Enablement shouldn’t be a one-way street.
You'll waste hours trying to perfect things before sharing with sellers.
Collaboration and iteration are your ticket to faster, better results.
Here's a real example 👇
If you run enablement sessions, chances are you often present some kind of new messaging or positioning.
It may be a new product, a new persona or use case, or even a new concept you’re trying to help the team convey.
There can often be a perception (on both sides) that #productmarketing is coming in with everything ready. A tidy package of everything they need to know, say, show.
But that’s not the reality.
As Jody Geiger says, realize that what you’re delivering won’t be perfect. You won’t have it all figured out.
In most cases, you’re going to be building the plane as you’re flying it. And that’s okay — even better in my opinion.
Here’s a real example of what I mean 👇
➡️ Last week we ran an enablement session around some new executive-level messaging.
➡️ We came to a Thursday meeting with a couple of slides prepared that reps could use when presenting our Competitive Revenue Gap.
➡️ During the meeting, one of our senior AEs (shout out to Pablo Landa) spoke up sharing some feedback around what would be most helpful to him when presenting this concept.
➡️ On Friday we hopped on a 30-minute call to tweak the slide together.
➡️ On Monday Pablo sent me a recording of him delivering that message on a call.
➡️ That recording and the new slide was shared across the team and by Friday we had a number of awesome pitches being presented at a pitch contest. They were all using the new slide.
My point is that we should all be okay with not having everything figured out. You can waste a huge amount of time trying to have everything perfectly ready for your sales team.
It’s better to approach it as an iterative, collaborative process.
Come to the table with ideas and concepts, but get their help testing things out, and perfecting the message.
It will free you to roll out and test concepts more quickly. And the collaborative process will lead to better adoption and trust in the material.
Agree or disagree?