have quarterly objectives for each person on the team as well. So how do I help my team start to compartmentalize this and do it on their own without me. So one of my previous managers has a version of the Eisenhower matrix, which is about on one on your on your vertical axis is time. So how much time is it going to take you, how much resource is it integrated into it? And the other one is revenues for the horizontal revenue, and then I try to map it and so if I have a bunch of things that are being asked for my team or myself that are low revenue, yielding high time taking things I try to nix all of those and focus on things that are going to be a lighter lift but have outsized results, very little actually falls in that bucket either. It feels like the reality is, is you have things that make a big impact in terms of revenue, but they also take a lot of your time. So then I try to kind of think about how much realistically can people do there. And so that that space starts to get very small. And it’s having conversations at the annual planning stage at every quarterly business review, or quarterly Marketing Review. This is what we focused on. And here’s, here’s the result that that had. And it means you get better results for doing fewer things. And so once we have success with that, it’s easier to continue that momentum, but it’s getting everyone’s buy in early on that, like, just as you would say, here’s the things I’m going to do this quarter, I also tell my stakeholders, here are the things that unfortunately, even though we want to work on those things, we are not going to be able to do that this quarter. And that makes it that preserves those relationships. It’s we focus a lot on transparency, which sounds like, you know, a fancy, like, business jargon word, but to me, I interpret transparency is I am, I have the opportunity to tell my stakeholders and my team, what matters to the business to grow it and invite them into the conversation so that they feel like they are part of that process rather than being dictated, or that PMM is working in an ivory tower without involving them.

JAROD: I love that. I must feel the necessity and no. And I do think that framework is very useful to help, prioritize work out the listeners feel feel that way as well, it is a very difficult thing to do. And I love the idea of saying, you know, here’s what we’re not going to do. And it’s okay to be able to showcase that because I, I found just in my travels that sometimes showcasing what we’re not going to do can be a helpful conversation starter. If it’s then framed as well, what if you could, what would you need to be able to pull this above the line? Would this be an investment would this be headcount, would this be a tiger team, we think this is critical. But we also think that things above are critical. How do we work towards a scalable solution to kind of pull this What up, and those are the ones that I always find being the most impactful? Because for it not to be done by Product Marketing means someone’s going to do it in a rogue kind of silo scenario, and just, you know, call it what it is, it won’t be as good as it could be, had had product marketing and enablement, they touched it. So it’s a very helpful framework to be transparent on what we’re not doing. Because it brings the right amount of attention to something that if we truly believe it as a priority, what are we willing to trade off? That’s awesome.

JEN: Yeah. And also, like, there have been times where we were able, it looked like we were going to be able to do to release more than we thought we were like, then it becomes, there’s another problem, which is very luxurious problem to have. But if you’re launching too many things, how is your sales team going to still be maintaining those client relationships and do all of the training that’s required and all of the reporting that’s required? So I had one situation a few years ago, it’s like, actually, can we delay training on that? We’re gonna, so it Yeah. If you Yeah, what’s the what’s the curse, like, you get what you wish for some time. So?

JAROD: Yeah, it’s a good year and a good problem to have. But you could almost put, you know, sales training in the way of same analogy as furniture, you buy good furniture, once you buy bad furniture, you pay for it twice. But often find if you’re not going to be able to get the attention and the energy around the sales training, push it, delay it, because if you if you you will do it again. And that becomes an opportunity to not do something else. And so I think those are words to live by. Okay. I promise. Final question. final final question for listeners thinking through now. How do I build a better relationship with enablement? How do I strengthen my partnership? How do I make sure we’re aligned along the journey? Some of the ways you talked, what advice or recommendations would you give someone asking that question?

JEN: So if you are good question, and as you’re if you’re lucky enough to have someone who specializes in sales enablement, like I am I try to think about them as an extension of the team. I help them understand what the product roadmap priorities are. And I also want to understand what are their priorities? Are they being asked to train the sales teams on something and how are we each defining success and kind of bring them in on the process? Something else depending on how your teams work, you may share responsibilities for creating that sales enablement material. So PMM in general, typically owns all of it, but sometimes they want to recommend to do something kind of above the line. And so then you have to bring them in on that journey of even the content development for the training or just even sales assets. So making sure that they actually understand enough about the product that they can be your partner in it is the main things that I tried to do.

JAROD: So awesome. So awesome sound advice. So this has been a blast, I can talk to you for hours. I appreciate the context, the color, the candor, trying to come up with more deliberation. It’s always been this has been phenomenal. So so thank you for the time. Thank you for the energy and we appreciate it.

JEN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JAROD: All right. Thank you. Take care. All right, everybody, take care.

Lawrence Chapman – PMA: Thanks so much for tuning in for the latest episode of Leading the Way. If you’re looking to enhance your sales number and credentials, the marketing alliance has just a ticket in the form of sales enablement certified, no matter where you’re at in your product marketing journey. This course is packed with real life examples, case studies, expert tuition, templates and activities that you need to build and scale awesome sales and open programs. They’re by Sapphire Reels, Director of portfolio and integrated marketing at Pluralsight. The course will help you articulate the importance of sales enablement and sell internally design a sales enablement programme from scratch based on business objectives and sales needs. launch and iterate sales enablement programmes, demonstrates the importance and impacts of sales enablement on the business and revenue generation. Enroll on the course now at pmmalliance.com/salesenablementcertified and get all the tools you need to design and launch impactful sales enablement programs.

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