“Keep your friends close, and your enablement team closer”
– Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
Enablement teams are critical partners to product marketers.
Great enablement increases your impact on the business.
Strong relationships with enablement will make you a better PMM.
PMM & Enablement In Flow
I’ve been lucky to work with some terrific enablement folks.
PMMs bring expertise in the product, customer, storytelling, positioning, differentiation, value, and sales tool creation.
Enablement brings expertise in pedagogy, curriculum design, materials creation, the sales process & calendar, and how sales people learn.
Enabling on a pitch deck
Rolling out a new slide deck for sales to use is the simplest example.
You provide the pitch deck,
and if you’re cool – a “behind the slides” presentation
that tells the story of how you’ve structured the deck, and why.
Enablement sets the
- learning strategy
- training elements
- instruction format
- practice/exercises, and
- certification approach.
My first step in this process,
before I’m remotely finished with the slides,
is to sit down with my enablement partner and explain
what we’re trying to do, with whom, why, and when.
This frees them to start thinking about strategy, curriculum, and timing…
while I am still pushing pixels.
Once I’ve got a good draft of the slides,
I pitch the slide deck to my enablement buddies –
once all the way through, and then again slide-by-slide for questions and feedback,
and we brainstorm the enablement.
I happily defer to enablement on pedagogy, curriculum, materials, and exercises.
But: enablement timing and threshold for certification…
those are things on which we might arm wrestle a bit.
Who Delivers Training?
I’ve seen 3 successful flavors of training delivery:
- PMMs perform the presentation and lead the exercises
enablement is there to drill us and sales people with questions
we both judge certification - Enablement performs the presentation and leads the training
I’m present to answer questions (and ask planted ones)
we both judge certification - I train enablement on the pitch
They do everything else
I get on with my life
I’d encourage you to experiment with different approaches
to see what works best for you with specific enablement partners.
Each human is different, and being flexible is part of a good working relationship.
How Enablement Makes You a More Effective PMM
In addition to working well together, swimming side by side, and being flexible on the approach, there are 3 things the best PMMs get out of enablement.
- Get a positioning edge from their intelligence and savvy
Enablement spends more time with sales and sales leadership than you do.
They know what’s working well — and less well.
I often spot ways to evolve positioning or messaging
based on ongoing conversations with enablement.
But you have to be talking with them regularly,
not just when you’re rolling something out. - Do better positioning/messaging, with their help on pedagogy
A lot of what we do as product marketers is to shape customers’ perceptions
and how they frame their worlds.
This is a form of training, in which we’re “training” the market.
I often pull in enablement folks to get their training ideas.
You’ll be surprised by how many effective ideas you get. - Do better storytelling, with their help as simplification wizards
Enablement folks are experts in simplifying the world,
and then communicating it to a distractable audience.
I often try out a new pitch, or a new story, with an enablement person.
It’s hilarious how many times I pitch something
and my enablement buddy says
“so you’re trying to say [simplified version of what I said],”
and I reply “exACTly!”,
and my buddy says “well why don’t you just say that?”
Invest in your relationship with enablement folks every day.
It will serve you (and the business) well
From the front porch in Moss Beach,
Tenders
Product Marketing Best Practices 