8 ways to uplevel your sales enablement and training

Driving adoption of messaging and sales materials can be one of the most frustrating aspects of product marketing.

Sellers demand more content and training. But when it lands, the material is poorly adopted and quickly forgotten about.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a product where this issue hasn’t caused some level of friction between PMMs and sales teams.

And while there’s typically fault on both sides, product marketers should be willing to drop their ego and understand why their approach is failing.

Launch training, competitive battlecards, and buyer personas all miss the mark when sellers’ needs aren’t met. But there are simple techniques you can put into action today that will help you build more successful training decks and messaging guides.

Here are eight ways to make your sales enablement materials more engaging, better adopted, and more successful in the field.

1. Learn what sellers actually need

A simple but overlooked part of the sales enablement process is to discover where your approach isn’t working.

Start by asking account executives how you can make your training materials more useful. They might not tell you the full truth, but you’ll still learn something.

You can also use surveys. Make feedback an evergreen part of your sales training process. It can be as simple as asking people to leave a rating and a comment after each training session.

Encouraging people to rate your efforts anonymously can be humbling and uncomfortable at first. But it also gives you an opportunity to grow in your career. Making your work measurable and quantifiable shows a commitment to growth—and as you improve, you gain ammunition for promotions and raises.

If feedback is new for your team, you can go “big” with a sales readiness survey. This captures data on how confident sellers feel across product messaging, competitive, industry topics and more. Not only will it help you improve your training and enablement materials, it’ll also help you decide which problems to tackle first.

Finally, remember to review call recordings and join pipeline review meetings. This will keep you in touch with what’s happening on the front line. Strong PMMs can leverage these channels to spot enablement opportunities.

2. Keep your content concise and actionable

People have very limited attention spans in general—not to mention tech salespeople, who don’t have the time or patience to sit through verbose content.

Use the following techniques to uplevel any content you create for sales.

• The ‘so what?’ test. Ruthlessly cut words and even entire slides if they aren’t essential. Nobody cares that a second-tier competitor is headquartered in Utah, and they are not going to read customer reviews that were dumped in full onto a slide.
• Use bullets, not paragraphs. Make it your mission to avoid any wrapped text, meaning text that exceeds a single line. Stick to large, clear punchlines and avoid lengthy prose—especially for live training sessions.
• Make it easy to adopt. Consider whether or not a salesperson could literally just copy-paste your material into an email. If they can’t do that, you’re probably adding unnecessary friction.
• Apply the ‘one page’ rule. As much as I dislike one-pagers as a method of distribution, I do believe it’s a useful constraint that ensures you’re producing clear and concise materials.

Ultimately, your sales material doesn’t just have to be interesting—it needs to be usable in the field. Just like anything else, if you can save people time and energy, they will keep coming back.

3. Bring in more customer input

Your audience spends so much time speaking with customers and buyers. If their voices aren’t present in your materials, they’ll be quickly discredited.

Customer research is critically important to anything you create for sales—and this is why I encourage product marketers to have at least one direct customer interaction per week.

But even if you rely on call recordings and other second-hand information, the important thing is to bring the life and soul of your customers into your training and enablement content.

Here are some ways to do that.

• Customer snippets. Audio clips and video excerpts taken from customer calls work wonders to engage sellers during training sessions. It shakes up the flow of the training, invokes an emotional response, and adds credibility to your work. Start a ‘customer soundbites’ folder and keep adding to it—you won’t regret this.
• Case studies and success stories. Sellers need real-world examples they can share with prospects. Share proven success at overcoming a challenge, or getting value out of a new feature, in a simple, reusable format.
• Use real customers as your personas. Instead of relying on cheesy stock images for your buyer personas, make them about real people—your customers and prospects. This humanizes your material and makes it more relatable.

4. Invite sellers to participate in your training sessions

As great as you might be at content creation and training, sellers love to learn from their peers—people who truly understand their challenges.

Find ways to flip the script and pass the baton to sales reps during your live sessions. Get them to share stories of recent wins, or deals they currently have in flight, and highlight how they overcame objections.

If you can get somebody to show how they used one of your resources to close a deal, this is a huge win.

Role-play scenarios and workshops can be another effective way to get input from your audience and use it to drive the session.

Even for static or recorded enablement content, make it clear that you leveraged the experience of your most tenured and respected reps. This is another way to get people to take your work seriously.

5. Tie your content to outcomes

In the same way value-based messaging is so important for buyers, you need to make it clear why reps should pay attention to what you’re saying.

The “what’s in it for me?” should be addressed early and often when it comes to enablement content and sales training. Here’s how you can do that.

• Set expectations and clear objectives. Whenever you ask for half an hour of people’s time, they need to know what they’ll get out of it. Put training objectives in your calendar invites and the opening slides of any presentations.
• Make it about sales metrics. Most sellers are focused on hitting their targets. You need to show how your messaging, positioning, or objection handling scripts will help them to do that. It should be clear how your content will help them close more deals, close them faster, and make them bigger.
• Give proof. If possible, share how similar tactics worked in the past. Again, if you can get a rep to back this up, all the better.

6. Serve content in a variety of formats

People learn best in different ways—and the more learning methods you can offer, the greater the likelihood that your training materials will stick.

This might sound like a lot of work—but a true PMM “hack” is to be able to repurpose your content quickly into different formats.

Some of the ways you can repurpose training include:

• One-page summary or ‘cheat sheet’. Compile key takeaways onto a single “page” or brief article in whatever content management system your team uses. This provides something that’s quick and easy to find each time it’s needed.
• Short videos. These could be clipped from a recording of your live training to make it easy—but it saves people having to go back and watch the whole thing.
• Quick course. If your company uses a learning management system (LMS) for sales training, you could spin your content into a Q&A format that allows people to test their knowledge. This also gives you valuable feedback metrics on how many completed the training, and what they thought of it.

7. Repetition, repetition, repetition

Another thing PMMs and enablement teams overlook is the importance of repeating the same core concepts in every training.

Ultimately, whatever new feature you’re launching or competitor you’re covering, there are certain key value propositions that don’t change.

Take any opportunity you can get to reinforce these. It could be the key points from your value framework, your buyers’ most common pain point, or the company vision. Positioning each training in the context of these “big rocks” helps to make them stick.

While this won’t necessarily drive adoption of specific resources or training content, it will make your enablement efforts more successful in the long run.

That’s because you’re essentially playing the long game—people might not pick up and use these ideas now, but they will eventually adopt them if you persist over a period of months.

8. Gamify and reward follow-up actions

Each sales training should have a clear call-to-action that motivates sellers to put your recommendations into practice.

Some fun and successful techniques you can deploy here include:

• A prize draw for using certain messaging. Invite sellers to enter a prize draw for a gift card by submitting a call recording that shows them using your messaging or objection handling scripts. Announce the winner in a follow-up training and invite them to share more context about the call—and the outcome.
• A leaderboard. Similar to the above, you could also create a leaderboard for the people who book the most demos using your messaging or specific resources.
• Follow-up quizzes. Quizzing your audience in a live training can help to bring life to the session—but it can also be effective to do this on your instant messaging platform. Share little snippets from your training or pose questions to the wider team that help them to recall the key takeaways.

By applying some of these messages, you'll break through the resistance and having sales teams revisiting your content regularly.