Hosted by: Adam McQueen

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Adam is joined by Sophos VP of Market Intelligence Max Weinstein to discuss the most successful mechanisms for excellent sales enablement

1️⃣ Understand your sales organization 1️⃣

No two sales organizations are exactly alike. And in order to be the most effective you can possibly be at your job, you need to understand your sales team intimately.

Max says you need to get in the weeds. Understand your sales’ teams goals, how they’re compensated, management structure and other variables that affect your sellers’ day to day life.

“Sometimes competitive intelligence focuses too narrowly on the products or the competitors or the market and forget that ultimately what we’re trying to do is help our sales organizations succeed and selling solutions to customers.”

Getting too myopic on the intel collection and analysis side will get you into trouble as a competitive enablement pro.

Don’t ever forget that your job is to support your organization in generating more revenue. And your sales team is always a good place to start.

Save your seat at the biggest compete event of the year

2️⃣ Sellers need context for your enablement materials 2️⃣

Keep it simple. Keep it brief and make it readable. All principles you need to keep in mind when building enablement content.

At the same time, you need to make sure you’re providing enough contextual information so that your sellers can deeper their understanding of the relevance of your enablement materials.

“If you can help them understand the the broader picture of the market that they’re selling into or the how buyers do their jobs that’s going to be really valuable.”

It’s a fine balance to be sure. Ultimately it’s the tactical side of your enablement that helps reps win deals.

But all reps, especially newer ones, will benefit from learning about the broader context in which your organization competes.

Watch expert seller Chris Orlob break down the competitive strategies that win more deals

3️⃣ Sales enablement needs context for PMM Requests 3️⃣

If Max could waive a magic wand, product marketers would reach out to his team weeks in advance instead of days.

And most importantly, when they did reach out with a request, they’d include all the context needed for Max’s team to action the request.

To fill that gap, the team at Sophos created a form for research requests.

“I think it helped build trust in both directions; helped us better understand the product org and trust them more and then help them trust us that we were going to be able to get them what they needed.”

Mandatory fields in the request form

• When does the request need to be comlpeted by?
• Who’s the audience? (i.e. internal, executives, prospects)
• What are the competitive dimensions you’re interested in?
• What’s the format you need the research delivered in?

Sales enablement and product marketers have overlapping goals. Establishing the right mechanisms for collaboration between the two teams makes achieving those goals easier.