Sales Enablement is one of PMM’s three core accountabilities and the one that generates the most visible short-term results. It’s also the one most likely to become a content factory if you’re not careful. The goal isn’t to produce assets. The goal is to help Sales win.
Those are different goals. Keep them separate in your mind.
What Enablement Actually Is
Enablement is the discipline of making sure the people who sell your product have the knowledge, tools, and confidence to have the right conversation with the right person at the right moment.
Knowledge: they understand the product, the ICP, the value props, the competitive landscape. Tools: they have the assets they need to support the conversation — decks, battlecards, one-pagers, demo scripts. Confidence: they’ve practised. They know how to handle the hard questions. They know what to say when a competitor is brought up.
Most PMMs nail the tools part. The knowledge and confidence parts are harder because they require ongoing relationship and investment, not just a Confluence page with a link to the latest deck.
The Core Toolkit
The pitch deck. The single most important sales asset most companies get wrong. A good pitch deck tells the story. It opens with the problem, makes the buyer feel seen, articulates the value in outcome language (not feature language), and builds toward a clear ask. It is not a product feature tour. It is not a company history. It is a story with a point of view.
The battlecard. Covered in the previous section, but worth saying here: this is the asset Sales reaches for most in competitive deals. Keep it short, keep it honest, keep it current.
The demo script / discovery guide. Often underinvested in. A good demo isn’t a product walk-through, it’s a story told through the product. The script helps reps understand what to show, in what order, and what to say about each part so it connects to the buyer’s problem rather than the product’s capabilities.
The one-pager. The leave-behind. Two sides of a page that captures the problem, the solution, the differentiation, and the proof. Buyers share these internally after meetings. They need to be able to stand alone.
The objection handling guide. Every sales team hears the same ten objections repeatedly. Document them, document the best answers, and make sure the whole team knows them. This is a living document that improves every time a rep finds a better response.
Email templates. Painful to admit, but incredibly high-leverage. A well-crafted prospecting email or follow-up sequence that the rep can personalise takes hours of per-rep reinvention off the table.
The Trap: Producing Assets Nobody Uses
The most common PMM frustration: you build the deck, you share it in Slack, three people react with a thumbs up, and then Sales keeps using their own version. Or the old version. Or nothing at all.
A few things that increase adoption dramatically:
First, build it with Sales, not for them. Have a rep in the room when you’re building the pitch deck. Their resistance during the build process is valuable feedback you want to hear before launch, not after.
Second, run it live before you release it. A 30-minute session where you walk through the deck or battlecard with the team, take questions, and get real reactions is worth more than any Confluence page.
Third, make it easy to find and hard to ignore. If the asset lives in a folder that hasn’t been opened in six months, it doesn’t matter how good it is.
How Do You Know It’s Working?
You ask. Regularly.
After a deal closes, ask the rep what they used. After a deal is lost, ask what they wish they’d had. Run a quarterly check-in with your top three reps: what’s working, what’s missing, what’s out of date?
The signal that enablement is working isn’t asset downloads. It’s reps saying “I used the battlecard in a competitive deal and it helped.” It’s a shortened sales cycle on competitive deals. It’s consistent messaging in discovery calls instead of six different versions of the pitch.
That’s the bar. Set it early, and measure against it.