Podcasts about effective sales enablement

Pam Didner is a B2B marketing consultant, fractional CMO, speaker, and author. With 20 years of experience in B2B marketing, she helps companies bridge the gap between technology and marketing to build seamless customer experiences and boost sales. Pam is also the author of The Modern AI Marketer book series, which includes The Modern AI Marketer in The GPT Era, The Modern AI Marketing: Guide to Gen AI Prompts, Effective Sales Enablement, and Global Content Marketing.  In this episode…  AI is still just an algorithm and isn't at the human intelligence level, yet many marketers provide generic inputs yielding subpar results. AI doesn't understand your brand story or target audience, so you must provide specific information for valuable results. How can you create winning AI prompts to elevate your brand? Generative AI expert and B2B marketer Pam Didner recommends customizing AI prompts to your brand goals. This includes creating detailed, context-rich prompts to guide AI to meaningful and actionable outputs. For instance, a strong prompt should include specifics such as target audience details, product descriptions, competitor insights, and the generated content's intended outcome. To maximize results, Pam suggests training AI systems on proprietary data sets, allowing you to develop custom bots that automate repetitive tasks, streamline workflows, and create consistent outputs.  In the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris invites B2B marketing consultant Pam Didner to speak about engineering custom AI prompts for your business. Pam shares her recommended AI tools for image and content creation, how to overcome growth barriers, and the importance of treating your customers with dignity.

Sarah Carson from packaging design and manufacturing company, Rohrer, talks about bringing together marketing and sales teams from two organizations, building in-house capabilities, and her approach to creating powerful sales enablement content.

Pam Didner is a seasoned B2B Consultant, Speaker, Fractional CMO, Author, and Podcaster. Her extensive knowledge covers various areas such as strategic planning, account-based marketing, demand generation, and sales enablement.  She thrives on diving deep into the trenches with her clients. As a regular fractional CMO with 20 years of corporate experience spanning finance, accounting, manufacturing, operations, and marketing, she knows how corporations work.  As an accomplished business author, Pam has also written five business books: The Modern AI Marketer in the GPT Era, The Modern Marketer: Guide to Gen AI Prompts, The Modern AI Marketer, Effective Sales Enablement, Global Content Marketing. Pam has also launched her popular podcast B2B Marketing and More, which serves as a hub for industry insights and interviews in the B2B space.   During the show we discuss: Importance Of Connecting Sales And Marketing Teams And Effective Methods To Achieve This. Key Strategies To Align Sales And Marketing For Improved Results. Major Barriers To Growth When Sales And Marketing Teams Are Misaligned. Approaches For Companies To Overcome Challenges That Hinder Marketing And Sales Efforts. Challenges Companies Encounter When Attempting To Restart Stalled Revenue Growth And Solutions To Overcome Them. Initial Steps Companies Should Take To Revive Stagnant Sales And Marketing Efforts. Impact Of Short-Term Marketing Fixes On Long-Term Business Growth. Benefits Of A Well-Developed Customer Profile In Enhancing Marketing Effectiveness. Role Of Performance Metrics (KPI) In Evaluating The Success Of Marketing Strategies. Essential Elements Of An Effective Marketing Strategy In The Current Digital Landscape. Solutions For Companies Facing Limited Tools Or Resources In Tracking And Measuring Marketing Success.   Show resource/s: https://pamdidner.com/  

In this weeks' Scale Your Sales Podcast episode, my guest is Pam Didner. Pam is a seasoned B2B Consultant, Speaker, Fractional CMO, Author, and Podcaster. She has also written five business books” The Modern AI Marketer, Effective Sales Enablement, Global Content Marketing. Pam works closely with both sales and marketing teams to develop cohesive plans that align with overall business goals. In this episode of Scale Your Sales podcast, we explore the evolving world of sales, marketing, and AI with Pam Didner. She shares insights on transforming sales teams, the shifting buyer's journey, and the critical role of digital marketing. Drawing from her latest books on AI, she offers practical strategies for integrating AI into sales and marketing and emphasizes the importance of understanding buyers and aligning teams. Welcome to Scale Your Sales Podcast, Pam Didner.   Timestamps: 00:00 Discusses AI's Impact on Sales Teams and Marketing Strategies 05:42 Understanding jobs, hands-on training essential for tool use. 07:39 Sales leaders create inefficiencies with varied methodologies. 12:13 Great salespeople aren't always the extroverted talkers. 15:31 Understand and nurture prospects throughout buying journey. 17:49 Marketers struggle to capture attention amidst email overloads. 20:51 Understand audience and intent via data enrichment. 26:13 I admire Taylor Swift's hard work.   https://pamdidner.com/books/modern-ai-marketer-in-gpt-era/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamdidner/ https://www.instagram.com/pam_didner/ https://twitter.com/pamdidner   Janice B Gordon is the award-winning Customer Growth Expert and Scale Your Sales Framework founder. She is by LinkedIn Sales 15 Innovating Sales Influencers to Follow 2021, the Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Customer Experience Nov 2020 and 150 Women B2B Thought Leaders You Should Follow in 2021. Janice helps companies worldwide to reimagine revenue growth thought customer experience and sales. Book Janice to speak virtually at your next event: https://janicebgordon.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/janice-b-gordon/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaniceBGordon Scale Your Sales Podcast: https://scaleyoursales.co.uk/podcast More on the blog: https://scaleyoursales.co.uk/blog Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janicebgordon Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScaleYourSales   And more! Visit our podcast website https://scaleyoursales.co.uk/podcast/ to watch or listen.

  Hey there, tired of feeling like you're constantly juggling between customer success and finding new sales opportunities? You've probably been told to just push harder and do it all, leaving you exhausted and stretched thin. The struggle to balance it all can be overwhelming, leaving you feeling drained and unproductive. But what if there's a better way to achieve both success and productivity without burning yourself out? Keep reading. Want to revolutionize your sales team's approach and achieve exceptional customer engagement? I've got the solution to help you achieve that. Let's dive in and uncover the secrets to transforming your sales productivity and customer-centric strategies. Are you ready to level up your game? Let's make it happen! This is Teri Long's story: Teri Long, the Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at MindTickle, has had an incredible journey that led her to her current role. With more than 20 years of experience as an enablement leader, she initially spent a decade as a quota-carrying sales rep, which shaped her unique perspective on the challenges and needs of sales professionals. Teri's unwavering passion for enabling sellers and driving customer success is evident in her varied experience, spanning startups, enterprise organizations, and fractional work within business development and operations. Her remarkable resilience and determination are showcased by a surprising and inspiring personal story – overcoming a snowmobiling accident that resulted in a six-inch titanium plate and six screws in her collarbone, followed by a swift return to snowmobiling just two months after surgery. Teri's journey, both personally and professionally, reflects her tenacity and drive, making her insights on implementing effective sales enablement programs all the more impactful and compelling. Humans are complex and humans aren't linear. We need to figure out how to teach sellers and customer success that in this new world, you get a box this big, and somehow you need to translate verbal and nonverbal body language. - Teri Long Teri Long, serving as the Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at Mind Tickle, boasts 20+ years of extensive experience in enablement leadership, coupled with a decade-long tenure as a quota-carrying representative across startups and enterprise organizations. As a pivotal founding member of the Revenue Enablement Society, her influence has been instrumental in shaping global enablement strategies. Teri's expertise lies in implementing effective sales enablement programs, making her a sought-after authority for sales enablement leaders and professionals aiming to optimize sales productivity and foster a customer-centric approach. In this episode, you will be able to: Mastering effective sales enablement programs for exponential growth. Unleashing the power of a digital presence to supercharge sales success. Aligning customer success and sales strategies for unstoppable growth. Boosting sales productivity through cutting-edge technology solutions. Harnessing personal brand prowess to skyrocket sales performance.   The key moments in this episode are: 00:00:09 - Introduction to Vengreso and FlyMSG 00:01:18 - Welcoming Teri Long 00:08:09 - Implementing Sales Enablement Programs 00:12:36 - Identifying the Biggest Problems 00:14:02 - Effective Enablement Leadership 00:14:58 - Challenging Assumptions in Sales Training 00:18:30 - Impact of Operationalizing Processes 00:20:44 - Fundamental Challenges in Sales 00:24:34 - Sales as the Art of Helping 00:28:55 - Balancing Customer Experience and Sales 00:29:35 - Restructuring Customer Success Compensation Model 00:30:39 - Misalignment Between Sales and CS 00:34:28 - Bridging the Gap Between Sales and CS 00:39:48 - Digital Presence and Relationship Building 00:43:55 - Blog Content and Social Media 00:44:35 - Connecting with Teri 00:45:16 - Personalized Connection Requests 00:45:48 - Favorite Movies 00:47:22 - Closing Remarks Timestamped summary of this episode: 00:00:09 - Introduction to Vengreso and FlyMSG Mario Martinez Jr. introduces Vengreso and FlyMSG, a free personal writing assistant and text expander application. The podcast aims to help sales leaders and practitioners grow their sales numbers at scale. 00:01:18 - Welcoming Teri Long Mario welcomes Teri Long, Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at Mind Tickle, and shares their history of collaboration in shaping revenue enablement sales strategies. 00:08:09 - Implementing Sales Enablement Programs Teri emphasizes the importance of initiating enablement strategy with a charter and a listening tour to identify urgent, short-term, and long-term priorities, as well as success metrics tied to organizational business metrics. 00:12:36 - Identifying the Biggest Problems Teri advises enablement leaders to investigate root causes by delving into data and being hyper-curious. She highlights the importance of testing hypotheses to pinpoint the reasons behind sales performance issues. 00:14:02 - Effective Enablement Leadership Teri underscores the role of enablement leaders as investigators who test and validate hypotheses to identify the root causes of sales performance issues, emphasizing the need for a test and validate approach to problem-solving. 00:14:58 - Challenging Assumptions in Sales Training Teri Long discusses the common assumption that sales teams need more training when they're not selling. She challenges this by delving into the reasons behind the lack of sales and emphasizes the importance of digging through processes before jumping to training as a solution. 00:18:30 - Impact of Operationalizing Processes Teri shares a real-life example of how operationalizing the sales process and creating a playbook led to significant impact for a BDR team. By removing roadblocks, setting clear expectations, and creating repeatable enablement programs, they saw an improvement in sales productivity and performance. 00:20:44 - Fundamental Challenges in Sales The conversation shifts to fundamental challenges in sales organizations, focusing on individual and team productivity. Teri references the State of Sales Productivity report and highlights the importance of genuinely helping buyers during the buying process. 00:24:34 - Sales as the Art of Helping Teri shares a personal story of how she unintentionally became a top salesperson by simply helping customers. She emphasizes the importance of authentically wanting to elevate customers and provide value, echoing the findings of the productivity report. 00:28:55 - Balancing Customer Experience and Sales The discussion centers on the challenge of balancing customer experience and finding new opportunities. Teri highlights the disconnect between customer success and sales incentives, emphasizing the need for sales leaders to align incentives to drive adoption and renewal. 00:29:35 - Restructuring Customer Success Compensation Model Teri suggests tying 30-35% of CS compensation to renewal to align incentives with sales. This could lead to hiring more experienced salespeople and reevaluating the CSM organization. 00:30:39 - Misalignment Between Sales and CS Teri highlights the misalignment in compensation and expectations between sales and CS. Lack of communication between AEs and CS reps leads to confusion and potential customer dissatisfaction. 00:34:28 - Bridging the Gap Between Sales and CS Teri emphasizes the need for CS reps with sales backgrounds and the importance of value selling in the CS role. She suggests evaluating competencies and hiring the right people to drive success. 00:39:48 - Digital Presence and Relationship Building Teri discusses the importance of digital presence for both sales and CS teams, emphasizing the need for personalized engagement and building rapport with buyers. She also highlights the shift towards understanding digital body language and leveraging technology for customer interactions. 00:43:55 - Blog Content and Social Media Teri discusses a new feature that allows users to generate social media posts from blog articles. The goal is to streamline the content creation process and empower sellers to be more productive. 00:44:35 - Connecting with Teri Teri invites listeners to reach out to her through LinkedIn, phone, or email. She emphasizes her commitment to being responsive and helpful in networking. 00:45:16 - Personalized Connection Requests Mario advises listeners to send personalized connection requests to Teri on LinkedIn. He encourages them to mention the podcast and Teri's insights in their invitation. 00:45:48 - Favorite Movies Teri shares her two all-time favorite movies: "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "The Heat." She expresses her love for Audrey Hepburn and Melissa McCarthy, showcasing a unique dichotomy in her movie preferences. 00:47:22 - Closing Remarks Mario thanks the audience for listening and encourages them to leave a 5-star rating and review for the podcast on iTunes. He also promotes the use of FlyMSG to increase productivity. Mastering effective sales enablement Effective sales enablement is crucial for organizations to align their sales teams with the overall business goals and priorities. By mastering sales enablement, businesses can enhance their sales productivity, drive better customer relationships, and ultimately boost revenue. Implementing successful sales enablement programs involves creating a clear charter, prioritizing challenges, and aligning efforts with organizational metrics. Unleashing the power of digital presence Having a strong digital presence is essential for sales professionals to connect with customers and prospects in a virtual environment. Utilizing digital tools and platforms can help sales teams personalize interactions, understand buyer behavior, and improve customer engagement. Embracing technology and leveraging digital resources can streamline sales processes and enable sales professionals to scale their efforts efficiently. Aligning customer success and sales Aligning customer success with sales goals is crucial for organizations to drive long-term customer satisfaction and retention. By incentivizing customer success managers based on renewals and engagement, businesses can ensure a seamless transition from sales to post-sale activities. Developing a clear handoff process between sales and customer success helps set expectations and ensures successful customer onboarding and retention strategies. The resources mentioned in this episode are: Connect with Teri Long on LinkedIn and send a personalized connection request mentioning the Modern Selling Podcast with Mario Martinez Jr. Watch the movie The Heat starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy for a good laugh and a memorable bar scene. Download FlyMSG for free to save 20 hours or more in a month and increase productivity with a text expander and personal writing assistant.

Are you looking to make AI work for your small business? You have come to the right place. This week, our Small Business Matters podcast dives into AI with expert and author Pam Didner. Pam is a powerhouse in the marketing world. She's not just a marketing expert; she's a problem solver, a digital enthusiast, and a lover of all things tech. With a rich background in B2B marketing, Pam is a much sought-after keynote speaker and trainer for B2B marketing teams. She's the host of a popular podcast, B2B Marketing and More, where she dives into marketing strategies and trends that shape modern business. Pam's also the acclaimed author of three insightful books: Effective Sales Enablement, The Modern AI Marketer, and Global Content Marketing. Each book is a treasure trove of knowledge, offering practical advice and cutting-edge strategies for marketers everywhere. For any resources mentioned on the show today, please visit our show notes over at experian.com/smbmatters.   FOLLOW US   Threads | https://www.threads.net/@experianbis TikToks | https://www.tiktok.com/@experianb2b Twitter | https://twitter.com/experiansmb  Instagram | https://instagram.com/experianbis  Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/ExperianBusinessInfo Pinterest | https://www.pinterest.com/experianb2b LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/experian-business-information YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI5DU7EVNB_z5xst-Ncuk-g  

Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, writer, speaker, podcaster, and author of 3 books: Global Content Marketing, Effective Sales Enablement, and the Modern AI Marketer.  She has given future trends, content marketing and sales enablement presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet local marketing and sales team's needs. She is strategic in nature and tactical in execution. She also specializes in sales, marketing and internal/external communications consulting, keynote presentations, corporate training and planning sessions. Her clients include Intel, 3M, Sunstar, Cisco, TE Connectivity, Southwest Airlines to name just a few. She shares marketing thoughts at pamdidner.com. Learn More About Pam - Click Here

Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I'm Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. While enablement has recently emerged as a formal business function over the last several years, the idea of enabling sellers to succeed has existed in businesses for a long time. As the function of enablement has become more solidified in recent years, selling as a profession has also undergone a lot of change. Inevitably this means that enablement will continue to evolve alongside those changes. Pam Didner, the author of Effective Sales Enablement is here to talk to us a little bit about some of those core concepts from her book about where enablement has historically been and how organizations can lean on enablement to overcome some of those challenges that they may face in the future. So with that, Pam, I’d love to hear a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit more about your book. Pam Didner: Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be part of your podcast. My name is Pam Didner and I am a B2B marketer, writer, and podcaster. I love anything and everything related to B2B marketing. I worked in the corporate setting for almost 20 years doing many things actually from finance, accounting, product management, even operations, and content marketing all the way down to global marketing where I created a strategy for a lot of geographies for the content marketing teams. I worked on the global strategy so they can create their go-to-market plan. I wrote a book about effective sales enablement and it’s really about what a B2B marketer should do to better support their sales team. OF: Fantastic. Well, Pam, thanks so much for being here. What I really loved about your book is you spent some time walking through the history of sales enablement and you talk in the book about how acts of enabling sellers, whether or not that’s been called sales enablement, have actually existed for a long before the term was actually coined and the formal discipline was formed. I’d love to hear your perspective on what some of those ways were that enablement initiatives have historically existed in organizations. PD: Yeah, I’d love to share that. I wrote a whole chapter about that. For a long time selling goods and services was not complicated because our lives were not complicated. You know, we buy food, we farm and we go to sleep. It’s not complicated, but then things changed dramatically after the Industrial Revolution, especially the invention of the steam engine. That literally changed everything because now we can use steam engines to power almost everything. People started building complicated machines using steam engines to automate things and make our lives a whole lot more efficient. For example, we started using steam engines to build trains, right? Think about it. Steam engines are pretty complicated machines then trains are also pretty complicated, so we are building a complicated device on top of a complicated device. Now all of a sudden you have to explain those complicated devices in a way that the buyers can understand. For the longest time, we used horses to transport us. Then the train was invented, but nobody has ever seen a train before. You have to explain what the train will do. Then all of a sudden the people who are selling the train need to be educated in terms of what the train will do and then be able to explain how the train will function. That by itself or in essence, it’s a sales enablement, even though the term was not created or coined back in the 1900s. So really, if you think about it, for the longest time ever since the early 1900s, we were building more and more complicated devices on top of complicated devices. Now, the salespeople’s job is actually trying to sell those complicated devices. They need to be educated. They need to be trained. They need to know their products well. Things changed dramatically in the 1980s. The reason is we invented the computer. Computers actually existed way before that, but the personal computer started to become very popular. Way back then it was like ‘what is a computer, what can a computer do?' The computer was at that time really doing a very complex calculation on behalf of humans. We never ever imagine that the computer can do whatever they are doing now almost like 30 years later. We cannot imagine that, so way back then when people invented computers, especially IBM, they were like okay what does a computer do? I mean it’s literally the machine that is being enclosed inside and then people walk around and see what these things do? The IBM sales professional needed to actually understand what the computer will do and then educate the buyers about its benefit and its features of it. They coined the term sales enablement according to Wikipedia, and I’m not surprised they actually coined that term. It’s really about training sales so they can understand the complicated products they are selling and how to explain that in a way the buyers can understand. So initially sales enablement was really about sales training and sales onboarding. I think the term has been expanded. It’s almost like everything that sales are doing and that needs to be supported can be cold sales enablement. OF: I think that’s very true and just how much enablement has expanded in its definition and organizations over the last few years. I love what you also talked about around the innovation and the business landscape and even all the way back to the industrial revolution, but really how these sales trends have been impacting selling as a profession over even just the last few decades. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. What are some of the ways that sales organizations have evolved in recent years? PD: Great question. Remember I mentioned earlier that salespeople need to be trained when they sell complicated products? In a way, the evolution of sales has a lot to do with technological evolutions and also technological advancement. The complexity of a product actually does have a huge impact in terms of the evolution of sales and also how people conduct the selling process and engagement, but there’s another important element which is the buyer’s purchasing behavior. How buyers purchase any products, especially B2B products, will impact how salespeople sell. For example, the internet, digital media, and even the pandemic have impacted how buyers purchase or behave, therefore massively impacting how salespeople or sales organizations evolve. For example, for the longest time, salespeople have visited their clients several times to close the deals and they had to be present. With the virtual meetings and the pandemic in the past couple of years, sales engagement with clients has evolved even sales hiring. Do we need to hire people on the ground that should be near our client base? I don’t know, maybe that has changed. From my perspective, as I said, the complexity of a product can impact the evolution of sales and the other one is the buyer’s behavior. Another important factor I mentioned in my book is millennials they are joining the sales force and are digital natives. The way they need to be supported, trained, and communicate with will be very, very different from the previous generation of a sales force. If you are supporting both generations, how should you support them? The evolution of a sales engagement will be dramatically different depending on the age of the sales team as well. OF: Yeah, I think that’s such an important point around the generations in the workforce and how their expectations and how they are wired to interact with customers is different. I think that’s so important to take that into consideration. PD: I totally agree. For example, a lot of millennials prefer texting, so the way they communicate with the buyers is actually through texting, but the older generation prefers email and they prefer talking to them, picking up the phone, and having a conversation. Because the communication mechanism is so different, the way that you need to train those people needs to be different as well. OF: I couldn’t agree more on that point. Looking ahead to the next few years, what are some of your predictions for how selling will continue to evolve? PD: You know, I hate making predictions. Selling, especially technology selling, is going to get even more complicated and that just affects. The biggest challenge from my perspective, moving forward is to find a way to explain complex ideas or the product in simple terms that your buyers will understand. That sounds like this age-old challenge, but I’m telling you many companies have not solved that. The messaging, such as what to say and how to say about your product, will continue to challenge the sales product and marketing team. I don’t think that will ever stop. The other one is that the buyer’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter. I am the guilty one as well. So we need to think about the types of content and outreach communication to get their heads turning. So what can we do so that it’s not creepy? The buyer knows that you are virtually stalking them, but how can you communicate and reach out to them? It’s not like you know that I’m following you every step. That, in terms of how to understand them and communicate with them yet not be creepy, will be also a knowledge challenge that from my perspective that those people will face in the next couple of years. Another thing is technology will continue to play a critical role in helping sales and unraveling buyers' intent. There are a lot of tools out there to actually help you understand if the buyer is ready to buy, what is their intention, and whether are they apprehensive to buy. Sales professionals, along with the marketing team will continue to evaluate different kinds of tools they need and incorporate that into their sales stages. The key thing is the more tools that you incorporate into the sales stages, the more tools that salespeople need to learn and they hate that. So how you get your sales team motivated to learn more about the new tools can also be challenging. Did I depress everybody now? OF: No, those are very, very great points and they’re very real. I mean those are challenges that I absolutely think are prevalent today in a lot of organizations. I think it will continue to persist, especially as there’s so much change happening in the business landscape and economic uncertainty right now. I think every point that you just mentioned is absolutely spot on. With that in mind, one of the things that you do mention in the book is that one of the core purposes of enablement, from your perspective, is really to increase sales velocity. With all of this change that organizations and that sellers are experiencing right now, how can enablement really help organizations not only maintain but improve sales velocity? PD: That’s a great question. The key thing is you need to set up sales enablement success metrics. Let's assume increasing sales velocity is very important for the sales team. Then you need to define what sales velocity is and you need to incorporate that as a part of your success metrics. So that’s number one. Now, let's assume that the sales velocity is an increased conversion rate, and let's assume that’s your definition of yours. Now, you need to think through what the sales enablement team is doing as a part of your job to actually increase that conversion rate. Are you training your sales team faster when a new product is launched, literally two weeks before the product is launched, you have training ready and everybody is educated and onboarded. That can increase sales conversion through training and arming them with the data they need. Maybe the other one is to give them enough content at different sales stages so they know what kind of content they should use at the different sales stages. That’s also another way to showcase that you are increasing sales conversion. You need to determine what you are doing as part of your success metrics and you need to define what sales velocity means to you and also to the sales team and then make a decision to quantify. A lot of things can be very abstract. It’s very hard to directly say that is the sales enablement contribution, but you can basically make a percentage and make sure that the salespeople agree with that or you can determine your deliverables in a way that the sales team agrees with that and use that to quantify your contribution to increase the sales velocity. OF: Absolutely. I think defining what that means for your organization as the first step is a fantastic point. That was great advice. In thinking ahead as well, I know you said you don’t like to make predictions, but alongside some of those predictions that you did lay out with some of the challenges that sales organizations will continue to experience over the next couple of years, I’d love to hear your take on where you think enablement is going as a function. How do you think enablement will continue to mature and evolve alongside some of those larger-scale changes in the business landscape over the next few years? PD: Let me answer that a little bit differently as well. I think the maturity of an organization in terms of setting up the sales enablement function is going to be different from company to company. I just want to make that very clear and there’s no best practice that will apply to all companies. I think it’s very, very important that each company looks inward to evaluate its own processes and tools. There are things that salespeople always complain about, especially when they are not getting the support they need. For example, the number one reason that salespeople complain the most that I’m aware of is, ‘I don’t know where the content is, I cannot find the content when I need it'. Okay, well can you at least make sure that all the sales-centric content and training information are properly tagged with the right keywords, detailed descriptions, product names, product family, content owners, even expiration dates, etcetera so salespeople can just find them when they need them. Do you see where I’m coming from? So the majority of your organization, in terms of what you need to do, is to address the salespeople’s most common challenges head-on. The maturity of a sales enablement function will come naturally when you start addressing salespeople’s challenges one by one. That’s how I see that you can evolve the maturity of a sales enablement function. OF: Yeah, absolutely. especially alongside challenges, I think that’s fantastic. Well, Pam, thanks so much for joining the podcast today. I love this conversation and loved hearing more about your book. Thank you again. PD: Thank you so much for having me, really appreciate it. Take care! OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro and if there's something you'd like to share or a topic that you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I'm Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. While enablement has recently emerged as a formal business function over the last several years, the idea of enabling sellers to succeed has existed in businesses for a long time. As the function of enablement has become more solidified in recent years, selling as a profession has also undergone a lot of change. Inevitably this means that enablement will continue to evolve alongside those changes. Pam Didner, the author of Effective Sales Enablement is here to talk to us a little bit about some of those core concepts from her book about where enablement has historically been and how organizations can lean on enablement to overcome some of those challenges that they may face in the future. So with that, Pam, I’d love to hear a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit more about your book. Pam Didner: Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be part of your podcast. My name is Pam Didner and I am a B2B marketer, writer, and podcaster. I love anything and everything related to B2B marketing. I worked in the corporate setting for almost 20 years doing many things actually from finance, accounting, product management, even operations, and content marketing all the way down to global marketing where I created a strategy for a lot of geographies for the content marketing teams. I worked on the global strategy so they can create their go-to-market plan. I wrote a book about effective sales enablement and it’s really about what a B2B marketer should do to better support their sales team. OF: Fantastic. Well, Pam, thanks so much for being here. What I really loved about your book is you spent some time walking through the history of sales enablement and you talk in the book about how acts of enabling sellers, whether or not that’s been called sales enablement, have actually existed for a long before the term was actually coined and the formal discipline was formed. I’d love to hear your perspective on what some of those ways were that enablement initiatives have historically existed in organizations. PD: Yeah, I’d love to share that. I wrote a whole chapter about that. For a long time selling goods and services was not complicated because our lives were not complicated. You know, we buy food, we farm and we go to sleep. It’s not complicated, but then things changed dramatically after the Industrial Revolution, especially the invention of the steam engine. That literally changed everything because now we can use steam engines to power almost everything. People started building complicated machines using steam engines to automate things and make our lives a whole lot more efficient. For example, we started using steam engines to build trains, right? Think about it. Steam engines are pretty complicated machines then trains are also pretty complicated, so we are building a complicated device on top of a complicated device. Now all of a sudden you have to explain those complicated devices in a way that the buyers can understand. For the longest time, we used horses to transport us. Then the train was invented, but nobody has ever seen a train before. You have to explain what the train will do. Then all of a sudden the people who are selling the train need to be educated in terms of what the train will do and then be able to explain how the train will function. That by itself or in essence, it’s a sales enablement, even though the term was not created or coined back in the 1900s. So really, if you think about it, for the longest time ever since the early 1900s, we were building more and more complicated devices on top of complicated devices. Now, the salespeople’s job is actually trying to sell those complicated devices. They need to be educated. They need to be trained. They need to know their products well. Things changed dramatically in the 1980s. The reason is we invented the computer. Computers actually existed way before that, but the personal computer started to become very popular. Way back then it was like ‘what is a computer, what can a computer do?' The computer was at that time really doing a very complex calculation on behalf of humans. We never ever imagine that the computer can do whatever they are doing now almost like 30 years later. We cannot imagine that, so way back then when people invented computers, especially IBM, they were like okay what does a computer do? I mean it’s literally the machine that is being enclosed inside and then people walk around and see what these things do? The IBM sales professional needed to actually understand what the computer will do and then educate the buyers about its benefit and its features of it. They coined the term sales enablement according to Wikipedia, and I’m not surprised they actually coined that term. It’s really about training sales so they can understand the complicated products they are selling and how to explain that in a way the buyers can understand. So initially sales enablement was really about sales training and sales onboarding. I think the term has been expanded. It’s almost like everything that sales are doing and that needs to be supported can be cold sales enablement. OF: I think that’s very true and just how much enablement has expanded in its definition and organizations over the last few years. I love what you also talked about around the innovation and the business landscape and even all the way back to the industrial revolution, but really how these sales trends have been impacting selling as a profession over even just the last few decades. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. What are some of the ways that sales organizations have evolved in recent years? PD: Great question. Remember I mentioned earlier that salespeople need to be trained when they sell complicated products? In a way, the evolution of sales has a lot to do with technological evolutions and also technological advancement. The complexity of a product actually does have a huge impact in terms of the evolution of sales and also how people conduct the selling process and engagement, but there’s another important element which is the buyer’s purchasing behavior. How buyers purchase any products, especially B2B products, will impact how salespeople sell. For example, the internet, digital media, and even the pandemic have impacted how buyers purchase or behave, therefore massively impacting how salespeople or sales organizations evolve. For example, for the longest time, salespeople have visited their clients several times to close the deals and they had to be present. With the virtual meetings and the pandemic in the past couple of years, sales engagement with clients has evolved even sales hiring. Do we need to hire people on the ground that should be near our client base? I don’t know, maybe that has changed. From my perspective, as I said, the complexity of a product can impact the evolution of sales and the other one is the buyer’s behavior. Another important factor I mentioned in my book is millennials they are joining the sales force and are digital natives. The way they need to be supported, trained, and communicate with will be very, very different from the previous generation of a sales force. If you are supporting both generations, how should you support them? The evolution of a sales engagement will be dramatically different depending on the age of the sales team as well. OF: Yeah, I think that’s such an important point around the generations in the workforce and how their expectations and how they are wired to interact with customers is different. I think that’s so important to take that into consideration. PD: I totally agree. For example, a lot of millennials prefer texting, so the way they communicate with the buyers is actually through texting, but the older generation prefers email and they prefer talking to them, picking up the phone, and having a conversation. Because the communication mechanism is so different, the way that you need to train those people needs to be different as well. OF: I couldn’t agree more on that point. Looking ahead to the next few years, what are some of your predictions for how selling will continue to evolve? PD: You know, I hate making predictions. Selling, especially technology selling, is going to get even more complicated and that just affects. The biggest challenge from my perspective, moving forward is to find a way to explain complex ideas or the product in simple terms that your buyers will understand. That sounds like this age-old challenge, but I’m telling you many companies have not solved that. The messaging, such as what to say and how to say about your product, will continue to challenge the sales product and marketing team. I don’t think that will ever stop. The other one is that the buyer’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter. I am the guilty one as well. So we need to think about the types of content and outreach communication to get their heads turning. So what can we do so that it’s not creepy? The buyer knows that you are virtually stalking them, but how can you communicate and reach out to them? It’s not like you know that I’m following you every step. That, in terms of how to understand them and communicate with them yet not be creepy, will be also a knowledge challenge that from my perspective that those people will face in the next couple of years. Another thing is technology will continue to play a critical role in helping sales and unraveling buyers' intent. There are a lot of tools out there to actually help you understand if the buyer is ready to buy, what is their intention, and whether are they apprehensive to buy. Sales professionals, along with the marketing team will continue to evaluate different kinds of tools they need and incorporate that into their sales stages. The key thing is the more tools that you incorporate into the sales stages, the more tools that salespeople need to learn and they hate that. So how you get your sales team motivated to learn more about the new tools can also be challenging. Did I depress everybody now? OF: No, those are very, very great points and they’re very real. I mean those are challenges that I absolutely think are prevalent today in a lot of organizations. I think it will continue to persist, especially as there’s so much change happening in the business landscape and economic uncertainty right now. I think every point that you just mentioned is absolutely spot on. With that in mind, one of the things that you do mention in the book is that one of the core purposes of enablement, from your perspective, is really to increase sales velocity. With all of this change that organizations and that sellers are experiencing right now, how can enablement really help organizations not only maintain but improve sales velocity? PD: That’s a great question. The key thing is you need to set up sales enablement success metrics. Let's assume increasing sales velocity is very important for the sales team. Then you need to define what sales velocity is and you need to incorporate that as a part of your success metrics. So that’s number one. Now, let's assume that the sales velocity is an increased conversion rate, and let's assume that’s your definition of yours. Now, you need to think through what the sales enablement team is doing as a part of your job to actually increase that conversion rate. Are you training your sales team faster when a new product is launched, literally two weeks before the product is launched, you have training ready and everybody is educated and onboarded. That can increase sales conversion through training and arming them with the data they need. Maybe the other one is to give them enough content at different sales stages so they know what kind of content they should use at the different sales stages. That’s also another way to showcase that you are increasing sales conversion. You need to determine what you are doing as part of your success metrics and you need to define what sales velocity means to you and also to the sales team and then make a decision to quantify. A lot of things can be very abstract. It’s very hard to directly say that is the sales enablement contribution, but you can basically make a percentage and make sure that the salespeople agree with that or you can determine your deliverables in a way that the sales team agrees with that and use that to quantify your contribution to increase the sales velocity. OF: Absolutely. I think defining what that means for your organization as the first step is a fantastic point. That was great advice. In thinking ahead as well, I know you said you don’t like to make predictions, but alongside some of those predictions that you did lay out with some of the challenges that sales organizations will continue to experience over the next couple of years, I’d love to hear your take on where you think enablement is going as a function. How do you think enablement will continue to mature and evolve alongside some of those larger-scale changes in the business landscape over the next few years? PD: Let me answer that a little bit differently as well. I think the maturity of an organization in terms of setting up the sales enablement function is going to be different from company to company. I just want to make that very clear and there’s no best practice that will apply to all companies. I think it’s very, very important that each company looks inward to evaluate its own processes and tools. There are things that salespeople always complain about, especially when they are not getting the support they need. For example, the number one reason that salespeople complain the most that I’m aware of is, ‘I don’t know where the content is, I cannot find the content when I need it'. Okay, well can you at least make sure that all the sales-centric content and training information are properly tagged with the right keywords, detailed descriptions, product names, product family, content owners, even expiration dates, etcetera so salespeople can just find them when they need them. Do you see where I’m coming from? So the majority of your organization, in terms of what you need to do, is to address the salespeople’s most common challenges head-on. The maturity of a sales enablement function will come naturally when you start addressing salespeople’s challenges one by one. That’s how I see that you can evolve the maturity of a sales enablement function. OF: Yeah, absolutely. especially alongside challenges, I think that’s fantastic. Well, Pam, thanks so much for joining the podcast today. I love this conversation and loved hearing more about your book. Thank you again. PD: Thank you so much for having me, really appreciate it. Take care! OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro and if there's something you'd like to share or a topic that you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, writer, speaker, podcaster, and author of 3 books: Global Content Marketing, Effective Sales Enablement, and the Modern AI Marketer.  She has given future trends, content marketing and sales enablement presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet local marketing and sales team's needs. She is strategic in nature and tactical in execution. She also specializes in sales, marketing and internal/external communications consulting, keynote presentations, corporate training and planning sessions. Her clients include Intel, 3M, Sunstar, Cisco, TE Connectivity, Southwest Airlines to name just a few. She shares marketing thoughts at pamdidner.com. Learn More About Pam - Click Here

