Product marketing professionals help position your organization for success by creating content that sales teams can use to close more deals.
They answer tough questions like:
- Who is the right target for your product?
- What benefits are being offered?
- What pain points does your product address?
- What differentiates your offering?
These teams work hard to perfect your messaging, but their vision doesn’t always make it to the finish line.
Luckily, product marketing professionals and sales leaders can work together to close existing communication gaps and ensure consistent messaging across the board with sales certifications.
Product launches, for example, offer an opportunity to optimize. Imagine designing a product launch specifically designed for success, and knowing your sales team can execute it to perfection. That’s possible with sales certifications.
How Do Sales Certifications Work?
Sales certification programs are used to roll out new products, programs, or information to sales reps. They give leaders the ability to certify that their reps know what to sell, and how to sell it. They make all the hard work product marketing puts into their campaigns last.
Certifications help reps retain information by using both learning and assessment components to hold reps accountable. And smart organizations are collaborating with dynamic partners, like LearnCore, who can give reps the ability to practice what they’ve learned to boost retention even further.
Check out how LearnCore clients administer successful sales certification programs.
A Collaborative Effort
Successful product launches require collaboration between product marketing and sales. While product marketing is churning out critical data and content that may include marketing collateral, competitive analysis, sales guides, pricing lists, demos, ebooks and or white papers, sales needs to get trained to accurately deliver the pitch.
Product marketing and sales leaders need to work together to translate between the two teams. Don’t forget, product marketing is guiding the content for the sales certification, but marketing and sales historically speak wildly different languages. It’s critical to facilitate the creation of common goals as early as possible.
Get started with these tips:
- Include sales stakeholders in the product marketing content creation process. Getting feedback and buy in will create stronger collateral, and also help build a great relationship between the two teams.
- Involve product marketing in the creation of the sales certification process. What are their biggest goals in sales implementation? What do they expect to see? What will they count as a success?
- Get feedback from product marketing during and after the certification for the product launch. Have them provide commentary on pitch practice submissions so they can see exactly how sales is processing their plan.
Just as messaging misalignment can lead to lost revenue, consistent messaging can lead to big wins. Help your teams win at message alignment by tackling sales certification programs through a collaborative effort.
