Sheevaun Thatcher -PMC/Pavilion

Speakers: Sheevaun Thatcher, VP, Strategic Slack Enablement, Salesforce

Sheevaun Thatcher: Hi. I'm Sheevaun Thatcher,

Sheevaun Thatcher: the interlock between product marketing and sales enablement is really important because one team cannot do their job without the other. So the way we work with product marketing is we help them understand what is required from sellers' perspective, to be able to use the content that they create. So, for example, we go to our product marketing folks and we say, look, you can give us the brochures, you can give us all that content, but you need to do two things. The first one is give us the metaphorical page, if you will of questions that the sellers can ask in order to be able to introduce this particular product. The second part of that is to make sure when you're doing any type of enablement training that you always start with WHY and so I have explained with our product marketing folks, whenever you give us any material to do training on, it has to answer two questions right up front. The first one is as a seller. Why should I even care about this piece of content that's coming my way? And secondly, how is it going to help my customers buy from me? Notice that I didn't say How is it going to help me sell? What we don't want is product marketing trying to tell sellers how to sell. That's what they do best. What we do want is product marketing to help sellers understand where the product fits, how it can help their customer.

Sheevaun Thatcher: The question is, what type of content should product marketing and create for the sellers? Well, as I said previously, it has to be able to answer the Why questions it for me and how is it going to help my customer buy? But in addition, the content itself has to be designed in a certain way so that number one, you can get the attention of the sellers number two so that you make it memorable and number three so that the sellers can repeat it in an easy fashion. So that everybody is able to understand. So you do that by asking them why upfront. You also make sure that whatever you're using from a product marketing perspective that you're pushing over the fence has to be in short controlled bursts. And it's not.... well, for Number one is. If part of that training session needs to change, you only have to change that small piece. Number two. It allows folks to come back and pay attention to the pieces that they may have missed, and so it really puts the learning in the hands of sellers. So it's just in time or activity based, if you will. So the training has to be. It has to be in depth enough that folks will get it. There may be multiple levels of it, right. So you may have initial training that says, Here is what it is Then you may have another level of training what we'll call 201, which is how do I sell it? You could have another level below that, say, third level '301' one that says, I'm a solution engineer. How do I demo it. How do I talk about the architecture? And so you need to consider not only who your audience is going to be, but who the end result of that audience is going to be. Who are you talking to? A customer site.

Sheevaun Thatcher: the relationship between product marketing and sales enablement or any type of enablement. Frankly, the most important one is making sure everybody understands the go to market message. Did they all get the memo so you can go to anybody in the company whether they are a senior executive or they are, somebody brand new right out of university and tap him on the shoulder and say, What do we do? And the same thing comes out and it's not focused on what we do from bits and bytes. It's focused on again. How do we help the customers What customers buy us for what's there? So it's getting everybody to understand and be able to deliver that message and be able to deliver a message in a very small and short amount of time. We don't have a lot of time anymore. People are so distracted with what's going on, and even now with the situation that we're even more distracted with other things that you need to make it succinct and you need to make it clear and you need to make it powerful. And that's why, from a sales enablement perspective, we work very closely with product marketing so that we can help them with that. To make sure that as a conduit between marketing and sales, as that conduit, we can make sure the message is clear. We can make sure that the message gets delivered appropriately and we can make sure that the message actually aligns with the company's go to market.