Sarah Carson from packaging design and manufacturing company, Rohrer, talks about bringing together marketing and sales teams from two organizations, building in-house capabilities, and her approach to creating powerful sales enablement content.

Artificial Intelligence has been a buzzword in martech. Many martech vendors position their products as AI-based platforms. What does that mean to marketers? What do marketers need to know about AI to either evaluate vendors' platforms or modify their existing sales and marketing processes? Pam Didner, Author of Global Content Marketing and Effective Sales Enablement, will share examples and case studies so that you can easily evaluate AI or build AI-centric martech stacks that fit your processes and flows.Check out upcoming DigiMarCon Digital Marketing, Media, and Advertising Conferences & Exhibitions Worldwide at https://digimarcon.com/events/

Pam Didner: Hi, welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Yay! Today I actually have a special guest. Stacey Danheiser is the founder and CMO of SHAKE Marketing Group and also a host for Soar Marketing Society, which is a community on Mighty Network. So if you are interested in joining, check that out. She has worked with many companies, at the same time, being in the CMO positions. Now, she is a mentor and also created many marketing training programs for B2B Marketers. So Stacey, welcome.   Stacey Danheiser: Hi. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.   Pam Didner: Yay! So I have a couple of questions for you.   Stacey Danheiser: Sure.   Pam Didner: I know that in your program, you are talking about the skill sets that's needed for B2B marketers, and I work with many B2B marketers and me included, for a long period of time, we tend to focus on hard skill sets, like search engine marketing, email marketing, event marketing, yet soft skill sets are so important. So what is the number one soft skills, from your perspective, that marketers should possess?   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. Well, we're gonna go into competencies a little bit more, but from a skill perspective, absolutely, I would say marketers are expected to be amazing communicators and very high creativity. In fact, creativity happens to be, I think the number one in-demand skill year after year, and so marketers that are only focusing on the hard skills aren't necessarily taking the time to become creative, which is really what the business needs marketers to be.   Pam Didner: You know, that's actually very interesting. Before you answered the question, you mentioned about competencies, and from my perspective, competencies and skill sets are very similar. Do you actually have a different definitions for that?   Stacey Danheiser: We like to talk about skills as what you need to do to be successful in your job.   Pam Didner: Okay.   Stacey Danheiser: So if you're a social media manager, then you obviously need to know how to use social media. You need to know about content creation, right? You might need to know about how to create ads. That's kind of what you need to do. Competencies on other hand, are more about the behaviors and how you do your job. So how do you show up as a social media manager? It's the things that aren't often talked about and you might not necessarily see them in a job description as to what it will take to be a successful person in that role.   Pam Didner: When you were talking about it, the only thing I can think of is like the softer skill set.   Stacey Danheiser: Exactly. It's maybe what we would traditionally call a softer skill set, but it's also leadership.   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: It's what somebody is looking for to promote. If you have two marketers and they're both really great at SEO, that's the skill, which one do you promote? Do you promote... And if they have equal skill sets in that area, you end up promoting the one that is showing leadership capabilities and competencies beyond just the skills that they need to be successful in the job. I wanna take a step back maybe, and introduce you to the framework, 'cause we did a bunch of research on well, what are these competencies that today's modern marketers should have to be successful in their role? And so it all started a couple of years ago, when we did research, we started noticing a trend that... If you looked at the websites and Twitter feeds and LinkedIn feeds of companies that are operating in a similar industry, they all started to sound the same. Everybody was pretty much copying and pasting each other. And so we wanted to know why was this happening? And you could go into... This is, I think, where the creativity piece evolves from, right? Because companies wanna stand out, they want to feel like they're doing something different or bringing something different to the world. But we were really interested in why this is happening from a marketing perspective, and what we found is that it's not because marketers didn't know what to do, it's because there was a skill set gap or a competency gap happening within the marketing function.   Stacey Danheiser: So people were getting into these roles, had high demands to get something out there fast. Well, what's the fastest way to do it? You go and you look at what your competitors are doing. You scrape their story from their website and then you put it onto your own, changing some of the words and making it sound slightly different. And so what emerged from that research was a set of competencies that we call the VALUE framework, because it's an acronym that spells value.   Pam Didner: What are these five?   Stacey Danheiser: Yes, so the first one is visionary, which is the ability to look ahead, to use your imagination, to have your pulse connected to what's happening in the market, and not only your industry, but your customer's industry, so that you can see ahead and build strategies. The second one is A for activator, which is the ability, not only to get things done, which marketers traditionally rate themselves very high on, but also the ability to collaborate and get buy-in and say no to ideas that may not work for the business. The third one is L for learner, which is not only just staying in touch with your own career path and the upskilling and reskilling required to just be a marketer, but also what are you doing to learn about your competitors, your market, your customers, and even your business and your company products and your company priorities. The fourth one was U for usefulness, and this is really the ability to connect the dots from, on one side of the bridge, what the customer cares about and values, to the other side of the bridge, which is what your company sells. How are you leading your customers over that bridge, and you really can't be useful to customers if you don't understand both sides of that equation. And then finally, the E is for evaluator, which is the data analytics side and the ability to objectively look at your marketing activity, look at what's happening and to be able to analyze it and make decisions based on that, and this one requires a little bit of political savviness as well, because as we know as marketers, there's a lot of opinions that are being thrown around internally and pet-projects that come up from the CEO or the head of product, and so this is really being objective and being able to analyze the data and make sense of it so that you can use it to make decisions.   Pam Didner: Got it! Those are, I would say, a lot of competencies or the skill set that people need to possess, and it's a journey. It's a multi-years type of effort. Obviously, you have written a book, talk about it. For these five different competencies, is there one more important than the others? Or is there any way to learn the competencies at once?   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. So the book is called Stand-Out Marketing, and we are just in the process of launching a self-assessment tool so that somebody could go on and figure out where do they have the biggest gaps across the five. I've done the polls for other audiences, and typically, the one that seems to be rated the lowest as of now, kind of trending amongst marketers... What do you think it is?   Pam Didner: Vision?   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, it's visionary.   Pam Didner: Either vision or evaluating?   Stacey Danheiser: Yep. Yeah, if you think back to a few years, there's been this push for data-driven marketing, data-driven marketing, data-driven marketing, so I think you're starting to see more people sort of comfortable in that role of thinking ahead about what data do I need to collect.   Pam Didner: That makes a lot of sense. I like that. Yup.   Stacey Danheiser: But what... I think the gap is around sort of this visionary piece, and this is really... If you look at the CMO tenure and the turnover in the marketing position and the frustration with the CEOs, it's that marketers aren't really tapped into business priorities and able to connect to suggesting marketing activity that aligns to the business, and so this requires a lot of strategic thinking and permission to give yourself time to think strategically, versus what I think a lot of companies tend to do is, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that there's a bunch of steps in foundation that we have to build, but let's just go execute, and let's put something out there and let's see how it does." And what ends up happening with that kind of approach is that sure, you get results, but you're kind of sporadic about collecting that information, versus being intentful and purposeful about where you wanna focus. So to answer your question, we have a self-assessment tool that we're building that will help somebody identify those. The second piece of that, like which one is the most important, really depends on the organization. So...   Pam Didner: I like that answer. Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: It does because there's different stages of companies, there's different sizes of marketing teams. And I would take a holistic approach to it. When I work with organizations, kind of looking at the skill sets on the team, if you have a strong team of activators and you have nobody doing the evaluation and nobody doing the visionary piece, well then that's the gap, and that's what you should be focused on, is filling that gap.   Pam Didner: True. True.   Stacey Danheiser: Whether you're upscaling somebody or potentially bringing on a new hire in that area, that's kind of how the prioritization would work, and so these can all be learned. It can.   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: Each chapter has an explanation of what the competency is. There's some exercises and self-assessment that you can do to figure out how you would score yourself, and then there's suggestions and ways to get better for each of those areas as well.   Pam Didner: So Stacey, I love your answer and I want to do a quick summary actually, for my audience very quickly. Granted I ask a very specific question. I say, "Hey, these are the five skill set. Which one should we go first?" And Stacey basically said, determining down your gap, and there's assessment that you can do. And then you can determine with your individual assessment where maybe you fell a little short or maybe the area you have the biggest strength. From my perspective, there are two ways to work on this. You can work on to improve the areas that you need improvement, or you can even continue to work on your strength and make your strengths shine. But doing assessment, I think, is very, very important. So your answer is wonderful. Doing assessment and actually using your assessment to determine the gap and what you want to do next. With that being said Stacey, is there any specific link that people can actually do that assessment? Is that assessment free at this time?   Stacey Danheiser: It is not ready. However, you can go sign up. There's a... Can I share a link?   Pam Didner: I will add that into the show description and as a part of my podcast and also the video.   Stacey Danheiser: Yep, great.   Pam Didner: Fantastic. So with that being said, I actually have a couple more questions. You mentioned about strategic thinking. I'm using myself as an example. I was a CPA and I was incredibly operations-driven. And strategic thinking was never my Forte, ever. For 10, 15 years of my career, I'm always incredibly focused on how. When I took on a strategic type of role to create a global marketing plan for an enterprise, I remember I struggled tremendously the first two years. [laughter] I have colleagues like came to me and said, "This is a bunch of tactics. It's not strategic enough, and I was like, "What does that even mean, to be strategic?" And took me a long time to actually understand that. You brought a very good point in terms of for marketers to understand the business imperative and also the business goals of a company, and that's how I start when I started thinking strategically, is understand the business goal, the revenue goal, what are the sales people trying to do, what are some of the key things we want to accomplish? And then understand it, internalize it, then take that and try to incorporate it as a part of my marketing strategy. That's how I see as a strategic thinking. What is your thought on that? Can you provide additional insight?   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah. I love that. That really is strategic, is knowing why you're doing something. So I spent 14 years in corporate marketing working for five different Fortune 500 companies so...   Pam Didner: We can talk about that (laughs).   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah.   Pam Didner: Both of us have been in the corporate world for a long time.   Stacey Danheiser: For a long time. So I have, yes, a lot of stories about the marketing planning process, but what I've found, and this is still happening pretty prevalently, is that depending on the marketer and how strategic they are, a lot of people start with how, right? "Here's what I need you to do. I need you to go build a website." "Okay, how are we gonna do it?"   Pam Didner: "We need to do an event." [laughs]   Stacey Danheiser: "We need to do an event." "Okay, great. How do we get started? And let's go build out the tactics." But it's stopping yourself before you jump to that level and asking the question why. Why are we doing this? What do we seriously want to achieve? And how do we know if we've achieved it? What does success look like for this program? So I think a lot of companies, and especially back in my day in corporate, we did a lot of events, because we had always done events. Of course, we're gonna show up at this trade show because that's just what you do. But...   Pam Didner: And sales has been asking for it. And because sales want the events to happen, it's a trade show, so and they can get leads and therefore we do it. Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So it's the marketer, starting to think strategically, is stopping and saying, "Why? Why do we wanna do this? What are you trying to achieve?" And you'll find, this is really interesting, it seems like a lot of people are making assumptions that these answers are understood, but when you actually pause and ask that question to the person making the request, half the time they don't even know. They'll stop and they'll say, "Oh, that's a really good question. What are we trying to achieve with this? How will we measure the success of this?" And so it really forces people to sort of think through the request that they're making and maybe events are not the answer. Maybe there's a different way to come up with the outcome that people are looking for, rather than spinning up a whole bunch of work that's going to take six months to come to fruition. So...   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: That would be kind of number one is to just get in the mindset of asking that question, why? The second thing that I think helps to start thinking more strategically, especially as a marketer, is what I would call the customer-focused mindset, and I think this is missing in a lot of organizations that are very inward-driven. They sit in a group around of sales people and products people and executives, and they all speculate about what the customer may want, and the reality is, marketing should be owning customer research, and marketing should have their pulse on what the customer needs or wants, or values, or expects. And unless you're in an organization that's budgeting for customer research, which I've found most B2B organizations are not, then your avenue for getting input from customers is either you need to build your own relationship with customers and ask these questions directly as a marketer, or travel along with the sales team, and build the respect and relationship with the sales team so they start inviting you along to have these conversations directly with their customers. And so this will help you be a more strategic thinker because you'll have another data point which is, "Here's what my company wants to do, I have their goals and I understand what we're trying to achieve, but what do my customers want and how do I... Like I said earlier, kind of bridge the gap between the two." And so forcing yourself to always be thinking about the customer, and is this really adding value to their world, how is this gonna help us, how does this help the customer? That's definitely a piece that helps you think more strategically, and then kind of along with the research piece, and I know that there's maybe an unpopular opinion about how much time to spend with competitors. But reality is that we have ended up in this sea of sameness because marketers have not focused on what the competition is doing. So said in another way, we know that customers are looking at 10 or 15 pieces of content. They're looking at multiple vendors, and so putting yourself in the shoes of the customer would then help you as a marketer see that is what you're creating contributing to the noise, or is it truly differentiated and helpful and educational and really progressing the customer's journey along a little bit further. So I advise for marketers to spend time doing that competitor research because that helps them ultimately create something more useful.   Pam Didner: And I 100% agree with you in terms of marketers like us in addition to do our job, which is... We have a lot of jobs we have to do and tactics and deliverables, but also understanding the competitors is very critical, which is apt to in terms of connecting different thoughts, and that's one thought that you should connect and to contribute in terms of the thinking strategically.   Stacey Danheiser: Can I add one more thing just real quick, that I have a very strong point of view on, for marketers as well to again, think strategically. So it's not just understanding how your customers buy, and the buying process, and the decision-making process they go through, but it's also about understanding the sales process and so...   Pam Didner: Exactly, the topic. I love the sales part of it. Sales Enablement!   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So this is very interesting because again, I spent a lot of time in corporate marketing, and when I... I started my career in B2C, and I realized that we didn't really have a sales team. We were the sales team, the marketing engine was sales. We had big budgets to support that as well. So when I switched over to B2B, I was pretty surprised at how one, little my budget was. [laughter] Marketing didn't have a very big influence in the company. It was the sales team that really owned a lot of that influence. And so I realized very early on that I needed to build a relationship with my sales team if I was going to be successful in my role as a marketer.   Pam Didner: So true.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So one of the first things I did, we had an annual sales training, so there was product training that the sales team had to go through, and then there was sales methodology or process training. And so I'm asked to attend both of those, and I remember when I showed up to the sales methodology training, the trainer said, "Why is there a marketer in here?" And I said, "What do you mean?" He's like, "I can't remember the last time we had a marketer in the sales training." And it was true. All the sellers are looking at me like, "Why are you here?" And I said, "We all want the same thing. We're both trying to get customers."   Pam Didner: Yeah.   Stacey Danheiser: "If I understand how you guys are doing your job, then I can help you and figure out where I can fit in."   Pam Didner: You can do a better job supporting them. Yes.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. And not only just supporting them, but also the customers, and like I wanna know each of the touch points that the customers need to help them make that decision. So we started working together once they knew that I understood the sales process, and I read sales books, and then from that point on I attended sales methodology training at every company I went to because I was really interested, and I wanted the sales team to develop a really good working relationship, and speak the same language so that we knew it wasn't marketing versus sales, it was marketing and sales, and how can we work together? So that's another piece that I would add for marketers to think more strategically is really understand the sales process.   Pam Didner: Okay. So for folks who are listening, that was coming directly from Stacey. I did not even prep her to say that, and that was also one of the major reasons that I wrote my second book, Effective Sales Enablement. And that whole book is really about how marketers, especially B2B marketers, can do to better support sales in addition to your point, understand customers. Very nice. Lovely. Lovely. This is awesome. So after they listen to, say, this show, or this podcast, and that's assume they also did the gap analysis, and understand what they need. What are one or two like very easy, quick actionable suggestions that you have so that they can continue to hone in these five competencies on regular basis?   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, there's so many. Let me see if I can narrow it down here. I think I would prioritize... I mean, one thing in our research for the book and how we came up with the five competencies is that we interviewed business and marketing and sales leaders across the US and the UK. So this is not just coming from a marketing standpoint, this was really coming from business leaders who are leading large global organizations. And the one thing that was very interesting to me was about going back to the learning bit, which is a lot of companies had budgets for their marketing teams to use for learning...   Pam Didner: To attend conferences, to take classes. Yes.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes, and the one thing that we heard as a barrier was my marketing team is not using it.   Pam Didner: Really?   Stacey Danheiser: So we have a budget, nobody comes to me and asks me to use it, or I think there's maybe one person on our team who ever finds something and asks to attend. So that was interesting. And I started to look into why, and it went back to these long list of things to do, that marketers are notorious for having. And so learning was de-prioritized. Way, way down on the list, and so I would say prioritize yourself. Nobody, especially if you're working in an in-house agency or a corporate job, is going to come and tell you what you need to go learn. It's really up to you, and this is like your own personal growth and your own development that you get to own, so make that a priority, and if it's 30 minutes a day, spend reading about your industry, spend reading about something that your customer is doing, learning more about your product. There's so much to learn. But that would be one piece of advice that I think everybody has full ownership of, is blocking off 30 minutes a day to learn and replace it... And this was the thing, "Well, I don't have the time." Well, I guarantee that there's probably 30 minutes in your day that you're spending scrolling mindlessly on social media or sitting in a meeting that you might... That you don't need to be in. [laughter]   Pam Didner: That is so true. That is so true. Or when you are driving, you can always turn on the podcast.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes.   Pam Didner: Any kind of marketing-related podcast, or any kind of like know-how type of podcast.   Stacey Danheiser: 100%.   Pam Didner: I do agree with you. Yes.   Stacey Danheiser: Yeah, so that would be my one thing. And then two would just be, if you don't already have a really good relationship with your sales team, go sit with the seller.   Pam Didner: So true. So true.   Stacey Danheiser: And really, you can even ask them like, "What's one piece of advice that you wish marketing knew, or what's one sales book that you think every marketer should read?" So that you're starting to build that knowledge base and build a better relationship with the sales team.   Pam Didner: Sounds like a jam (laughs). So spend some time to learn something new every day and also build a better relationship, or start having the relationship with your sales team. Excellent. Stacey, thank you so much for coming to my show. Can you also tell us, remind us one more time in terms of where we can find your book and as also where people should go in terms of finding more about you.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes. So first, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn, Stacey Danheiser, and then my company website is shake, S-H-A-K-E, M as in marketing, K-T-G.com. And there, you'll find my books. I have a new playbook program that I'm rolling out, the assessments, of all of our tools and resources are on that website.   Pam Didner: Very good. Thank you so much for coming to my show, Stacey.   Stacey Danheiser: Yes, thank you for having me. It was awesome chatting about one of my favorite topics, B2B marketing. [chuckle]   Pam Didner: Yay! Take care everyone. Bye.

