How Leading B2B CMOs Are Driving Sales Enablement Success & Results

From content strategy to internal certifications, tech platforms and social amplification, last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk sessions focused on sales enablement best practices covered a lot of ground.

The chat highlights below offer a wide variety of insights, best practices, cautionary tales, tech and consultant recommendations and much more.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community with 1,300+ of your peers, let me know.

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We're just now focusing on "shoring up" the traditional sales enablement owned by sales ops.?Focus is on selling to the decision makers.

Sales definitely doesn't "have it" once they have an opportunity -- that's what became really clear this year.

Love the idea of directly measuring PMM teams on win rates.?It's not about the case studies or volume of trainings, it's about the impact!

Insights! Voice of the customer, win loss analysis, social listening, open text field on NPS. Sales enablement cannot be static. Yes to sales enablement platforms which help keep fresh and hold everyone accountable.

What are the best ways to turn all of our amazing content into ENABLEMENT - tools the sales, biz dev, and KAMs can USE effectively? That’s a gap I’m working to fill now.

If anyone need helps with a Win/Loss program IcebergIQ is also awesome - https://icebergiq.com/

I love the idea that "win rates" could get PMMs a little out of their comfort zone and start focusing/triaging on more valuable efforts.

If you have sales enablement staff, the Sales Enablement society is a great resource… https://www.sesociety.org/

Sales Enablement has to be an executive driven culture and top 3 strategic goal (every year in fact).

Metrics - conversion rate on first call, Speed and conversion rates into opp creation, speed and conversion rates to tech win, speed and conversion rates to win.

Good formula (under the CRO) is Marketing driven Sellers + Sales driven Marketers + Mktg/Sales Ops expertise + an outstanding content machine

I think of Enablement as a 2fer…internal enablement and external enablement.?Our team needs to know what our customers/prospects need to know.?Different degrees of depth and breadth but they are inherently linked.

Buyer Persona Institute is great in case anyone is looking for persona insights/development support - https://buyerpersona.com/

All of our sales enablement has a test that must be passed.

90% of our company had to pass our recent certification course for bonus to be paid!

Our CRO has sales rep submit Avoma snippets every week and we listen to them during sales forecast call, as well as in QBRs, training programs and all that.

Also celebrate wins… and have star AEs share how they won - get technical deal by deal.

We love Gong, video and transcript with keywords that push to the necessary departments. Eg. Marketing gets the buzz words. Product gets the features etc.

I'd like to see us apply the same usability principles we apply to creating content for prospects to what we create for internal teams :)

Strong sales teams are founded on continuous learning.

Nothing like Voice of Customer (VOC) to make a case for change.

Dovetail (https://dovetailapp.com/ ) is a nice, clean way to store, tag, search, and segment all of your VOC data/snippets/research. Collecting all the data and insights is a first step, but actually operationalizing it all is the trickier part I find.

We start with our external story, and the last thing we create for a campaign or topic is the Sales Playbook.

Once a year our CEO makes every rep pitch him.

If I can get additional investment this year it will absolutely be in product marketing to ensure more focus on enablement.

We have a social shareable Slack channel that we share content on daily with suggested social posts - of content we produce and content that we don't.

We have a slack channel called brand advocates -we post 3 time a week with content that is written in sales voice they can share - direct post on LI that they click and share.

We also have writers interview sales and write content in their byline, so sales develops pride of content.

You also have to reward the ones that do share. Especially new sharers. Some will always share. Some will never share. Reward the swing voters - the ones who don’t always share - when they do.

We write scripts for using every enablement asset created including thought leadership, product marketing, competitive intel, customer story, social posts, everything. These are shared in unique slack channels, also sent via email. Leaving any of these share suggestions to chance will dilute the effectiveness of every piece.?

If you want to outsource social selling training, I’ve used https://salesforlife.com/ . Part 1 is social selling/brand building, but they go beyond that on how to develop, prioritize accounts using LI.

Whenever possible I target our sales and leadership teams in our advertising, it's low cost and makes sure that they SEE what’s happening out there. It also gives them a sense of confidence... hey our ads are everywhere this marketing team rocks.

I find it useful not just to tell them what to post, but to explain the purpose behind certain content. Anytime we did a piece of research or report, we sat with our salespeople and helped them understand why, how they can talk to their audiences about it, how it relates to our product, and the so what — how it makes a customer’s life better.

We had a standing 10 minutes on the weekly sales call. Reviewed only the next week deliverables - emails, blog posts, etc. Only further future items discussed were for events/webinars where we needed their engagement for driving attendance.

We send a weekly Rev Team Resources email with 3 things for sales know and activate on each week. It arrives in their Inbox at 7:30 am their time every Tuesday.

We do the same here - we call it the hot sheet and do a digest of all marketing activity every two weeks. It has been extremely valuable. We then can track how the teams are engaging with our content.

Think one thing we need to keep top-of-mind as marketers is the #1 complaint sellers and their managers have is Productivity. They’re being pulled a hundred different ways by the organization (think All Hands mtgs, internal mtgs, enablement meetings, product marketing, corp marketing, etc etc.) when they’re supposed to be using their time on primarily external conversations. Piling on ‘go post on social’ doesn’t land very well. If you’re not coupling social posting on LinkedIn.com with Sales Navigator and making it make sense within their context of their sales cycle, then…you’re kinda wasting their time.

We MUST stop calling it Sales Kickoff!?It’s GTM Kickoff!

Must do multi-channel marketing to sales: newsletter, webinar, snippets, slack channel highlights. Always be Marketing!

I used to do a weekly roundup of all industry news, plus marketing notifications, plus sales wins. It took me or someone on my team a few hours per week. It was well received, but over time atrophied. It went on for several years, but I think a monthly roundup is better.

I’m hearing a lot about marketing pushing information, etc TO sales. What about getting feedback, etc FROM sales on what’s working/not?

To share content and campaigns with Sales... I've created a single PPT Slide listing, by date and topic what's coming in the quarter -- and then hyperlink back to SFDC campaign records that then contain Hype Sheets (that explain the details of the campaign/asset) and to the assets themselves.

We created a deck with all case studies. At the top in a table of contents we group them by the pain points, uses cases, integration partners, vertical - every way to could slice them — so an AE can easily find the right case study to send to a prospect. Got good feedback on this and it cut down on the one-off requests.

I pick a few top sales reps & lean in with them. I get them to pull when they are starting to feel a problem emerging. Then I’ll jump in from a product marketing perspective, either listening to calls, or joining them. I leave every one of those with ideas for tools that can help them through each phase of the funnel.

Re metrics, we also look at speed to first deal close, number of meetings conducted without their supervisors etc… to get to how quickly new reps ramp up.

If you look at Peter Ostrow’s research at Forrester, the best performing companies all certify sellers.

I incorporate certification of the company story into any rebranding effort - companywide, NOT just the GTM team. We make it fun vs stressful but everyone is accountable for sharing a consistent company elevator story.

I really like “certify on the company story.” I lot of times I’ve seen “certify on product features”, which isn’t as useful.

Newsletter: We rotate team members to do ours and keep a rolling Google Doc template - owner copies and pastes previous weeks and then tags people for updates. Works pretty well and distributes workload.