Sales enablement
And where marketing fits in
Mehdeeka is for solo marketers or small teams working in the B2B, SaaS, startup, and tech spaces. Check out the previous issues on PR: part 1, part 2, and part 3. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!
Small marketing teams are, by definition, wearing many hats and often cross into sales enablement territory. Sales enablement is also a fairly recent job title, so a quick breakdown of that job is;
To create a library of assets for the sales team to use
To give training sessions to the sales team on anything from how to structure an email through to closing techniques
Work between product, marketing, and sales
Speaking with customers and leads to gain insights
Any number of other things depending on how the company defines the role
You’ll get a lot of benefit out of segmenting your work and labelling it what it would be if it had a dedicated employee working on it. When you’re producing assets for a new feature, tell yourself you’re doing product marketing; when you’re designing a new proposal document, tell yourself you’re doing sales enablement.
By creating this definition in your mind, you’ll make sure you do the follow up that that role requires. Instead of writing a blog that addresses a common objection and posting the link in a slack channel, write the blog and run an in person (or over zoom) session on how, why, and when to use blogs in the sales process.
Recently, I’ve been doing this segmentation for my work and I’ve found it really helpful. My to-do list doesn’t end at ‘publish blog’, it ends at ‘ensure sales team know why this was produced and how to use it’.
This will also help build up the relationship between sales and marketing - something that’s often a problematic part of a marketer’s day. When the sales team are using your work, they’ll come to appreciate and understand you and your role more.
Give it a go and let me know how you find it!
Check these out (longer than usual but I loved them all)
A blog about how Mailchimp is dead, and the Amazon email service is significantly cheaper but slightly harder to use.
This tweet which I found deep in the archive of my Google Keep notes:
A new report on benchmarks for a variety of topics for SaaS companies in 2020, including sales and marketing spend by ARR.
Some cultural and visual inspiration, the first gay marching band in the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade! Their uniforms are very nice. More inspiration comes from YellowTrace’s feature on the Atomic Beer Project’s architecture in Redfern. And last bit of visual inspiration comes from Monster Children’s shortlist for the travel category of their annual photo comp.
An interview with the Head of Growth Marketing from Ginger (Amanda Halle Bates) which mostly covers building a relationship with the sales team.
Marketing Mag is offering a one hour mentoring session with Sherilyn Shackell, the CEo of The Marketing School. Enter the competition here.
And some videos! A campaign from NZ’s tourism department, extremely creative and very cool use of tech, YouTube as a channel, and even an influencer.
And last up, a lecture from the University of Chicago about how you’ve never really written in your life. It’s very academic and really the audience is also for academics but it goes into writing with purpose and with the audience in mind. It’s a bit over an hour but as someone who has two degrees in linguistics I relished in the breakdown of language and writing.
Next week
More sales related stuff! I’ll be writing two more editions of Mehdeeka for the year to wrap up this 3 part miniseries and then I’ll be taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period.