Your host, Devonee Thaxton, talks with Pam Didner who is a fierce B2B marketing consultant, author, podcaster, and speaker. Pam Didner has been in the tech and IT segments for over 20 years with experience in Marketing, Sales Enablement, Strategic Planning, Finance, Product Development and Operations. She is the current President of Portland-based consulting firm, Relentless Pursuit, and has advised organizations across the world including Intel, Southwest Airlines, 3M, Sunstar, Cisco, TE Connectivity, and many more. She is the author of books titled Effective Sales Enablement, Global Content Marketing and The Modern AI Marketer, all available for purchase at Barnes and Noble and Amazon. In this episode, they delve into how Pam isn't interested in being a salesperson herself, but wants to be the woman enabling and supporting other salespeople. It's not about being the one who is centerstage, but being the one to shine the spotlight on others. To learn more about Pam's work, visit http://www.pamdidner.com/ (http://www.pamdidner.com/). If you'd like to be a guest on Savvy, Booked, & Blessed, click https://podcast.prosavvyas.com/podcast-guest (HERE).

B2B and tech marketing consultant, Pam Didner, joined Adam and Mark in the Data Basement recently. Pam is the author of 3 books: Global Content Marketing, Effective Sales Enablement, and the Modern AI Marketer. She has given future trends, content marketing, and sales enablement presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America, and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet the local marketing and sales team's needs. Show Notes and Transcript: https://www.netwisedata.com/accelerating-sales-success-with-account-based-marketing-ft-pam-didner/ Sign up for the Data-Driven Marketer Newsletter Come hang out in the Data Basement on Slack More NetWise: Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Web I Blog+Newsletter --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/datadriven/message

With endless logos to choose from, sourcing SalesTech can be a challenge even for the savviest buyers.  It gets even harder if you're responsible for both, Sales AND Marketing technology.  Our guest in this week's episode is a marketer that has driven Sales Enablement for organisations around the globe.  In our conversation, she breaks down the best practice for making purchase decisions, how sales and marketing technologies overlap, how to address sales tech needs as a marketer, and more. Please welcome best-selling author, podcaster, and our go-to expert for sales and marketing alignment, Pam Didner! These are some of the questions we discuss in this episode: There are so many technologies out there claiming to help the sales team. It's overwhelming. How should we go about addressing sales technologies or sales tech? Sales uses SalesTech. Marketing uses MarTech. Are these two overlapping in terms of technology needs? Any duplications or gaps? If I am supporting sales as a marker, what is the starting point to address technology needs? Speaking of sales and marketing working together, ABM comes to mind. Can you talk to us about ABM-specific tech? Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode: Pam Didner's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffaneyzohrabyan/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamdidner/) Pam Didner's Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BuildMarketingSkills/?ref=share (https://www.facebook.com/groups/BuildMarketingSkills/?ref=share) Pam Didner's website: https://pamdidner.com/ (https://pamdidner.com/) Pam's book - Effective Sales Enablement: Achieve sales growth through collaborative sales and marketing 1st Edition: https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Sales-Enablement-collaborative-marketing/dp/0749483644/ (https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Sales-Enablement-collaborative-marketing/dp/0749483644/) Connect with Felix Krueger online:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/) Where to find The State of Sales Enablement: Website -http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/ ( http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/) LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/) Apple Podcasts -https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853 ( https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853) Spotify -https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g ( https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g)

Deepkaran Singh Ahuja is an enablement specialist with Tech Mahindra and focuses his efforts on microlearning strategies to support their sales teams. In this conversation he had with Pooja Kumar, they covered:1) The need for a stronger enablement team and strategy that was born out of the challenges that the pandemic has created around the world.2) Deepkaran and enablement colleagues were asked to interview reps/ sales leaders and ideate on enablement solutions that would support them best.3) this ideation led to the creation of a platform for microlearning using in-house experts and sales leaders to deliver content. The content is broken into consumable parts that lead to certification.Deepkaran also spoke a little about how they measure success with business metrics and will be able to give us more information about that in a few months once he has collected enough dataGive it a listen and remain curious.

Join us in the Krueger Marketing podcast studio this week for another episode of The State of Sales Enablement. I've witnessed first-hand how tough it can be to be a sales enablement leader in a media company. My friend and former colleague https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartheys/ (Stewart Heys) has mastered his craft and is now managing a team that enables a sales department of 700 at News Corp Australia. In this episode, we spoke about how he goes about ensuring tailored support, how sales conversations have changed during the pandemic, and how he goes about identifying the most valuable market feedback. Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode. Sales Enablement Society (SES) -https://www.sesociety.org/ ( https://www.sesociety.org/) Effective Sales Enablement -https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Sales-Enablement-collaborative-marketing/dp/0749483644 ( https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Sales-Enablement-collaborative-marketing/dp/0749483644) Fanatical Prospecting  -https://www.amazon.com.au/Fanatical-Prospecting-Conversations-Leveraging-Telephone-ebook/dp/B01617VD3I ( https://www.amazon.com.au/Fanatical-Prospecting-Conversations-Leveraging-Telephone-ebook/dp/B01617VD3I) Sales Development Playbook  -https://www.amazon.com.au/Sales-Development-Playbook-Repeatable-Accelerate/dp/0692622039 ( https://www.amazon.com.au/Sales-Development-Playbook-Repeatable-Accelerate/dp/0692622039) Sales Gravy Podcast -https://salesgravy.com/podcasts/ ( https://salesgravy.com/podcasts/) Brought to you by Krueger Marketing: Free Content-Enabled Sales training -https://my.captivate.fm/thestateofenablement.com/content ( thestateofenablement.com/content) Connect with Stewart Heys online: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartheys/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartheys/) Connect with Felix Krueger online:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/) Where to find The State of Sales Enablement: Website (subscriber exclusives can be found here) -http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/ ( http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/) LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/ ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/) Apple Podcasts -https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853 ( https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853) https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g (Spotify) - https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g Cheers, Felix

Join us in the Krueger Marketing podcast studio this week for the inaugural episode of The State of Sales Enablement. We catch up with https://www.linkedin.com/in/4mattdean/ (Matthew Dean) who is responsible for enabling Docusign's sales team during a hypergrowth phase fuelled by the pandemic. He'll share how he made the transition from sales director to sales enabler, the top content formats supporting remote sales, and his tips for navigating sales enablement in a global business Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode. Sales Enablement Society (SES) - https://www.sesociety.org/ (https://www.sesociety.org/) Effective Sales Enablement - https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Sales-Enablement-collaborative-marketing/dp/0749483644 (https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Sales-Enablement-collaborative-marketing/dp/0749483644) Fanatical Prospecting - https://www.amazon.com.au/Fanatical-Prospecting-Conversations-Leveraging-Telephone-ebook/dp/B01617VD3I (https://www.amazon.com.au/Fanatical-Prospecting-Conversations-Leveraging-Telephone-ebook/dp/B01617VD3I) Sales Development Playbook - https://www.amazon.com.au/Sales-Development-Playbook-Repeatable-Accelerate/dp/0692622039 Sales Gravy Podcast - https://salesgravy.com/podcasts/ (https://salesgravy.com/podcasts/) Brought to you by Krueger Marketing: Free Content-Enabled Sales training - thestateofenablement.com/content Connect with Matthew Dean online: https://www.linkedin.com/in/4mattdean/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/4mattdean/) Connect with Felix Krueger online: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfkrueger/) Where to find The State of Sales Enablement: Website (subscriber exclusives can be found here) - http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/ (http://thestateofsalesenablement.com/) LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/ (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-state-of-sales-enablement-podcast/) Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853 (https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-state-of-sales-enablement/id1558307853) Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g (https://open.spotify.com/show/4ceCJYJLuCbTNbRTriOFpe?si=avn_E9EGSNu3gmHfoqJ_6g) Cheers, Felix

On this episode of SmartBug on Tap, Jen Spencer shares four effective sales enablement strategies to help reps meet their quotas. Jen discusses the following strategies: 1. Redefine Sales Leadership 2. Treat Sales Enablement as a Marketing-Driven Role with Sales 3. Use Customer Personas to Serve Better Customers 4. Set Up More Meaningful Benchmarks

