Archives for November 2013

The following presentation is from my AIPMM webinar on Nov 1, 2013.

Too often, those of us in the product marketing role are not doing enough to help our sales team or sales channel be successful. Our typical approach to helping is to provide a new salesperson with some marketing collateral and a product presentation and then wish them luck as they look for prospects and try to close deals with anyone that listens. This approach is sufficient for the star salespeople as they intuitively know how to talk with the right potential buyers about their problems and then show these buyers how to solve these problems with their products or services. But unfortunately, this only represents about 20% of salespeople. The other 80% of sales people need more training and coaching to be successful and we as product marketers need to help them be successful. This is the process of “Sales Enablement”.

What happens when we don’t engage in the sales enablement process? Sales people pursue opportunities that don’t fit well with your solution, speak with the prospects that aren’t really decision makers, sell solutions that you don’t really have and the list can go on. But the overall resulting impact is wasted time and effort in pursuing the wrong opportunities, confusion in the market place and poor sales results.

The following is my AIPMM webinar from Oct 4th, 2013.

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), “Up to 90% of collateral created by marketing is never used by sales.” That is an astounding statistic which should be a wakeup call to those of us in Product Marketing that we need to be doing something different. Most of the time, sales doesn’t use our tools because the tools are ineffective, and the reasons for this include:

• Too many companies create a standard checklist of marketing and sales tools based upon what someone used in a past company, without any consideration as to what is really needed in this company.
•  Too much content is about the company and their products with little discussion about the buyers and users and what they need.