With more than 15 years of sales, marketing, and sales enablement experience combined, two members of the Olivine team sit down to dig into how sales and marketing come together in an organization. From the best ways to collaborate to areas of improvement, we discuss how our teams play a role in the others' success, and what else can be done to maximize cross-functional success.

There’s an age-old belief that marketing and sales do not get along. The two organizations are known for constantly engaging in the blame game with one another. Sales says they can’t hit their numbers because of marketing, marketing claims they’ve delivered incredible, warm leads that sales simply can’t close. While this dynamic has played out historically, things today are changing. More and more, businesses are recognizing the importance of cross-functional collaboration and alignment. Sales and marketing leaders are moving away from working against each other, to working alongside each other. We especially see this kind of close collaboration working between subsets of the greater marketing and sales organizations, like enablement and product marketing.

With more than 15 years of sales, marketing, and sales enablement experience combined, we sat down to dig into what works in our experience and what can be improved.

Anna: Started in sales at Intercom before creating the enablement team there. Went on to start enablement at Envoy, onboarding and supporting over 100 customer-facing reps over three years. Now: consults with companies to help improve their enablement functions.

Sheena: First, for those of you not familiar with product marketing or sales enablement, here’s a quick summary.

Product marketing sits at the intersection of product, marketing and sales. It defines the overall positioning, messaging and value proposition of a company’s product and is at the core of all marketing programming. It is crucial to the overall success of an organization’s marketing efforts, and therefore has a huge impact on sales.

Sales enablement elevates an organization's sellers and other customer-facing teams by providing the right resources they need to close more deals. Enablement provides support to customer-facing teams by designing and executing onboarding for new hires, creating and leading ongoing training, and developing and managing processes and tooling.

How they work together

Product marketing is responsible for coming up with the value props, messaging and positioning of a product that sales ultimately has to sell. Sales enablement is responsible for taking these concepts and communicating them to the sales team, elevating a sales rep’s ability to convey these value props with the appropriate frameworks and tools, leading to higher close rates and customer engagement.

It makes sense that these two teams would find success in working together!

But how? And what could each of these groups be doing better to support each other? We were interested in discovering just that. Some of the answers surprised even us, but what’s clear is that a tight connection between product marketing and sales enablement is key to success.

Here’s what we learned from our conversation

What sales teams get wrong about product marketing and enablement

Sales teams sometimes think that product marketing and enablement exist primarily to respond to requests for more one-pagers or pitch decks. Great PMM and enablement teams are very strategic and are constantly working to support the company’s goals. Enablement is there to make sure sales teams are equipped to sell effectively but that doesn’t always mean just churning out new material.

What a (former) salesperson wishes enablement would do to help more

When enablement partners closely with product and leadership to dig into specific product positioning, rather than just focusing on just the frameworks of selling, it’s incredibly helpful to the sales team. This close partnership helps to provide greater context and connection between the GTM teams and Product, which allows the sales team to have a better understanding of the messaging they’re asked to communicate to customers.

How PMM and sales enablement could work together more effectively to support selling

The key is to treat each other as strategic partners.

If the enablement team is treating PMMs like an “asset shop” and expecting them to crank out one-pagers and decks, or if the PMM team isn’t leveraging the enablement team to launch new assets and product launches, then things aren’t going to work very well.

The two really need to act like a “two-headed” monster, bringing their expertise in the product and positioning (PMM) and the customer team perspective (enablement) to really be powerful and support selling most effectively.

One way that a strategic partnership between the two teams is really impactful is in helping sales to understand the value of the product and how to communicate that to customers (i.e. doesn’t simply sell features). As businesses grow, the features will change but the value that is provided to the customer will stay much more stable over time.

Is it important for a sales enablement professional to have had a strong customer-facing experience? In what capacity?

We’ve found that this experience is incredibly helpful. It helps to build trust with the customer-facing teams and provides enablement teams with a strong instinct for what is needed in certain situations or what skills are being used and when. This experience can also be built by embedding in the sales/support/success team, but it certainly helps to have been customer-facing in some capacity in the past.

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What foundational pieces should PMMs and Enablement focus on?

For PMMs, helping the company align on strong positioning and messaging is the key for a great partnership with enablement (and sales in general). Using this foundation, enablement can help to train the sales teams on skills like:

Discovery
Demonstrating the value of the product over features/functionality
Negotiation

Without strong positioning and messaging, and without the entire company aligned on it, it’s hard to do any of the above.

Takeaways

The bottom line: a strong alliance between product marketing and enablement is essential. By approaching this partnership strategically and leveraging each other’s strengths, you are able to:

Create a cohesive experience for customers via strong positioning and messaging.
Align the entire company on the value propositions of the product, which elevates sales conversations and results in increased revenue.
Ensure clear lines of communication between customer-facing teams and product
Launch new products and features seamlessly without leaving sales confused or missing important updates.

Product marketing + sales enablement: The perfect match