Hey, big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam. I have a very special guest today, Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute and the PR2020. And he recently launched a very nice product. I want to get into that and we'll talk more about our favorite topic, Artificial Intelligence.    Pam Didner: Alright, Paul, so happy to have you on my show. So tell me what's going on. Yeah, it's always very, very happy to see you.   Paul Roetzer: Good to see you. What's going on? We're all sitting in our houses, in our offices. We're trying to get human interaction through Zoom. That's pretty much what's going on. I mean, it's, I don't remember the last time we were together, but it's been too long in- person.   Pam Didner: It’s been awhile, definitely. It has been.   Paul Roetzer: We've been able to connect a couple, a couple of times on Zoom, luckily over the last few months, but yeah, it's just not the same is it (laughs).   Pam Didner: Yes. Yes. I can't wait--I don't know when this will be over—that we have a chance to see each other at the conferences again, but I noticed that you have been quite busy and you actually launch a new product. It's called the AI Academy for Marketers. How is that different than say the AI Marketing Institute/PR 2020?   Paul Roetzer: Yeah, so the Marketing AI Institute is the business. So I, I spun it off out of PR 2020. So PR 2020 is my marketing agency. Some people may recognize that brand because we were HubSpot's first partner back in 2007. So my marketing agency is actually 15 years old next week.   Pam Didner: Oh wow, amazing. Yay! So 15 years, I think that's a massive and major milestone.   Paul Roetzer: Yeah, we'll do some social distance drinking. And, um, out of that agency, in 2016, we created a blog called marketing AI Institute, and we just started writing about AI. And the idea was if other people are interested in it also, we'll turn it into a business. And so fast forward to 2018, we had about 5,000 subscribers to that blog. Based on that growth and based on some prompting from you. You, I believe we were at, uh, where the Content Tech. I think maybe in like March of that year?   Pam Didner: Yeah, I think it's 2017.   Paul Roetzer: Right. Okay. And I won't use the exact language was something like “Paul, you have an event business”--with a couple other words in there. (Pam laughs)   Pam Didner: Yeah, I think I was cursing too (laughs)!   Paul Roetzer: Yeah, so you were prompting me, “you should really think about turning this into event business so that we actually did. So in 2019, we took Marketing AI Institute made it a separate business. And then we launched the Marketing AI conference, which, you know, you're familiar with in July of 2019. And then 2020 would have been year two of that conference, which is the main piece of marketing AI Institute. The plan was to introduce online education on day two. So on my day two keynote, I was going to go up on stage and say “thanks for being here” to these 500 people. You can now learn year round through our online Academy.” Well, when we had to cancel the conference in March of 2020, we realized like, “okay, we should probably go ahead and introduce the online education play anyway.” And so that's what we did. So we, what we wanted to do is our whole mission at the Institute is to make AI approachable and actionable to marketers around the world. By going to online education, we also made it accessible. And so the idea was matter who you are, where you are around the world we wanted it to make it easy for you to learn about AI so you could apply it to your business.   Pam Didner: When I was meeting with you in back in 2017, we have that great conversation. I'm pretty sure I was interviewing for my book at that time. Right, I was publishing my second book, Effective Sales Enablement, and it has one specific chapter about technology and artificial intelligence, so thank you so much for your insight.   Paul Roetzer: Thank YOU. Your words always stuck with me.   Pam Didner: So, can I take you back, way back? How did you get interested in AI to start with. There’s got to be like a tipping point or a point that you were like, “okay, this is something that is going to have a big impact in any field sales or marketing or, you know, even our daily lives.” When did you get started interested in that specific topic?   Paul Roetzer: 2011. The progression was, I mentioned we were HubSpot's first partner. So we were very, um, front row seat to marketing automation and the whole growth of that industry. So we were big in marketing technology. So 2011, it was late January, IBM Watson wins on Jeopardy. So beats Ken Jennings.   Pam Didner: I remember that, yeah.   Paul Roetzer: So, the world is now like, you know, it's the topic of more interest. That April I started writing the manuscript for my first book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint. When I came out of writing the book. I started being curious about the AI thing. What was Watson? Could that eventually be applied to marketing? So I shortly thereafter read a book called Automate This by Christopher Steiner and he talked about intelligent algorithms and how they disrupted all these industries. And so once I started comprehending what AI actually was, I was like, “well, it's obviously going to change marketing and sales, like it seems inevitable to me” and yet no one was talking about it.   Pam Didner: 2011? No. Now were still talking about marketing automation and CRM. We're still talking about it, but that was still, you know, a major topic at that time.   Paul Roetzer: Human powered automation, Human based rules. So then fast forward to 2014, I'm writing my second book and it's about marketing talent, tech and strategy, and in the tech section, there's about 500 words about what if AI were to get applied to marketing and sales? And if you remember back in 2014, HubSpot was IPOing, zero AI in their platform. At the time Salesforce bought Exact Target for two and a half billion, zero AI. At the time Exact Target had bought part off or 170 million. So literally like billions of dollars for marketing software that's dumb. Meaning, the only way it got smarter was if humans did it. And so on, I'm looking, thinking, “this makes no sense, like it's, it has to come to the marketing industry.” And so once I wrote it in the book that basically became everything I did public speaking about. So starting in 2015, I did a talk called Origin of the Marketing Intelligence Engine at South by Southwest. And then that became all I researched and talked about thereafter.   Pam Didner: So the rest of it is history.   Paul Roetzer: Pretty much.   Pam Didner: So with that being said, can you be very specific and share some examples with us, how AI can apply to marketing?   Paul Roetzer: We guide people to look for look for narrow use cases. Because AI-- So again, like if we take even a further step back, what is it? What is artificial intelligence? It's just a collection of tools and technologies that make machines smart.   Pam Didner: Or anticipate I'll needs or answer our questions.   Paul Roetzer: Yes. It gives the machine human-like abilities to, to see, to, to speak, to learn, to understand; the machine can't do any of that stuff on its own. And to make predictions about what we ask it to predict on. So what we always tell people is look at the things you do every day that are data-driven, repetitive and require you to predict an outcome or a behavior. So if you're going to send an email, you're at really the core of that is you're likely trying to get someone to take an action, whether it's to buy a product or read an article or whatever it may be. So you're subconsciously predicting. What subject lines should I use that's going to get them to open this? Once they open this, you're trying to predict what links you should put it have in there and what the copy should be and what the CTA button should be and what the image should be. And you're like, all of these are a collection of predictions that you're subconsciously making to drive an outcome. So we start looking at whether it's paid media and you're doing digital ad spend and which creative will work best, to social media--what should I share and when? and what hashtags should I use? To email, to content marketing--what blog posts should I write? And what should I include in the blog post.   All of these daily activities for many of us really, you're trying to predict outcomes that then guys, what you do. That's the stuff where machines excel. Intelligent machines excel at data-driven repetitive, predictive things.   Pam Didner: You are saying that we should look at our, where, uh, our job and we also, we always have a templates and process, right. To do our job, right. If we want to send the email campaigns, we have to select the content. We have to, uh, write a copy. We have images and that we have to select and we have to put that email together. We send it out. Because it's somehow a templates. I'm a process being set up. There are certain tasks also in portion of the job that AI can take over to do it for us. They probably can write a copy. They probably can select the images. They probably can also automatically send it to the people. So that sounds great. Do you think that AI will take over the marketer's jobs? Do you think some of the marketing's jobs will be eliminated because of that technology advancement?   Paul Roetzer: Yes. Um, I think in the short term. I actually created something called the Marketer-to-machine Scale, and the idea is to do what you do, what happens in the autonomous vehicle industry. So a Tesla today is Level 3. This is an industry standard rating scale. There's goes zero to five. It's Level 3. What happens at Level 3 is the machine can drive itself in some conditions, but the human is actually there to oversee and correct if needed.   Pam Didner: Yes. So we are not the primary driver anymore. We are kind of like a facilitator. We are helping. Yeah.   Paul Roetzer: In, in an ideal world, that's where we're trying to get to with AI tools in marketing and sales today. We want the AI to assist the marketer, the salesperson at doing their job, in those repetitive data-driven tasks. It doesn't mean that we flip a switch and AI replaces the need for this role, this role in this role. It means those roles become more enjoyable because you don't have to do all of the repetitive things anymore. There is no full autonomy in marketing as there is no true full autonomy in cars today. I don't foresee a near term future where any AI, any marketing job can be truly automated to a full degree where the human isn't even overseeing the AI. I don't see that happening.   Pam Didner: Yeah. Um, there is no marketing robot that I'm aware of. Are you aware of some start-up doing it? (laughs)   Paul Roetzer: No, and if a vendor tells you they have it, go find a different vendor, because you should not see the words “full autonomy” on any vendor's site right now, because it's a lie.   Pam Didner: 100% agree with that. Yeah. The way I see it, we have to co-exist with artificial intelligence. For the-- in the near future. And with that being said, as a marketer, what is the best way to learn about official intelligence? Why can't we learn about maybe not necessarily, we want to be a coders, but how does it operate? You know, what is the supervised learning? What is unsupervised learning? What's the machine learning? What's, you know, what is the opaque AI? You know, all that term is kind of important to understand and understand how artificial intelligence works, but not to the point that we become incredibly technical. So how do you suggest that the marketers learn more about AI and how AI functions?   Paul Roetzer: I would argue the vast majority of marketers will never know nor care what unsupervised and supervised learning is. Nor will they care the eight common machine learning models of clustering and linear regression. And like the marketers don't need to know that generally speaking. What they need to know is what is AI capable of doing so that they can identify and prioritize use cases internally. And then they need to know who the go-to experts are, who do know what machine learning is and how it works. And the data scientists who can help them prepare the data properly and make sure that there's no bias built in. And like there are technical things. And so I kind of liken this to any other marketing technology you would buy. You don't have to become a true technologist. There will be those of us who are marketers by day and like, technologists because we're geeks and we like that stuff. And you figure out those other things that you were listing, but for a lot of marketers, like a content marketing manager, or maybe even like a VP of Marketing, you may never actually know the machine learning models. What, you know, though is you're right team spends a hundred hours a month doing this thing, that you now understand the machine could do 80% of that work. And you're able to go find the right tool, onboard that tool, upskill your team by getting them a base level understanding of what it is and how it works, and then redistribute those hours to some uniquely task human.   Pam Didner: More productive and more strategic value add.   Paul Roetzer: Yeah. So look, I think to answer your question real quick, what they need to do is remove the abstract nature of AI. They need to not be afraid of the topic because it isn't Sci-Fi, it is actually a pretty easy thing to understand what it is and what it does. And once you accept that, then you go read your book or you take an online course. You're like, now you embrace the idea that there's a smarter way to do marketing.   Pam Didner: Yeah. I still feel as a marketer, um, that you need to have a certain understanding of the marketing technology. You know, you need to understand the terminology a little bit. You probably don't have to do it. You are totally right. You don't need to understand how the machine learning works, but you need to understand the term of machine learning. For example, and you don't need to understand how AI actually assists HubSpot or even Salesforce, but you need to understand what kind of methodology approaches they use to make that happen. So, um, I think we talking the same thing, but I always feel that the marketers needs to be able to be comfortable and also embrace the technology. And a lot of time that the best way to embrace that technology is trying to understand it. Does that make sense? So that's where I'm coming from.  But I understand, like for example, I'm a marketer, you all might get a, we don't have to go down to the deep weeds to understand how that's done, but we need to understand what that is and then maybe the approaches that was taken.   Paul Roetzer: And I'll give you an example. So I took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning class on Coursera a couple of years ago. After like the third week, it started going deep into statistical models. And like, I was like, “okay, I'm good.” Like, I actually now know everything I set out to know, which is what is machine learning and what does it do? And I get the different models and I understand the scenarios with which you would use them in marketing. And I'm done. Like I'm out now. I'm going to go call Chris Penn. Like if, if something comes up, like I'll just go find my friend who actually figured out the rest of it and let him help me. (laughs)   Pam Didner: I love that! That's, that's actually a great point. Uh, you and I are probably on the same page about that, as well. So I took a couple of very technical courses on Coursera about AI, but after like two or three weeks, I say, “I'm done. I got the jist and also the understanding I need in terms of how things work.”   Paul Roetzer: I think that's a good learning lesson for young professionals is like. You don't have to start-- like if you get into a book and it's dense and it's like, “okay, I'm not learning” don't force yourself to go 500 pages into it. Like get what you need out of it and move on to the next resource. Like just know what your outcome is. I didn't want to become a machine learning engineer, so I didn't need to go through Lessons 7-15. (laughs) I was good after.   Pam Didner: Right. But that also come from the perspective that you need to know yourself. Yes. You need to know your skillset. You need to know who you are, and then you can make that decision and say, “okay, you know, this is my job. This is what I do. This amount of knowledge for the time being is good enough. And the rest of it, I have to let it go.”   Paul Roetzer: You need a confidence level based on what it is you're trying to achieve in your career, I think is a good way to look at it.   Pam Didner: Awesome. Excellent. Well said. So do you have any suggestions how marketers should implement or even incorporate artificial intelligence into their work? What are the couple of steps, Like from your perspective? You know, it can be a thinking process, it can be approach.   Paul Roetzer: Yeah, so in AI Academy for Marketers, I actually teach a course called Piloting AI and it's a common talk I'll give at conferences when we're going to conferences. So what I guide people to do is take a spreadsheet. Write down in column a, all the things you do every month and then have a column B it's like, how frequently do you, as a daily? Weekly? Monthly? Then a column that says, how many hours did you spend doing it? And then a column that says, what would be the value to you if you could intelligent automate this? And just do a one to five rating, five being “it transformed my life.” One being, “yeah, it's all right.” Do that, go through it. Take the things that are level fives and then go search AI for that thing. So like just go find a tool that is built to do the thing you spend a bunch of time doing and you know it'd be valuable to you. Use that as your pilot project prove to yourself and your team that AI can have either an efficiency gain for you or a performance gain. Cause any AI you use, those would be the two reasons you would do it--you want to reduce it, reduce costs by increasing efficiency, or you want to accelerate performance or give yourself a greater probability of achieving success. Like otherwise you don't, you don't do it. You need a reason to put AI into something.   Pam Didner: So sounds like the course and co-pilot AI can help you to conduct assessment and give our audience a templates to evaluate their workflows, evaluate the repetitive tasks that they do on a regular basis, and then determine what are the areas that they want to allocate or distribute that to AI and then source to technology accordingly.   Paul Roetzer: Yeah, and we also have, there's a free tool. I'll give you, I'll send you the link you put in the show notes, but it's score.marketing.AIinstitute.com. And we actually built a use case assessment tool. So there's 49 use cases in their common AI use cases. And you can—   Pam Didner: Can you say the name of that course again or the topics?   Paul Roetzer: AI Score for Marketers, but it's score.marketing.AIinstitute.com. And it's un-gated. You can, you can give your contact information if you want, but what it'll do is it walks you through the 49 use cases. You rate them on a zero to five scale. And then on the results page, it shows you all the ones you rated a 3-5 and it actually recommends vendors if we have them in our database to do those things.   Pam Didner: I love that. That's actually a great tool. I want to check that one out.   Paul Roetzer: And we're actually using it right now to do a state of the industry survey with Drift. So we teamed up with Drift to take the data from that and turn it into a state of the industry report.   Pam Didner: Excellent. So this is great. You are sharing a lot of useful information and the, from your online, um, uh, Marketing AI Institute, that the tools and also those templates that people can use. And I'm also very grateful that you launched the online platform, which is AI Academy for Marketers. If you are listening or you are watching the show, please check that out. Before we wrap this up, I want to ask you one parting question. And so what is the most useless talent that you have? That contributes nothing, literally nothing to the society?   Paul Roetzer: I have thought about this before, and I don't-- to my daughter spinning a basketball on my finger. She thinks it's like, just like it's unicorn magic or something. Like, so we're playing basketball in the backyard (laughs)   Pam Didner: Were you a basketball player before?   Paul Roetzer: Yeah. Like globe Trotter style, just like spin a ball.   Pam Didner: Yes, exactly. So you can do that? That's amazing!   Paul Roetzer: She thinks it's amazing. I'll take it. When she was really young, I would dunk on an eight-foot hoop and she thought I was like LeBron James. So I have to find things that still impress her now that she's getting older. So apparently spinning a basketball works right now. (Pam laughs)   Pam Didner: Well said, well said. So thank you so much for coming to my show, Paul, and to share a lot of useful information and relevant templates that, um, the audience can use really, really appreciate it.   Paul Roetzer: It was fun. Do it again soon!   Pam Didner: Thanks a lot, Paul. Again, thank you so much for listening to my podcast. Really, really appreciate it. If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. Love, love, love to hear from you. Take care. Bye.  

Pam Didner author of "Effective Sales Enablement" by The Best Business Minds

Pam Didner is the Founder of Relentless Pursuit, a passionate B2B marketer, and an author of 3 books: Global Content Marketing, Effective Sales Enablement, and the Modern AI Marketer.Pam shared her insights on how to tighten up marketing and sales alignment based upon her years of experience on the marketing side of the house.

Pam Didner is a passionate digital and tech marketer, speaker, and author who loves to bring alignment between sales & marketing. She is the author of The Modern AI Marketer and Effective Sales Enablement. Her mission- to help bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams so they can work efficiently and grow together.

ABOUT THE GUEST ANDY J SOLOMONAndy J. Solomon is the Director of Sales Training for Associated Materials a 1.2 billion dollar manufacturing and sales organization. He's a father, a husband, a writer, and he enjoys creating content related to personal growth and sales advice. You can find Andy and learn more about his great content on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-solomon-ami/ ABOUT THE EPISODE Andy is passionate, disciplined, and dedicated to creating effective sales enablement at his company and across the construction materials industry he serves. In this episode, Andy shares with us ideas about how to make sales training and enablement effective and targeted - well beyond the content of the training itself. If you are interested in helping the individuals in your sales team get better and in creating the infrastructure to make that happen, this episode with Andy is well worth listening to. (1:10) A bit about Andy’s background and how he went from selling to sales enablement, almost by accident and definitely head of schedule (3:55) How dabbling in social content creation led to a coveted career move (5:10) Andy shares some thoughts about how to make sales training and sales enablement more effective (7:40) The limitations of event-style sales training and the challenges of alternatives (10:30) How to get reps up to speed by training the rep AND training the trainer (12:30) Supporting the sales reps by supporting the sales manager (and vice versa) (15:05) Sales enablement from the perspective of the entire sales team (16:40) Advice for anyone who wants to succeed with sales enablement (18:57) How to teach across a wide range of experience, personality, and skills (20:30) Selling and sales enablement in the age of Covid-19 (22:12) Will things go back to normal after Covid-19 or is this the new normal

Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. I know that it’s going to be a stressful time for all of us. I do hope that you’ll find time to relax and get a sense of normality from listening to my episodes. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends.   Hello everyone! Today is Sunday. Sunday is both lazy and busy afternoon. It’s a lazy morning and buzy afternoon kinda day. Sunday is the only day that I allow myself to sleep late and wake up whenever I want to wake up. It means that I don’t usually get up until like 10 am, so a very lazy morning of doing nothing. I love it! Then, I start working again on Sunday afternoon, like writing podcast or video scripts or recording podcast and video. Blah, blah blah!   I was interviewing a marketing director of my clients a few days ago to help them build a collaboration process between B2B Marketing Group and Sales Enablement Team. During the interview, the Marketing Director made it very clear to me that B2B marketing should reside with the Corporate Marketing Team and should be part of the marketing function.   You know what? I understand where she is coming from. Earlier this year, there was a talk that B2B marketing should be part of the sales team given that they are supporting business accounts and corporate sales. Plus, most of the marketing dollars such as media dollar and demand gen campaign budget supporting B2B marketing is coming from sales; therefore, the sales team feels that they should also own the team.   Well, I can see both sides. Marketing wants to have the B2B Marketing Team as a part of their teams and the Sales Team feel that all the B2B Marketing dollars are coming from them so B2B Marketing should be part of corporate sales.   Organizations often struggle which part of group should belong where.   Sales enablement is a great example. I was doing my research for my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. I have heated discussion with several sales enablement managers where this group should reside. Some are adamant that this should be part of sales. Several feel that sales enablement has a function of demand gen, therefore, they should be part of marketing.   In many tech companies, believe it or not, sales enablement is part of product team or business units, because subject matter experts are within these teams and many sales-centric content is created by the subject matter experts and also the content creators.   Heck, one company, recently, marked the sales enablement team as part of HR, since the core of sales enablement they did is all about on-boarding and training. This team did a great job, they were allocated to HR to help other teams to do better jobs on employee training.   Granted there is no right or wrong answer. Here is my stand on this.  Where the B2B Marketing or Sales Enablement resides depends on the purpose of the team and the maturity of the company. If the company is a start-up and growing fast, everyone is nimble, it probably doesn’t matter where the team reside. The core is communication, everybody talks to each other all the time and things get done.   If the company is growing, chances you are going through growing pains at different stages, your company will go through different re-orgs to test out where the group should reside. If the sales team is growing rapidly, it may make sense for sale and marketing all stay under sales during that stage.   If the company reaches a plateau or mature stage, the sales team has a bigger sales force, the marketing team is growing, as well, it may make sense to break down to have B2B marketing as part of the marketing, and sales enablement as part of sales operations, sales training or on its own. It really depends on what you want sales enablement to do.   B2B Marketing from my perspective should stay in corporate marketing and that has its benefits. The biggest benefit is that you can leverage the corporate marketing’s resource and use other marketing resources whenever necessary.   Where does your B2B Marketing and Sales Enablement reside? Share that with me.   If you enjoy my podcast and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.    Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.   Be well. Let’s connect again next week.  

