How do you create a sales enablement plan that drives product launch success?

🎯A robust sales enablement plan is the linchpin for a product launch's triumph, preparing sales teams to communicate value effectively. Key Steps to Consider: ✅Product Knowledge: Organize training sessions for the sales team. ✅Collateral Creation: Develop sales sheets, demos, and case studies. ✅Feedback Loop: Establish channels for sales to relay client insights. ✅Role-playing: Mimic customer interactions to refine selling techniques. ✅Measure & Adjust: Continuously monitor results and refine strategies. Ready to ensure your product launch stands out and resonates? Let's discuss how to position your sales team for success. Contact me today.

To create a sales enablement plan that drives product launch success, closely align with your product team to understand the product's features, benefits, and ideal customer profile. Develop comprehensive training materials, including case studies, demo scripts, and FAQs, to equip the sales team with in-depth knowledge. Ensure regular communication between sales and product teams for feedback and updates. Craft targeted messaging that resonates with the identified customer profile and aligns with marketing efforts. Set clear sales goals, monitor performance, and adjust strategies as needed for continuous improvement and alignment with the product's evolution.

The metrics can be broken into two buckets - a) lagging metrics like revenue, market share, retention, upsell and more and b) leading metrics like usage of new product collateral and effectiveness. You might need a good platform to do this but tracking leading metrics these can be quite critical in driving overall outcomes. Some leading metrics could include - 1. Percentage of sales teams who are trained on the product (attended a in-person learning session or watched a recording) 2. Usage of sales collateral (how many sales folks are using the assets, how often are they using) 3. Response from prospects (from digital sales rooms) 4. Capturing feedback (from sales & front end teams and doing 'dipstick' tests from sales calls)

Once you know what you need for your product launch, segment the sales content by journey/funnel stage. Train your sales folks on what to use and when. Create a heat map of sales collateral and stages where it needs to be used. This visualization makes it easy for Sales leaders to know what is the right weapon for mini battles they are fighting. E.g. If they encounter reference of competition from prospect, they know they need help of battle card that you created

Break down complex training with bite-sized training sessions. Include a guest speaker, and switch up the speakers throughout the training program. Use different methods for example include quizzes, role playing, and video recording from top sellers. Add office hours Q&A sessions open to all team members, keep them also after launch as a feedback loop.

With a lot of products getting updated quickly, front end teams are faced with a lot of updates that they might have trouble keeping up with. Most of the times they are looking for helping when faced with a specific objection or requirement. It would be good to evaluate if your sales enablement efforts or platform can provide the right asset without disrupting the workflow of a front end team member. This might mean support for contextual search, easily embedding the collateral into emails, just in time & AI powered recommendations and more.