Product Marketing Community KLUE, Jason Oakley

Speaker: Jason Oakley, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Klue

Jason Oakley: as a product marketer, you're naturally going to have a number of situations where you're enabling a sales team on a feature that hasn't been released yet. And so in fact that's probably the way you want to do it. You wouldn't want to have to enable them after the fact. So you're gonna have a lot of conversations where, um, in an ideal world, you are able to get in front of the sales team and prepare them for a release before it actually happens. And so a couple of things that, that we focus on for a small release, I think the conversation that you're gonna have with sales is more around here are the, you know, the high level bullets of, of kind of what's changing if it's something that they need to incorporate into their, um, their demo flow or their pitch at all. It's showing them how this new functionality works as well as creating a positioning and messaging resource for them. So it could be something as simple as a couple of slides that are just internal that kind of walks them through the, the high level kind of messaging notes on how to how to talk about this and the value it's going to have for, for prospects and why, why? We went about building this new feature um, on a grander scale, it's going through a full certification program with your sales team, if it's a big release, that is going to be a major change to your product, that's going to impact the way that they they sell, then you want to make sure that they're ready and feeling confident before they go and actually start to to sell it. So a full certification program which would mean having a training session with them to walk them through the new functionality, giving them an example demo of what a best practice demo might look like and training tools. And we think of it and call it a launch package that has all of the tools that they would need at their disposal, whether it's slides that they can use in their pitch deck recordings of example demos, um F A Q like an internal F A Q document for them, that would be like a larger scale launch package that gives them everything they need. And then actually before they start to demo it, doing a certification with one of their managers or members of your product marketing team to make sure that their demo ready and ready to actually speak to the new functionality. And so there's a there's definitely arrange there were depending on how big like what tier release this is, um the types of communication you'll need to have with your sales team but for ones that are smaller and kind of or even within a smaller team, uh say if you're in like a small start up, one of the things that I know works well and worked well for us is even doing using asynchronous video. So if it's a small release and it's not something that you need to do a big scale kind of training or certification program, it might be something where you want to provide your team with high level messaging and maybe a couple of slides or, you know, some instructions on how to actually demonstrate or use the new functionality. You can do that in a 12 minute, you know, say 125 minute video and using something like loom or cloud up and be able to share that in slack. So your sales team can not only not only have the information but refer back to it and and easily access if they want to watch it later. So those are some of the things that have worked well for us, but again, depending on the size of the release, um, it definitely varies

Jason Oakley: So for your competitive enablement program, the types of content that you create, the output that you create is gonna vary based on the internal teams that you are serving. So if you're enabling your sales team, you're gonna be creating battle cards, um, competitor profiles, um, in internal newsletter digest of competitive intel. That gives them the latest information every week on your competitors and context around why that actually matters. But if you're delivering content to a product team, they might need more side by side feature comparisons or maybe pricing information on your competitors. Whereas if you're enabling your executive team, they might want more high level analysis around, say, a competitive threat analysis or a map of your competitive landscape. So really the teams that you're serving are really going to dictate the types of content that you're delivering. Because what might work for a sales team is not necessarily what your executive team needs. And so it's important that as a competitive development manager, you're keeping your eye on, on who you're actually serving and then creating your content specifically for them.