The Enablement Squad Playbook: Product Launches 🚀
The Enablement Squad Playbook đź“” is a blog series that captures and shares the best practices, insights, and strategies contributed by members of our Enablement Squad through Zoom chats with Ebonie Glenn, our Knowledge Chair, and Slack discussions. This series highlights real-world enablement approaches and offers valuable tips on enablement-driven initiatives.
Do you have a great best practice or insight to share? We encourage you to contribute to and participate in this collaborative series!
Expertise submitted by Emily Beugelmans Cook
Emily Beugelmans Cook is currently a Senior Manager of Global Training and Enablement at Productboard, a product management software company. Prior to Productboard, Emily was a founding member of Lattice’s GTM Enablement team. She has a background in higher education, instructional design, and public relations.
Chapter 1: Driving Product Launch Success Through Effective Enablement
In today's fast-paced business environment, successful product launches require more than just a well-timed release—they demand strong cross-functional alignment and well-prepared sales teams. To dive deeper into how enablement can drive product launch success, we had a conversation with Emily Beugelmans Cook who shared her expertise on managing change, supporting teams, and ensuring product knowledge and demo readiness. Kim Fields, an Enablement Leader, also contributed her insights on optimizing training materials.
Below are key takeaways from both leaders:
1. How Do You Measure Sales Team Readiness Before a Product Launch?
Emily emphasized that readiness measurement depends heavily on the nature of the product launch. It's not just about training but understanding the scale of change required in sales behaviors. Here's how she approaches it:
Change Management: Start by evaluating how much change is needed— will there be new personas, new industry knowledge, or a shift in product demo practices?
Behavioral Metrics: Emily doesn’t solely focus on knowledge retention but also looks for changes in the team’s behaviors once the product is launched.
Emily also mentioned a tiering system for product launches to better align enablement activities. Depending on the launch’s complexity, enablement, marketing, and customers could all require significant support. A checklist for key stakeholders to keep track of their responsibilities and decision-making process is needed for smooth execution. It ensures a holistic view, allowing enablement teams to spot potential challenges early and resolve them ahead of time.
2. How Do You Ensure Cross-Functional Alignment?
Cross-functional alignment between sales, marketing, and product teams can be tricky. Emily shared a practical solution that works for her team: huddle meetings.
For larger releases, quick “standups” or status update meetings help teams track their progress and address blockers before they become major issues. Consistent communication among stakeholders and teams involved in the product launch keeps everyone on the same page and ensures no one is left behind.
3. What Type of Training Materials Work Best for Product Launches?
When it comes to training content, Emily highlighted that the complexity of the product launch determines the approach. She prefers a mix of asynchronous training, prework, and live practice sessions for larger launches. A certification process that includes talk track and demo reviews helps gauge the team’s readiness.
Emily emphasized how important it is to conceptualize the desired outcomes leaders and enablement want the sales team to do after the enablement session into a clear call to action. This includes providing resources relevant to the context in which the reps are working and familiar to them. Enablement practitioners must consider the product launch's impact on customers and account for any additional layers of complexity that may arise. For instance, if customers are migrating to a new system, think about the nuances they would experience to fully integrate and utilize the new system effectively and include that in the resources provided to sales teams.
Enablement should tailor the foundational elements of training materials to specific sales team roles, expectations, and desired outcomes to provide revenue teams with a clear path on their responsibilities in preparing for product launches. Training materials should include clearly defined targeted personas, value propositions, product functionality overviews, and a feature/product roadmap. Additionally, enablement should equip teams with other enablement resources, such as external messaging (including outbound sequences and templates) and available data on customers who have requested features related to the product release to share with Customer Success.
Kim Fields also provided her insights here, suggesting that on-demand resources are the most efficient, allowing reps to reference materials both before and after launch. At a minimum, she recommends a product demo video and a one-pager, which teams can build upon based on their specific needs. For more technical roles, hands-on training exercises and demos tailored to different levels of expertise can be highly effective.
4. How Do You Support Sales Teams Post-Launch?
Continuous learning naturally follows the initial product launch. Emily shared some great strategies to ensure teams stay sharp:
Workshops and Office Hours: Scheduling post-launch workshops or office hours gives reps a space to ask questions in a collaborative environment.
Conversational Intelligence Tools: Tools like Gong can help monitor how reps handle customer conversations to ensure they’re on track with the messaging and talk tracks and allow for real-time coaching opportunities.
Define and Track Success Metrics: Defining the product launch’s success metrics beforehand ensures everyone understands the success outcomes expected from sales teams post-launch. According to Emily, success metrics fall into three categories:
Enablement Metrics: These metrics measure enablement initiatives' success. For example: Session Attendance, Post-Session Surveys, Resource Utilization
Behavior Change Metrics: These metrics measure the impact of the intended behavior change on business outcomes. For example: Has the rep effectively used the new messaging in conversations? Can the rep articulate competitive advantages to prospects? Has the rep shared new sales collateral, such as one-pagers, with customers?
Lagging Indicators: These are metrics that measure the frequency of an activity. For example: Attach rate for new SKU, opportunity creation rate with new SKU, and number of demos scheduled for new product.
Lastly, Emily noted the importance of manager involvement, suggesting "Manager-in-a-Box" activities, where managers can provide live coaching in their team meetings by listening to a specific recording and discussing the strengths and areas of opportunity or growth with their teams. Having these activities fleshed into their current processes as managers is essential so it does not feel like additional work but an added layer to what they are already doing.
To enhance the coaching experience, Emily suggested having managers participate in the same certifications as their reps so they can provide feedback on the structure and content of the certification while equipping themselves with the information needed to talk to and sell the new product effectively.
In conclusion, enablement is a continuous, multifaceted process that requires careful planning, alignment, and adaptability. Emily’s approach shows how a blend of behavioral metrics, cross-functional collaboration, and tailored training can help ensure a smooth and effective product launch. Kim’s additional thoughts on the importance of flexible, on-demand resources and role-specific demos further enriched the conversation.
As product launches become increasingly complex, staying proactive with these enablement best practices ensures your team is prepared and confident.
