This article comes from our expert panel, ‘Enablement vs product marketing; Who should own what?’, at our Austin 2023 Sales Enablement Summit, to hear the insightful discussion in full, click here.
Have product marketing and sales enablement ever felt like ships passing in the night at your company? You're not alone.
Even at sophisticated enterprises, tension and misalignment often simmer between these interconnected functions so pivotal for revenue growth.
In a fascinating panel discussion, our industry leaders, Katie Pariseau, Director of Enablement at TrustRadius, and Abhinav Joshi, Director of Product Marketing at Red Hat, traded insights on how the two departments can shift from friction to strategic collaboration.
Across the complex sales journey, marketing owns the strategic messaging while enablement translates that for customer-facing teams.
When firing on all cylinders together, they wield the power to revolutionize sales productivity, client relationships and ultimately, the bottom line.
Yet as Katie and Abhinav related through hard-won experience, a myriad of hurdles always seem to surface - from conflicting priorities to inconsistent messaging, to stretched bandwidth.
The good news? By using best practices uncovered here, enablement and product marketing can start operating less like disjointed siloes and more like the unified revenue engine they’re meant to be.
Let’s dive in to extract actionable lessons on how you can iron out those widespread pain points!
Defining the interconnected roles
Product Marketing: Owning strategic messaging and positioning
In the panel discussion, Katie defined enablement as “the last three feet of marketing”, focused on intimately understanding sales reps’ daily challenges.
Meanwhile, product marketing plays the role of “partner in crime” and subject matter expert, arming enablement with the raw intel and building blocks needed to resonate with the field.
Enablement: Translating complexity into clarity
At Red Hat, Abhinav’s product marketing concentrates on market positioning, honing messaging, analyzing competition and foundational content creation.
Enablement then serves that crucial “last mile” function - making complex messaging relatable, actionable and relevant for customer-facing roles through sales skills reinforcement and content amplification.
As Abhinav added, product marketing supplies the crucial “raw ingredients”, while enablement elevates them into “snackable” assets catered to the reps’ limited bandwidth between customer calls.
When strategically coordinated, the specialized strengths shine brighter collectively than individually.
Marketing supplies the critical building blocks while enablement elevates them into digestible assets catering precisely to reps’ limited attention between calls.
Yet this interdependency also underscores why friction so easily erupts when not grounded in a shared vision.
Just as reps struggle to convey disjointed messaging confidently to prospects, competing product launches and priorities quickly inundate enablement with overwhelming requests to juggle simultaneously.