Hello everyone! So, I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence--which is available on Amazon. Simply type “Pam Didner” or the name of the book “The Modern AI Marketer”. Download to your Kindle and check it out. Love to hear your feedback!   I mentioned in my past podcast that I wrote this book to help myself and others understand how AI fits into the field of Marketing. In the eBook, I mentioned six use cases. For today’s podcast, I want to talk about three or so that you can get a sense of it of how AI applies to Marketing.   So one specific case I want to share with everybody is the chatbot. Whenever you go to the website you will see a little bot at the bottom of the right hand corner, waving it’s hand and wanting to talk to you. So a lot of times I will try the chatbot and ask specific questions and see if they can answer them. And a lot of time they are not giving me the answer I need and I end up talking to real people, which is fine.   But there is one website which I go to all the time trying to find freelancers and it’s called Upwork. I don’t know if you use them, but if you are looking for freelancers check out that specific website. From time to time I need to change the milestones of my project or add additional money because my scope has changed. So I don’t know how to do some of that work and I will go to their support site and they have a little bot.   And I ask multiple times in terms of different questions. Interestingly enough, that specific bot always gives me the answer I’m looking for. I am very impressed in terms of how Upwork works with the bot and build the workflow and also help the bot understand and learn from the different questions that people are asking. So that’s a very good example in terms of AI use in Marketing and Communication, especially on the website.   Create a blog post or white paper And another thing I want to share with you is in terms of content creation. For example, many publishing companies they are using home grown AI reporters. Bloomberg uses automated technology, Cyborg, to generate 1/3 of its financial news, especially company earnings reports.[1]   The Washington Post used the home-grown AI content generation machines, Heliograf, to create content for coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics Games and the 2016 Election. The media company has been using this AI-based content creator (aka robot reporter) to cover local-specific news which the publisher can’t afford to assign to full-time local reporters.[2] So they are using the robot reporters to actually pull the content and write the content based on the keywords and also pull from trusted sources. This works well if you know the intended outcomes of your content. For most white papers, we know what we want to say, what information we want to emphasize, and what the call-to-action should be. Given that we know the predictive outcomes, it’s actually possibly and plausible to use AI to create a first draft of the white paper for you.   If you write blog posts or long-form content, look into MarketerMuse, the AI Content Intelligence and Strategy Platform that will transform how you research, plan, and craft your content. I don’t believe that MarketMuse can write the content for you, but its capabilities can certainly help you to optimize and refine your content.     Support sales via account-based marketing Another use case I want to share with you is basically supporting sales using account-based marketing. Sales and marketing have traditionally played two separate roles within an organization.  Marketing focuses on the top of the funnel and drives demand, while sales is responsible for the bottom of the funnel and closing deals. I am a firm believer that marketing’s primary role is to support sales, in addition to driving demand and building brand equity.   There are many ways to support sales as a marketer. I talked about these extensively in my book, Effective Sales Enablement (if you are interested in purchasing the book, focus on chapters 4-7).   As AI is further embedded into sales and marketing tech tools, it naturally forces alignment and bi-directional communication between these two groups. This has further elevated the need to integrate marketing automation and CRM tools. Many companies do that.   One approach marketers can take to help sales is account-based marketing, which implements targeted campaigns and outreach to complement the sales account’s approach.   The purpose of ABM--account-based marketing--is to address the needs of individual target accounts. What AI can do is further enhance the customization and the prediction. To do that, it requires a pool of intelligence (aka data) at both the account and individual customer levels to tailor your ABM efforts.   One of the key desired outcomes for account-based marketing is to predict prospects’ intent or enhance propensity to buy. Predictive insights and intent data give you real-time intelligence on the accounts that are most likely to convert. This obviously streamlines account prioritization and fully optimizes your budget allocation. And there are several companies that can actually help you to do that.   One of them is DemandBase. It’s used by many enterprise customers, and positions itself as the end-to-end ABM solutions from identifying accounts between sales and marketing, personalizing content and ad retargeting, to tracking the prospects’ ABM results. The AI is also embedded into a DemandBase solution. This is one tool that is used widely my many enterprises.   Another company is called Lattice Engines. They have AI-powered platform that helps B2B marketers scale their account-based marketing programs across different channels. They connect and consolidate multiple internal and external data sources, and build audience segments using AI.  So these are some of the companies and also use cases for account-based marketing.   Extend reach via media-buy Obviously another use case example I want to share with you is a media buy. The media-buy landscape has changed dramatically with the Internet.   Ad placement is no longer a direct communication between advertisers and publishers using email or phones. Now you can buy and sell your ads inventory using an algorithm. You are bidding on the different inventory. So it’s basically created and managed by machines or AI. It plays a critical role in the media buying process.   There are many, many platforms that use the latest advancements in machine learning to optimize impressions in the real-time bidding process, like Albert, MediaMath Omnichannel, IBM Bid Optimizer, etc. So, brands can use artificial intelligence to serve more relevant and targeted messages in the right places, at the right times, by providing data-driven insights   So I’m sharing different use cases with you in terms of how AI is being used nowadays in the current marketing landscape.   If you enjoy my podcast, feel free to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.    Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. That would be greatly appreciated. One new video every week.   In the meantime, be well and let’s connect again next week. Take care. Bye bye! [1] Jaclyn Peiser, the Rise of Robot Reporter, the New York Times, Feb. 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html [2] Joe Keohane, What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism, February 16, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/    

Good morning, everyone! I have super exciting news to share with you. I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence. Yeah!   Here’s the thing: when I’ve spoken at conferences in the past, it’s been clear to me that marketers are intimidated by AI and don’t know what to make of it. AI piqued my interest when I was doing research for the Technology chapter of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. Ever since, my fascination has skyrocketed.   To help marketers and sales teams better understand AI, I wrote a 9000-word Kindle ebook: The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing to Get Ahead.   I am a strong believer that modern marketers need a firm grounding in relevant technologies so they can use it to their advantage. I am not saying that you need to write code or implement AI initiatives at this time. But as a starter, it’s nice to understand what it is and have some ideas on what it can do for you as a marketer.   The book starts with simple definitions, history, and then I dive into the various marketing-specific benefits of using AI, from running hyper-targeted automated email campaigns to extending reach and improving the overall customer experience online and offline.   It’s an easy read. I promise! And I make it fun. So go to Amazon, type my name, Pam Didner or the name of the book Modern AI Marketer. Download automatically to your Kindle.   Oh, at the end of the eBook, I also provide a list of useful books and online resources. I am positive that you’ll get a good sense of AI, and discover how to apply it in your own way.   Happy AI reading!   If you enjoy my podcast, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.    Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. It’s all about B2B Marketing.   So, be well and let’s connect again next week.

In just 22mins, sales enablement expert Pam Didner explains: - How sales enablement has changed as a result of AI - What Marketers need to appreciate about Sales - Key buyer insights to be shared between Marketing & Sales Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, writer, and speaker, and the author of 2 books: Global Content Marketing and Effective Sales Enablement. She has given presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet local marketing and sales team’s needs. Pam shares marketing thoughts at pamdidner.com and contributes articles to the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Content Marketing Institute, and other publications.

I have huge respect for sales people. I do! Personally, I don’t think that I am cut out to be a sales rep. The reason is that I don’t take rejection well, I take it personally, as if it’s my fault. So being told “no, thanks” 20-30 times every day is going to crush me. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing cold calls. It's time to increase my sales pipeline My leads tend to come from referrals, workshops and organic outreach through my website. It has worked well for me. But I want to increase my sales pipeline so I decided to give virtual cold calls a try.  There are many ways to do that. I decided to use LinkedIn Sales Nevigator and InMail, since many of my prospects are on LinkedIn. Find an expert to assist me I couldn’t do this alone. I knew that I needed someone to help me out. Sean Anthony found me via virtual cold call (InMail) on LinkedIn. I didn’t respond to his email right away, but I liked the content he shared. He is salesy, but not too salesy. He is the founder of GrowthResponse.io and specializes in lead generation and customer acquisition using LinkedIn. Identify Ideal Customer Profile, their pain points and challenges and my offerings First, we identified my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). I told him my peeps are B2B enterprise marketers in the manufacturing, healthcare and financial services segments. He also drilled down on my ICP’s pain points and challenges. At the same time, I shared with him my offerings. I help B2B marketers in content marketing, sales enablement and account-based marketing. Based on my offerings and my ICP’s pain points and challenges, we worked together to rewrite my headline and profile summary on LinkedIn. We want to make that very clear so that people can easily know what I do and offer. Change my new headline, tagline, LinkedIn profile In the past, I emphasized my corporate experience, author and speakership, but it didn’t help to explain what I do for my clients. So, we changed that.  Here is my new headline: “Accelerating B2B marketers’ contribution to sales with content, sales enablement, account-based marketing using proven methodology” I emphasized the keywords of content, sales enablement and account-based marketing. I also explained that I have a process to do that. Using different words, we also created a tagline so that I can place below my signature on LinkedIn:  This is my tagline: “Helping B2B marketing teams increase sales velocity through content, sales enablement, and account-based marketing” So, you can tell, it’s something similar. That tagline is part of the InMail, people can immediately understand what I do without going to my profile. The next thing we tackled was the profile summary. I started by sharing my passion for creating alignment between sales and marketing. I followed that with the 3 main challenges that marketers encounter, then moved on to explain how I address these 3 challenges.  I moved the blurbs about authorship and speakership to the experience session, so people search for speakers on specific marketing topics can still find me. On a side note… I’ve changing my LinkedIn headline and profile at least 20 times in the past 5 years. The reason is that my expertise and experience continue to grow. Therefore, I need to constantly update my value propositions to reflect that. Plus, the secret of writing is rewriting. It’s amazing that I can constantly find better ways to explain who I am and what I do. A value proposition is not something you do and then just check off. You need to constantly evaluate what you do and what you can offer to be competitive.  Once we were done with ICP, LinkedIn headline, profile and tagline, we were ready to approach virtual cold calling. For this, we carefully crafted a sequence of 5 emails. Carefully orchestrate the sequence of email for cold calls The first email is very simple and short. Let prospects know that I am reaching out because we share some mutual connections. Something simple like this actually enticed people to accept my invitation to connect.   The 2nd email is a “Thank you for connecting” email and asks the prospects whether I can be a resource to them. It finishes by letting them know they can reach out anytime if they want to explore opportunities to work together.  The 3rd email is a Value-Add email. I created a relevant blog post for my ICP, share the link with them and ask for their feedback. The 4th email is a meeting ask. I follow-up and check if they read my content. I also ask if they are open to a phone chat. The 5th email is the final email. In it, I remind them what I do and ask them to contact me if they ever need any help in the areas of content marketing, sales enablement or account-based marketing. I also share a free chapter from my latest book, Effective Sales Enablement.  I use Sales Navigator to find prospects and reach out to a small number of prospects every day. It requires that I stay on top of it and follow through with prospects consistently. Here are some of my findings after 8 weeks of virtual outreach 35% accept my initial invitation Out of that 35%, 80% failed to respond to further emails and 19% said “no, thanks” after the 3rd or 4th Only 1% request a meeting Out of that 1%, 50% actually attend a meeting. The first 90 days are typically an experimentation period where we try to achieve a message to market match. Here is the biggest finding for me: We’ve noticed that manufacturing companies with 51-1000 employees have the best response rate, while larger enterprises, companies with 5001-10,000+ employees, have a poor response rate. That was counter-intuitive to me initially, since my experience is enterprise, therefore, I tried to align my enterprise experience with enterprise customers. But that’s not the case. Granted my experience is enterprise, but prospects that need my expertise are the companies that are growing into being a big enterprise. They are going through growing pains and have so much to do that they need strategy help… That’s really my sweet spot. As a result, our focus for the next month will be on companies with 51-1000 employees. One more thing to share…  For people who said no, some of them appreciate the useful content I share. But some people are pretty nasty, saying things like ‘I don’t appreciate you looking for work on LinkedIn.’ Well, that’s what LinkedIn is for. People are on LinkedIn to find work or jobs. That’s the way it is. But I understand their frustration of getting cold calls. I get it.  Since the purchase cycle for the prospects to engage with me is about 8-12 months, I am planning to run this outreach for several months and see how it goes. More updates to come. So, do you do any virtual cold calls? How does that go? Share with me and let’s keep learning from each other.

Sarah Carson from packaging design and manufacturing company, Rohrer, talks about bringing together marketing and sales teams from two organizations, building in-house capabilities, and her approach to creating powerful sales enablement content.

Struggling to get your sales and marketing teams on the same page? Look no further than todays episode of TAG! We had the honor of hosting Pam Didner and she really hits the ball out of the park ⚾️ when she outlines the differences between the two departments and she outlines three key strategies on getting these two teams to talk to one another!On this episode Pam talks to us about: * The importance of account based marketing* How budget dictates behavior* How to leverage both sales and marketing to build better partnerships with your internal stakeholders* How marketing teams can help sales teams to keep their sales messaging 'on brand'Pam also covers the fundamental differences in sales enablement in a B2C vs a B2B environment. Pam outlines some tactics and strategies that both can take to make their sales enablement more effective. Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, writer, speaker and author of 2 books: Global Content Marketing and Effective Sales Enablement. She has given future trends, content marketing and sales enablement presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet local marketing and sales team’s needs. She is strategic in nature and tactical in execution. She also specializes in sales, marketing and internal/external communications consulting, keynote presentations, corporate training and planning sessions. She shares marketing thoughts at pamdidner.com and contributes articles to the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Content Marketing Institute, and other publications. We HIGHLY recommend anything Pam does. We have attended her workshops personally and can definitely say there is a reason why she is known as one of the best experts in sales enablement. To get to know Pam or to work with her, check out her site: pamdidner.com or follow her on twitter @pamdidner.We also highly recommend that you pick up her book 'Effective Sales Enablement'. Seriously. It's one of the best books we have read on the subject. Want to follow Chris & Josh?Subscribe and listen to our showApple https://apple.co/2DKObZfSpotify https://spoti.fi/2GPs0llGoogle http://bit.ly/2Ts998h Want to watch our show? Check us out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iYTempINxGQ

Pam Didner knows sales enablement because she literally wrote the book about it. It's a great book, and Pam is REALLY smart at this. Listen in to this conversation - and then go get the book! More about Effective Sales Enablement A sales enablement book for marketers written by a marketer. If you are in marketing supporting your sales team, this book offers ideas to better support them. If you are in sales or sales operations this book will help you understand your marketing team better. Win-win!! After finishing this book, you will: Understand trends that impact sales professionals and how to take advantage of them Become a better marketer with creative ideas on how to support sales Be able to integrate sales elements into select marketing programs Comprehend technology’s impact on sales enablement Gain insights on how to assemble a first-class sales enablement team #SalesGrowthWithPam Download a Free Chapter Buy Effective Sales Enablement

