Early in my career at Texas Instruments, our business unit marketing manager had a phrase he used whenever a new product was on its way: first sell it to the sales force. I never found out whether it was his own, but it has stayed with me ever since. His point was that sales, not marketing or engineering, would carry the product to customers, and each salesperson had many products to sell. A new product needed their share of mind. That meant making it easy to sell, and it meant training the sales team before launch, not after.
That’s sales enablement in a sentence. In many companies it falls between product management and marketing, and it tends to land at the end of development, when everyone is busy finishing the product.
Why it matters more now
B2B buyers now do most of their deciding without the supplier in the room. Gartner’s research finds that buyers spend only 17% of their buying time meeting potential suppliers, and when several suppliers are in the running, any one of them may get 5 or 6% of it. The rest of the time they’re reading websites, comparing datasheets and asking a distributor’s salesperson who may also sell a competitor. Gartner also found that buyers who get consistent information from a supplier’s different sources are 2.89 times more likely to complete a deal they don’t regret. Everyone who talks to your customers needs to be telling the same story.
The sales force is a customer too
A salesperson in a large organization carries many products and one quota. They have limited time with each customer and will spend it on whatever is most likely to close, and they don’t want to be caught out by a question they can’t answer. A distributor’s salesperson is harder still to win. When I was VP of Marketing at Ross Video, our distributors sold products from many other suppliers, some of which competed with ours.
Making a product the path of least resistance is mostly practical. Sellers need a sentence of positioning they can repeat, answers ready for the common objections and each main competitor, clear pricing and discount rules so a quote doesn’t take three days, a demonstration unit, a named contact in product management, and training before launch. None of it is complicated. In my experience it’s often left until the last week, when nobody has time.
Incentives matter too, because a new product is usually harder to sell than the established one beside it. A short-term bonus or extra quota credit can help with your own team, and a launch rebate or deal registration with distributors. They need care, though. Pay plans shape behaviour in ways nobody intended, and a generous bonus can produce deals that shouldn’t have been sold.
What goes in the package
The release package turns your messaging into things a seller can use at a particular moment: a one-pager to leave behind, a battlecard for each main competitor, tested answers to objections, a demonstration script, a value calculator, pricing guidance, references, and the training that brings it together.
Battlecards are only trusted if they’re honest. Keep to one competitor per card, give a straight account of where that competitor is stronger, and put a date and an owner on it so it’s updated when the competitor changes price or product. A seller who has only been given the flattering version will be caught out the first time a customer raises the competitor’s main advantage, and won’t trust the card after that.
On objections, a missing feature usually comes from a comparison table. The first question is whether the customer needs it in their application or just wants it because it’s on the list. We often found they didn’t, which turns the objection around. If they do need it, be honest. From my time working on VDSL chips I learned that some customers treat any date on a roadmap as a promise, so my rule is no dates on anything not yet in development, and only a year or quarter for what is.
A value calculator helps because the person who meets the seller is rarely the one who signs. If a product avoids three hours of downtime a year at $10,000 an hour, that’s $30,000 of value against, say, an $18,000 subscription, which pays for itself in about seven months. Use the buyer’s numbers and stay conservative. A payback of three weeks will be dismissed by the first finance person who sees it.
Training doesn’t have to be a long presentation. At Ross Video every release went through our Ross Way To Market process, with separate sales training for our own team and for distributors. For one trade show in Las Vegas we made a version that was a pack of playing cards, one card per product. It suited the city, and the sales team could carry it around the show and use it.
Partners need a reason
Distributors and channel partners need a program as well as an agreement, with margin, deal registration, marketing funds, training and a portal where they can find what they need. None of it helps if the money is wrong. At GEC Plessey Semiconductors we partnered with a company already selling into volume markets to sell our new IGBTs. The partner focused on its own higher-margin products, and the margin on ours sat with us, so it had little reason to push them. If a partner doesn’t make money selling your product, training and tools won’t change much.
Listen to what sales hears
Sales and partners talk to more customers in a week than most product managers do in a quarter. Capture what they hear in the CRM and in win/loss interviews, review it monthly, and act on it by changing the battlecard, the price, the roadmap or the training. Then tell sales what changed. If sellers never see anything happen as a result of what they report, they stop reporting.
Win/loss interviews are one of the most useful and least used tools I know. Ask buyers, a few weeks after they’ve decided, why they chose as they did, and include the deals you won. Use someone neutral rather than the salesperson on the deal, because buyers are more candid with someone who wasn’t trying to sell to them.
A simple test
Hand your release package to a new salesperson, or to a distributor who sells ten other lines, and ask whether they could sell the product using only what’s in it. If they couldn’t, the gaps are usually easy to spot, and much cheaper to fix before launch than after.
If your team is preparing a launch and would like to talk it through, get in touch.
