Heidi Cohen Interviews Pam Didner
New book: Effective Sales Enablement: Achieve sales growth through collaborative sales and marketing
Q: What’s your best piece of advice for marketers?
A: Understand your audiences! We all have a tendency to jump in and start talking about our products first. But it’s important to understand our target audiences’ challenges and pain points. Then, tailor our product positions to meet their needs.
Understand audiences to help you help them. It’s about them, not about you.
Q: What was the inspiration for Effective Sales Enablement?
A: I’m a B2B marketer through and through and I’m a firm believer that marketing’s job is to support sales. Sales enablement is something I have always been passionate about. In addition, with the rise of digital, many marketing tactics and channels can also be used as sales enablement tools by sales teams to accelerate conversions.
A great example is email marketing, which is used not only by marketing to drive massive marketing campaigns, but also by sales professionals to run customized and targeted outreach for theirs prospects. In this book, I share how to leverage various marketing elements effectively for sales enablement.
Q: What is the key concept behind the book?
A: I wrote my first book, Global Content Marketing, based on my own experience of scaling content across different countries. Effective Sales Enablement, in a way, is a natural extension of content marketing.
As a marketer enabling or supporting sales, a big chunk of it is about creating, customizing or leveraging marketing content for sales outreach. When I explored this topic in more depth, I discovered that there is a lot more that marketers can do to optimize their sales support efforts. Each chapter addresses a specific sales enablement topic from marketing’s perspective; from goal alignment, branding, messaging, and martech, to assembling a sales enablement team. Please check it out.
Q: What do you want readers to take away from your book
A: Sales people need to understand that existing digital marketing channels can all be part of sales conversions or enablement tools. Learn how to use digital marketing to complement the existing sales processes and methodologies. Marketing managers need to see sales as another marketing channel and identify marketing content and campaigns to assist sales outreach.
Q: How do you describe yourself professionally?
A: I help clients connect sales and marketing to engage with their audiences. I also help them align resources and process to get things done! If you have challenges, I have solutions!
To understand what else I can do → check out what I can do on my “About” page.
Q: What are the books that inspired your work/career?
A:
Q: What is the biggest challenge that you’ve had to overcome?
A: Working for myself! I was very fortunate to work in a global corporation for over 20 years, I learned how a big company works. However, working for yourself requires a very different mindset. I need to be nimble, flexible and, most importantly, think like a salesperson or a start-up.
I am so glad that I have both enterprise and entrepreneurial experience.
Q: What’s something unusual or fun that most people don’t know about you?
A: Most people think I am stern, proper and professional. Then, they sit next to me at a dinner table. They are surprised: “OMG, you are crazy and silly!” I am not much of a foodie, but I really enjoy good food and good jokes. Yes, sit next to me when we meet next time. LOL.
Q: Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you’d like to share?
A: Check out my new book, Effective Sales Enablement on Amazon. If you don’t find a single tip or idea that you can implement from the book, please go to www.pamdidner.com to schedule a call with me. I am more than happy to understand your challenges and find a way to help.
Contact information
Contact informationThanks, Pam.
P.S. Read our previous interview with Pam upon the publication of Global Content Marketing.
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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