Entrepreneurship is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery ring. Seriously though, in this episode Priscilla talks with John Lee Dumas (or JLD) about two of her favorite things: entrepreneurship and podcasting. JLD is host of the award-winning Entrepreneurs on Fire - a daily podcast that features interviews with successful entrepreneurs as well as tips and creative solutions from the host. He and Priscilla discussed FireNation, his listener network, and the importance of listening to the audience. They also talk about SMART goals, brand-building, and mastering productivity during their jam-packed (fire-filled!) interview. Check out all 2,000+ episodes of Entrepreneurs on Fire, and for those who are interested in learning more about how podcasting works, JLD has assembled a Free Podcast Course to help show the way. Hey! Are you a content marketing master, a total greenhorn, or somewhere between? Regardless of your answer, you NEED to enter our ULTIMATE CONTENT MARKETING GIVEAWAY! From helpful resources to unique swag, this package has everything you need to take your marketing strategy to the next level. We've partnered with some of our favorite authors, thought leaders and brands to compile a gift set valued over $250.00! ____ Giveaway items: - Little Bird Marketing tote bag - Little Bird Marketing yeti tumbler - Dynata insulated water bottle - other Dynata travel swag (chapstick and hand sanitizer) - netquest headphones - P2Sample Wireless Charger - P2Sample Travel Backpack - AYTM leather journal and t-shirt (large) - Effective Sales Enablement by Pam Didner and small gift pack - Marketing Landmines by Karen Tibbals - Social Selling by Tim Hughes and Matt Reynolds - Brilliant Social Media by Adam Gray - Content Chemistry by Andy Crestodina Oh, and hey again! Are you enjoying this podcast? If so, please take a moment to subscribe, rate and review Ponderings from the Perch on iTunes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.  In my workshops, one of the key points that I emphasize all the time is the importance of understanding marketing technology. In my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement, I even dedicated one whole chapter to technology and its impact on marketers supporting sales. We all know technology is important, we use it every day. But, as a marketer, we are overwhelmed by the continuing evolution of technology and have a hard time keeping up. Here are 3 ways that you can keep up with martech. Pick up a field that you want to understand more It doesn’t matter if it’s social media, search, events, email or what not. Martech vendors are constantly exploring the latest technologies to refine and improve their platforms with additional features. With more features, they can be more competitive and, of course, they can also charge more.   Using FB as an example, they add new features to their advertising platform all the time. Even if you outsource your social media buy, it’s still important for you to understand the ad exchange arena so that you can ask intelligent questions about how to better increase conversions, lower cost per acquisition, even the A/B testing results on messaging, calls-to-action, or creative. Subscribe to blogs or podcasts that specialize in the areas of your interests. If you work with a decent-sized agency, ask them to share the latest trends. They love sharing what they know and how they get things for you. Learn to build a martech stack for a specific initiative  Another way to keep up with technology is to take a specific initiative or address a specific marketing process gap within your company. This may or may not relate to your daily job. Say, your company is interested in launching account-based marketing to help sales win key strategic accounts. To make that happen, there are a list of questions which need to be addressed: How do we know which accounts the marketing team needs to work on? Should we get a list from sales? If they don’t have a list, should we jointly come up with the list together? What tools should we use to come up with the list? How do we collaborate with sales to ensure a consistent customer experience? That may lead to thinking about the collaboration process or tools we should use to keep both sales and marketing in the loop. What marketing elements or campaigns should we do to support these accounts? Different campaign elements may require a different mix of technology platforms and processes. Can we use current tools to make that happen? If not, what tools do we need? By asking a list of questions, you start going deeper and deeper. it’s like peeling the layers of onion. I see it as a scavenger hunt. It’s frustrating and fun at the same time. It will force you to start searching for the tools inside and outside of your company. Start looking for tools that can help you to implement the initiative. Talk to vendors directly Another option is to talking to vendors directly. I love attending conferences and talking to marketing and sales vendors. Yah, vendors like to scan your badge and I get many unwanted emails, but that’s the price I am willing to pay so that I can understand how they use various technologies to create their platforms and help marketers to do their jobs better. Doing a walk around at the exhibit hall is another way to educate myself about different martech areas and learn how to think outside the box. So when you go to conferences, do a walk around the exhibit halls. Talk to the vendors.  Have them explain to you what they do and what products they offer. The best way to test if you understand their technology and platform is to paraphrase what they say back to them. By doing so, I learned to internalize their technology and understand how that fits into overall marketing communications.  Find a topic that you want to understand more. Read about it. Get your agencies to educate you. Start an initiative to build a martech stack for that initiative. Or just talk to various vendors directly. That’s how I started to learn more about martech. I didn’t understand paid search about 10 years ago… I started reading different blog posts, and I also enlisted my search agencies to do some lunch-and-learn for my team. Then, I ventured out to talk to as many vendors as possible whenever I could. I built up my martech knowledge bit by bit so that now I can make suggestions to my clients for some of their martech needs. If I can do it, so can you. The ability to understand technology and source the appropriate platforms for different processes is essential for modern marketers. If you have any questions, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner. So if you like the podcast, please leave comments on iTunes. Keep hustling, my friends. You got this.

Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, writer, speaker and author of 2 books: Global Content Marketing and Effective Sales Enablement. She has given future trends, content marketing and sales enablement presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet local marketing and sales team’s needs. She is strategic in nature and tactical in execution. She also specializes in sales, marketing and internal/external communications consulting, keynote presentations, corporatetraining and planning sessions. She shares marketing thoughts through her website and contributes articles to the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Content Marketing Institute, and other publications.  Pam also has a podcast called 7 Min MKT with Pam where you can get a dose of digital, content marketing and sales enablement through her intriguing personal stories. Pam shares how learning to say no to the things that don't align with her, made her realized that she has options to live life on her terms.  She also shares her tips that you can use in your own journey to self confidence. Check out thetaoofselfconfidence.com for show notes of Pam's episode, Pam's website, resources, gifts and so much more.

Ponderings from the Perch doesn’t usually get squeakquel episodes. However, when we heard that our friend Pam Didner had a new book, we were like, “Look who’s invited to the podcast now,” and also kind of like, “I still know this is going to be a great podcast!” For those who don’t know, Pam is a sales, marketing & communication consultant, two-time author, prolific blogger, and global marketing speaker. She was also a guest of Ponderings way back in episode 39. Pam’s latest book, “Effective Sales Enablement,” is written for marketers to foster collaborative sales and marketing efforts. This time around, Priscilla and Pam quickly got back in the habit, discussing authorship, public speaking, the perils of marketing silos, and what marketers can do to better support their sales teams. It’s a truly bogus journey. Like what you hear? Let us know! Subscribe, rate and review Ponderings from the Perch on iTunes. P.S. Props to anyone who caught all of our sequel references in this week's show notes. About our sponsor: IIeX North America is on April 23rd-25th in Austin, TX! Brought to you by GreenBook, this event is all about new ideas, new approaches and new connections in market research and insights. Join the brightest and boldest minds in market research, all under one roof. Register with the promo code LITTLEBIRD to save 20%! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.   While being interviewed for a podcast, I was asked a great question: “Hey, Pam, you wrote a sales enablement book from a marketer’s perspective. That sounds good. But how can marketers really benefit from supporting sales?” Ok, I’d like to answer that at two different levels: At the micro level: Like I said, with the rise of digital, the boundaries of sales and marketing are disappearing. In the past, email marketing was done exclusively by marketers. Now, sales can run their own customized and personalized mini email campaigns straight out of their CRM systems. Another example is social media. Social media is not a marketers’ tool anymore. Sales are using it for social selling and social listening, even customer services are using it to answer customers’ questions real-time. Through supporting inside sales and post sales, you, as a marketer, learn how the other groups use your marketing channels. You get to know how sales handle rejections and how customer services address customers’ concerns. You can use the knowledge to refine your buyers’ personas, editorials, content planning, even your inbound and outbound marketing efforts. It’s a win-win. At the macro level: Marketers’ career paths may be limited within marketing departments. Supporting sales opens additional career opportunities. I know several marketers that moved into sales enablement, operations, customer services, and even training. There are plenty of benefits to supporting sales. For me, supporting sales led to the publication of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement.    I strongly recommend marketers work with sales closely. Supporting sales is like opening a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna’ get, but you know that you’ll get something delicious. Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner   Keep Hustling, my friends. You got this.

Conversation with Pam Didner, the author of “Effective Sales Enablement,” a speaker, adjunct professor, strategist, Fortune 100 senior marketer, and a subject matter expert on sales enablement

I was fortunate to be invited back to do a workshop and a session at the Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland, Ohio for the 8th time. When you go to an event like this for 8 years straight, you start seeing familiar faces and begin forming a circle of friends that you hang out with from year to year.  As always, it was wonderful to see Kelly Hungerford, Jeff Julians, Amy Higgins, Jay Baer, Michael Brennen, Robert Rose, and many other friends. I don’t know about you, but as much as I see them on FB or Twitter, I still prefer a meaningful hug and in-person catching-up. I’d like to challenge myself so I present a different topic each year, and I was excited to create a new one for 2018’s conference. My session title was 5 Creative Ways Marketers Can Enable their Sales Team, and it is no surprise that it’s closely related to my new book, Effective Sales Enablement. As a speaker, I can tell you that the content needs to be solid throughout, but the most important part is the opening. I like to come up with a fun start to the presentation that will capture people’s attention. Once I can get the opening right, I believe everything else will flow naturally. This time, however, I couldn’t think of a fun opening. My initial plan was to go directly to the 5 creative ideas that I wanted to share. Pretty boring, right? But, I did a last-minute change. Here is what happened. I went to that morning’s keynote. The keynote speaker was Andrew Davis. He is a great keynote speaker. He made his keynote like a show, very entertaining and fun. So he shared one of his observations. He said that our customers have no attention span and no time to read our emails, download our e-books, dive into our blog posts, yet these very same customers can binge watch two seasons of Stranger Things on Netflix in one weekend.  Why is that? He talked about how these shows are created in a way to pique our interests and provoke our curiosity. They build up suspense and drama like ocean waves to draw us in. He stressed that we need to do the same when we create our content. For example, can we create titles to pique our audiences’ curiosity and attention? Can we build up the hype as part of our content storytelling and flow? Of course, once the hype is built up, can we deliver that level of expectations to meet the hype? I decided to take his suggestions to heart and apply them to my session. I wanted to see if I can come up with several fun titles that will pique attendees’ interests. So, my session title was “5 Creative Ways Marketers Can Enable Their Sales Team.” Well, it’s on-point, but didn’t capture audiences’ attention or invoke any curiosity. So, I created 3 additional titles which say the same thing but state in a way which will capture their attention. Are you ready? Drum roll, please!! Here are 3 titles that I came up with:  5 Untold Secrets Marketers Can Score with Their Sales Teams  A Quick and Dirty Framework You Can Use To Improve Your Sales Enablement Efforts Instantl Check Out the Untold Secrets that Will Lead You to Sales and Marketing Nirvana. WOW! When I started my session, I told my attendees that Andrew’s keynote put me to shame. I was looking at my session: 5 Creative Ways Marketers can enable their sales teams. Concise and get-to-the-point, but there is no excitement in it. So I put Andrew’s message into practice right away. I shared with them the 3 titles that I came up with and I shared them with a sense of passion and a dramatic voice. They all laughed. I told them that they would vote on which title fits my content the best after I finished my session. That somehow captured their attention. Yeah!! I didn’t simply share 5 creative ways to enable sales. I put into a framework so that they can work with their sales or marketing teams to brainstorm the creative ways that they can enable sales. And, throughout the 45 minutes, all eyes were on me. They were listening. At the end of the session, I came back to the 3 titles again. I had them vote on which one worked the best for my content. Most of the people voted for, are you ready? A Quick and Dirty Framework You Can Use To Improve Your Sales Enablement Efforts Instantly Then, 4-5 people voted the last one: Check Out the Untold Secrets that Will Lead You to the Sales and Marketing Nirvana. WOW! I said to the audiences, that these people are just trying to mess with me. To cap things off, I ended up my session by giving away 5 books. This was such a great experience I decided to use the session title my attendees loved, and created an eBook which compliments the book launch. You can check out the eBook on www.pamdidner.com/enablesales What is my lesson learned? To never stop thinking about my opening. To make a conscious effort to put interesting ideas I hear into practice, and if you keep working on it, something will come. Another lesson I learned is a quote from Andrew Davis: “Pay attention” is a misdemeanor. All attention is earned. Indeed, you want your audience to pay attention to you, and you need to earn it. There is no free lunch. We shouldn’t create content for the sake of creating content. It’s about making effort to earn someone’s attention.   Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner   Keep hustling, my friends. You got this!  

Sales enablement helps sales reps progress faster and overcome roadblocks to closing more deals. Sales enablement leaders are bridging the gap between sales and marketing ensuring knowledge about a customer acquired in the marketing department gets transfered to sales reps. What is the role of efficient sales enablement? In this episode you will listen to Jen Spencer, a VP of Sales and Marketing for SmartBug Media who is going to share her insights on approach to sales enablement from both sides - sales and marketing.Download free materials to this episode: www.salesleaderstalks.com/podcast/how-effective-sales-enablement-helps-your-reps-reach-quotas

Effective Sales Enablement: Achieve Sales Growth Through Collaborative Sales And Marketing by Pam Didner Click here to view the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/effective-sales-enablement-pam-didner Sales enablement is a way of increasing sales results, revenue, profitability, and productivity by creating integrated content, training and coaching for the sales function. Powered by technology, it provides the tools, systems, processes, training, coaching, and development to enable sales to be more effective and efficient. Effective Sales Enablement provides an introduction to the development and evolution of sales enablement and shows how the field has been transformed by marketing technologies. Using case studies and examples from some of the world's largest companies including Google, Cisco, and Salesforce, Effective Sales Enablement will allow you to understand how these market-beating firms have harnessed and exploited technologies and bridged the gap between marketing and sales. The author provides a blueprint for any organization wanting to create a sales enablement function, which will, in turn, accelerate revenue growth.

Many of you know that my book, Effective Sales Enablement, was launched at the end of October. I’ve received positive and negative comments by those who’ve read the book. Thank you so much! I’d like to take an opportunity to address some of the comments that were raised by you who read the book. There were three comments I’d like to address: Your book talks about many topics. There doesn’t seem to be a focus.   I was looking for how-two templates, but I didn’t see many. There are many ideas, and it’s overwhelming. Your book talks about many topics, and there doesn’t seem to be a focus Ok, a good point. I know that I touch on many topics in the book. Sales enablement is still evolving, and marketing can support sales in many different ways depending on your jobs and responsibilities. Because marketing is dynamics and situational, I want to make sure that I cover many marketing related topics so no matter what job functions you do, you’ll find something useful. If you perceive that as lack of focus, my most sincere apologies. I was looking for how-to templates and I didn’t see many Again, another great point! This book was written for marketers who understand the foundation of sales and marketing. This book is about to elevate your knowledge and help you connect marketing and sales dots. I shared how-to steps on key topics, but I didn’t provide many templates. If you are looking for templates for specific topics, let me know. Templates should be situational-based.  There are many topics and it’s overwhelming I get it! I wrote the book, I know. The chapters are topic-driven. I detailed each chapter in the preface. I suggest that you read the chapters that are relevant to you. No need to the book from back-to-back. You can jump around between chapters. Read the chapters which are relevant to you and focus on the ideas that can apply to you. Ok, I got one question from my FB post: What if I am not in marketing, will this book be helpful? I wrote this book with a specific audience in mind: B2B marketing and sales professionals. If you are not in marketing, you may find something useful, but you may not. It’s your call. Like I said, I wrote this book with B2B marketing and sales professionals in mind. Feel free to read the comments on Amazon. If you have any questions, please reach out, OK? Love to hear from you.  Keep hustling, my friends. Take care.

Our topic today is effective sales enablement. It’s a topic normally approached from the point-of-view of the sales team, but our guest, Pam Didner, is looking at it from the marketing side. Pam is a marketing consultant, an author, and someone well known to content marketers around the world. She’s looked at what marketers can do to help the sales team be more effective. On My Desk Pam recommended Jay Baer’s Talk Triggers and Atomic Habits by James Clear Sarah recommended a blog post of Pam’s called A quick and easy way to create your own value propositions Nic’s On My Desk was a reminder to have insurance for your gadgets – which comes on the back of him breaking his iPad. Links you might need You’ll find Pam Didner (and you can grab her book) here. Brand Newsroom is a marketing podcast for anyone who has a say in how companies are communicating — covering marketing, content marketing, public relations, media, branding and advertising.

Episode 171 - Pam Didner discusses her book "Effective Sales Enablement" and ways to achieve sales growth through collaborative sales and marketing. Pam is a B2B marketing consultant and a former adjunct professor at West Virginia University and the University of Oregon. She spent time at Intel, among others, in senior roles in marketing. Pam earned BA in finance from the University of Kentucky and an MBA from the University of Illinois. Listen for three action items you can use today. Host, Kevin Craine Do you want to be a guest? http://Everyday-MBA.com/guest

Some listeners know that my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement, will be available in October. While working with the publisher on editing the manuscript back in May, I also started thinking about how I need to revise my value proposition. The value proposition in this case is ‘How do I differentiate myself from other marketing consultants?’ Until now, I’ve focused on content marketing, or my value proposition or uniqueness being that I know how to help enterprises (not SMB) set up a process to scale content across regions. Not many people can do that, so that is unique to me. Now, with Sales Enablement coming into play, what is my new value proposition? How do I redefine what I can offer to combine my knowledge of global content marketing and sales enablement? I started by identifying several unique strengths or experiences that only I can offer. 20+ years of corporate experience in various positions, from finance to accounting, from operations to product development, from marketing to sales enablement. I have a wide array of experience and understand how a company works. I have a unique process to teach people how to scale content across regions, that’s the 4 P’s of global content marketing. In addition, I understand indirect and direct sales people. I have a unique point of view on what marketers can do to better support their indirect and direct sales team by evaluating the different marketing elements, collaborating on account-based marketing and more. I have steps that people can follow to map content between the sales processes and the customer journeys. All these points are unique to me. The next step is to distill all the uniqueness into one over-arching statement that I can say when I communicate FTF or on my website. So I came up with 5 statements and tested each with different colleagues and clients. I am going to read them out loud and slowly, so you can think about them, as well. Align sales and marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience Grow business by aligning sales and marketing with global content marketing  Increase conversions through content marketing and sales enablement Enable sales with integrated global content marketing   Connect sales and marketing to engage and convert audiences worldwide Here is my quick analysis of these 5 value propositions: Align sales and marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience: this statement is way to generic. It can apply to any sites. I crossed this one out right away. Increase conversions through content marketing and sales enablement: Ok, this statement is way too specific. It focuses only on conversions, but sales and marketing alignment is so much more than that. Otherwise, I like the mention of content marketing and sales enablement in this statement. Grow business by aligning sales and marketing with global content marketing: Actually, I thought this is not bad. It mentions global content marketing, sales and marketing alignment, but puts a focus on using content marketing to align sales and marketing. My offering is broader than content marketing. Enable sales with integrated global content marketing: This statement sounds like global content marketing is the only way to enable sales. The last one is to Connect sales and marketing to engage and convert audiences worldwide. Ok, very few consultants can boast that they can work with sales and marketing to engage audiences internationally. This is certainly unique. I ended up playing with the last one a little more. I tried different combinations of words. I decided to go with “Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.”  Of course, I need to test this statement online and get more feedback, but, at least, I have an overarching messaging to guide copywriting for my new website. So, hear me out. With the new book, my audiences will be expanded to the sales side. Therefore, I want to make an effort to include the sales team as part of the value proposition. However, I am a marketer through and through, my intention is to educate marketing teams on how to better work with the sales teams. Therefore, connecting sales and marketing teams make sense. In addition, I want to play to my expertise of scaling content across regions, therefore, I want to bring global into the value proposition. So, here is the final value proposition for now: Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences. You can see that on my new website. I also came up with other copy such as ‘Helping sales and marketing connect the dots’ and ‘Align communications and resources to get things done.’ ‘When marketing is done right, sales and marketing can co-exist beautifully.’ I see these copy fit nicely under my over-arching value proposition statement. With this start, I began to build out statements to explain my services and offerings such as Pam can help you find commonalities in misalignment, drive joint initiatives through account-based marketing (ABM), craft a messaging framework and map content between the sales processes and customer journeys.  I started with one value proposition, then built positioning and proof points to support it. Here is a quick summary. My value proposition is: Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences. My positioning is: Find commonalities in misalignment. Proven structured methodologies to align sales and marketing Bring clarity and propose recommendations to complex digital marketing and sales efforts My proof points: 20+ year of Corp experience. Deep understanding of MNCs (multi-national companies) Strong technical and marketing knowledge and able to articulate marketing from the perspectives of finance, management, operations, business units and other functions. In a way, I created a messaging framework from the value proposition, positioning and proof points. You can follow the similar thinking process to build your messaging framework. I have templates that you can follow if you want to try. Send me an email via my website, pamdidner.com and I’m more than happy to share them with you. Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner   Be well. Until next time.

Frequent listeners know that I just finished my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. This book was written from a marketers’ perspective on what we, marketers, can do to enable sales. I believe that marketing elements, f used right, can support sales and show impact directly. I am always looking for examples on how marketing better support sales. Here is a great example from James Rogers, Digital Marketing Manager for PowerBlanket.  I met James at MozCon, a search marketing conference in Seattle. PowerBlanket is a small manufacturing company that builds industrial heating blankets, wraps, and custom heating solutions for dozens of industries with hundreds of applications.  Powerblanket is a 55-person company based in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Its marketing department is a 2- person team with a few contracted content creators. Obviously, they don’t have a big marketing budget. If they spend $$ on something, the results and ROI must follow. I have supported manufacturing companies before. I totally get it.   I asked James if PowerBlanket does a lot of events. He said that although they used to, they have seen that the ROI of events and tradeshows have diminished in the past several years. They still recognize that event MKT is a good way to reach out their potential customers but, since the ROI is limited, he and his team modified their event strategy. They still attend events, but it’s usually with his distributors, and with a different goal in mind. He works from the angle of enabling his distributors to succeed. If the distributors succeed, then Powerblanket will succeed. For events, he doesn’t necessarily attend fewer of them, he simply attends events where his distributors are sponsors. He works at their booths to help them present his company’s products. He is on-site and talking to potential customers.   Since he knows search and digital MKT well, he helps his distributors optimize their websites with the right keywords. He also creates marketing materials that distributors can use to share or upload to their websites. Supporting distributors at events, doing content creation and optimizing their websites are ways for him to provide value to his distributors so that they can sell more of his company’s products. He tackles it from both online and offline perspectives. Onlineà website help, content creation and search optimization. Off-site à event support. I asked him if his distributors sell his company’s products exclusively. No, he said, most distributors also sell competitors’ products. His salespeople are joining the conversation and helping the distributors to address questions that they may not know.  Because of this joint effort, they are able to close several deals together. When he told me the story, I was so excited.  This is a perfect example of marketing enabling sales.  Exactly the point I try to share in my book. Here is a quick summary: PowerBlanket is scaling back on their event budget, but they instead found a way to maximize the impact of their time and energy by attending events with distributors to help them sell Powerblanket products. The effort they put in spending time at distributor booths ‘rubs off’ on their distributor and enhances their education in Powerblanket solutions. With that effort, he also provides additional assistance to distributor websites, search marketing support and customized content for them, Powerblanket is stretching its marketing budget to increase sales. A great example of effective sales enablement. Thank you for sharing, James! Great job!! Do you have any sales enablement examples to share?  Please reach out. Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner    Be well. Until next time.

I was talking to Michelle, a marketer, about my new book, Effective Sales Enablement. I told her that I wrote this book from a marketer’s perspective and how marketers can better enable their sales team. She told me that her company doesn’t have a sales enablement team, but it does have a sales operations team. So, what is the difference between sales enablement and sales operations? If you think about it, Sales enablement, in essence, aids and supports Sales. So does Sales Operations. Sales-support structures come in various shapes and forms, depending on the size of a company, budget, resources, organizational structure, the maturity of the Sales organization, and even senior management’s preferences. Some organizations tuck Sales enablement into Sales operations. Others keep the groups separate. Some have no official Sales enablement group; the enablement work is done by product-marketing teams in business units. It doesn’t matter what the structure is and who does the jobs, someone is taking care of sales enablement work. So, what are the differences between these two groups? Like I said, each company can define the differences between the two groups. Here is one common approach to differentiate them. Sales operations: Can covers Sales rep operations: Territory planning, deal routing, account assignment. It can support Sales administration: Proposal, quoting and contract management, contract governance. It touches on Sales incentives and compensation: Compensation optimization and administration. It works on Sales pipeline and forecasting: Forecast reporting and dashboards Manage Sales tools and processes: Systems and data management such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Configure Price Quotes (CPQ), Sales Performance Management (SPM), Deal Desk and Discount Approvals.  Sales Enablement Responsibilities: It touches on Sales onboarding and training, including content, process and training events. Sales enablement manages content planning, mapping, management, and analysis. The team also manages sales processes and technologies, including process performance analytics. They can also work with sales to brainstorm the tactics to engage new accounts or work with sales on account-based marketing. So, that’s the gist of how they are different. Another way to look at it is that sales operations tend to focus on short-term items such as quota, pipeline, incentive etc, while sales enablement focuses on long-term initiatives such as onboarding, training, sales content mapping, account-based targeting and more. Michelle, even if your company doesn’t have a sales enablement team, someone is in your company is helping sales with sales training, content mapping to different sales stages, account-based strategies, and even sales communications. You just need to find out who is doing those tasks. Reach out and see if you can leverage existing marketing efforts, tools and outreach to help sales. Help them connect the dots. Share with me how sales enablement is structured in your company.  Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner   Be well. Until next time.

I was hoping to record this episode when I was in Machu Picchu. That would be a major milestone, right? I carried the recording equipment all the way up 9000 feet above the sea level. I was taken away by the ruins, the mountains, the history and just the overall experience. I decided to be present and enjoy it as much as I could.  And I did! I recorded this episode when I came back to the US. A quick update on getting to Machu Picchu. First, I had to travel to Lima, then took a plane from Lima to Cusco. From Cusco, our group took the bus to Ollantaytambo. From there, we took the train to a town at the bottom of Machu Picchu. Then, we had to take a park bus to the entrance. It’s a long way to get there. Machu Picchu is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, so many rules are set up to proactively protect the site. The government limits the numbers of tourists that can access the site each day. To manage the visitor flow, we are put in groups of 15-20 with an assigned tour guide and a specific time-slot. When your assigned time slot arrives, you need to show your ticket and your passport, which are checked to make sure they are completely matched. In other words, the ticket is non-transferrable. With the rise of terrorist attacks, I guess it makes sense that the government wants to know who is in and out if they need to track down potential suspects. God forbids something happens to this site. If this site is gone, it’s gone forever. There is no way to replace it. The rules are annoying, but I understand.  Once we passed the entrance, we had to go through a windy narrow path and then enter into a half-way house. Once you walk out of that area, Boom! You are suddenly presented with the majesty of  Machu Picchu. I got a little emotional when I saw it for the first time… OMG, it’s stunning and exactly how I imaged it would be. I was still in disbelief that a tribe of people devoted so much time to build a civilization on top of a mountain in the middle of the rainforest. The tour guide showed us the temple and residential areas for the royal family and common people. The irrigation system and architecture were really states of art, at the time. So, what are my marketing takeaways from visiting Machu Picchu?  Well, there are two. Machu Picchu made me think about messaging and value propositions. To market our products, we are taught that we need to find unique differentiators for our products. Well, since there is only one Machu Picchu in the world, it’s easy to identify and craft its unique messaging. The messaging can tap into the history of the Inca empire, the mysterious abandonment of this city, the human sacrifices, the battles with Spaniards, their sophisticated and advanced knowledge in architecture and irrigation and more. There is no lack of content and story to use in marketing Machu Picchu. Obviously, our product and services are not as unique as Machu Picchu and we are likely not the only company serving the same customers.  But we should strive to find our own unique differentiators. The best way to start is to ask why and what. Why do we build the products? What problems do we want to solve? We obviously build our products to serve a specific segment of people. If we demonstrate our products to them, what would we say?  How do we tell our stories? It doesn’t matter how commoditized your products are, you can always find your uniqueness. Just type “hammer” on Amazon.com, you can see a variety of hammers for different purposes. The price ranges from $5-$50. Each one of them has its unique positioning.  While I was at Machu Picchu, I started thinking about my own value propositions. With the new book, Effective Sales Enablement, I can’t just talk about global content marketing anymore. The overarching value proposition needs to be changed to somehow tie global content marketing and sales enablement together.  Obviously, my expertise is global in nature. I know how a marketing organization works in a global company. I know how to create a scalable marketing process between corporate and local, how to create scalable personas, messaging framework, marketing planning and strategy. On top of it, I can shared ideas and recommendations on how marketing teams can better support sales teams.  So, what should my value proposition be? I don’t know yet. Messaging and value propositions are difficult to crack and they change as new features and benefits are added. Oh, here is another takeaway.  After Machu Picchu, our group took the train back to Cusco. The train was very slow and it was a 3.5 hour ride. To increase revenue and entertain the guests, the train staff did a fashion show with carefully curated upbeat music. They used the aisle as a run-way to showcase 100% Alpaca coats, sweaters, shawls, jackets and more. It was a lot of fun to see the staff dressing up as models. It did get people excited and interested in checking out the clothes. By the way, these clothes were not cheap, but people were buying.  Here is another marketing take away: the best way to market your product is show-and-tell. It never fails. While recording this episode, I can still recall tingling excitement of being on the top of that mountain. Totally worth it.  My next trips are Vienna and Seattle.  I am looking forward to sharing my marketing take-aways from these two cities. Stay tuned and more to come. Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner   Be well. Until next time.

Ok, I reached a major milestone last week. While in London, I visited my publisher and finalized the manuscript of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. Now, the manuscript is officially moving to the production phase. I am not at the finish line yet, but I am very happy that the hardest part is DONE. People approach me all the time asking about how to write a book and get it published. I want to share my experience with you, in seven minutes.  BTW, my experience is more on writing a business book, not a fictional novel. So, what’s the difference? This is my opinion. I think it’s harder to sell a novel and it’s better to have an agent.  For business books, personally, I think you can represent yourself and pitch it to a publisher directly. Here is the process I used for publishing my 2 books: Start with a topic that you are either the expert at or very passionate about. Writing is a frustrating creative journey. Unless you love the topic, it’s hard to get through the whole writing and rewriting process. Put your ideas into a general framework or methodology to explain your ideas. Or you can dissect the topic into different elements and add adjacent subtopics. Frankly, there is nothing new under the sun. The secret is how you present an existing idea with a new twist or from a new perspective. For my 1st book, I created a framework called the 4C’s of Global Content Marketing. For my 2nd book, I discussed how to enable sales through various marketing elements. I dissected the topics from a marketer’s perspective. Now you have a topic and a general framework, it’s time to write a book proposal. Hey, if you want a sample for your book proposal, I am more than happy to share mine with you. I am not saying mine is the best, but I structured the proposal in a way that makes it easy for the book publisher to get the gist of who I am, what the future book is about, and a sense of the overall outline and this topic’s competitive landscape. Once that’s done, you can send your book proposal to various publishers. Publishers are usually very good at letting you know if they are interested in your book proposal. For payments, some pay an advance, some don’t. I have heard that this is where an agent is helpful. Maybe! Most people write business books to get additional business opportunities or check off their bucket list, not necessarily try to make money off the book. You need to understand why you want to write a book. If you are driven by making money, I hate breaking the news to you. You are better off doing something else. Many people prefer self-publishing. I don’t have experience with that. The two biggest advantages for working with publishers: hold myself accountable to a deadline. They set up a date, I need to meet their deadline. Another reason for working with publishers is to access their retail and international distribution channels. If you are self-publishing, you will probably sell it on Amazon or your own website. You have to work hard to get on other online channels. It can be challenging. With or without a publisher, the next step is to buckle down and write. There’s not much more to it. One word at a time. Allocate time, sit down and write. Just do it. By talking to various business book authors, the writing seems to take about 4-8 months. The production process is about 6-9 months if you work with publishers. They will do a layout design, typesetting, fact-checking and a series of other steps to get the book published.   After you’ve handed in your manuscript, it’s time to start working on the launch and marketing plan. Many authors work closely with PR agencies to create marketing campaigns. This time around, I decide to work with a PR person and focus on mainstream media promotion and interview opportunities. When the book is published, there’s still a lot of work to do. Marketing and promotion never stops. It’s like demand gen, you have to do it day in and day out. I didn’t do a good job promoting my first book. This time around, I am making an effort to create an integrated plan with paid and organic marketing campaigns and content marketing efforts. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. Are you ready and willing to take the plunge? Like I said, I am more than happy to share my book proposal with you. Again, send me your marketing questions via Twitter @pamdidner   Be well. Until next time.    

Pam will tell you up front that she’s not your typical marketer. Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions at Intel from accounting and supply chain management and then marketing, Pam has the benefit of having a holistic view of how a company runs. She thinks strategically and is able to translate the big picture into actionable plans & tactics. Her first book, “Global Content Marketing” (McGraw Hill, 2014) is the first marketing book to offer a complete process to scale content around the world.   In her latest book, “Effective Sales Enablement” she focuses on marketing’s role in sales enablement, the friction between sales and marketing, and provides strategies for having consistent branding and messaging in sales enablement. It’s this second book that we dive into and discuss a very interesting topic that I know you’ll have an opinion on -- who should own sales enablement?   Get your copy of Effective Sales Enablement here: https://amzn.to/2uf6scr