02 / GTM ENABLEMENT
What a rep can say under pressure, and what they have in their hands when they say it. Most companies have material that looks right and answers that fall over on the first hard question.
SOUNDS LIKE YOUR TEAM
“My reps cannot answer a hard product question without going away to check”
“Everybody builds their own deck and none of them say the same thing”
“The pitch lives in two people’s heads and both of them are busy closing”
“We lose on the technical call and nobody can tell me why”
WHAT IS ACTUALLY BROKEN
There are usually two problems and companies almost always work on the wrong one first.
The first is the material. Most companies have a deck, a one-pager and something that gets called a battlecard. It was built by marketing, it looks professional, and it is built for the brand rather than for the conversation. Talk to the reps about it, or better, talk to the buyers, and the gaps are obvious inside ten minutes. Not because marketing did a bad job. Because they were solving a different problem.
The second is fluency, and it is the one that decides deals. A rep who has to go away and check has already lost the room, even if they come back with a perfect answer two days later. Buyers read hesitation as risk, and they are not wrong to.
You can see a deck. You cannot see the eleven seconds where a rep did not have an answer, unless you were in the call.
The reason the first problem gets the attention is that it is visible.
Artifacts, not recommendations. Every one is a thing your team holds and runs after I am gone.
THE TEST FOR ANY SALES RESOURCE
Two questions, and most material fails at least one.
Does a rep use it without being told to? Not has it been distributed. Used, voluntarily, because it makes the conversation easier. Material that needs a mandate is material nobody needed.
Does a buyer recognise themselves in it? Not is it accurate. Does the person on the other side of the table read it and think that is my situation, described by someone who has seen it before.
THE COMPLETE PACKAGE
Most companies have three or four of those ten and do not know which ones are missing, because nobody has ever laid out what the full set should be. That inventory is most of the value here. Not building forty assets, which nobody will use. Knowing what a rep needs at each stage of your specific motion, checking what exists against it, and building only the gaps.
The list above is not universal. A product-led company needs a different set from one selling a six-month enterprise implementation. What is universal is having decided.
WHERE AI HELPS, AND WHERE IT DOES NOT
It helps with the first draft, from a real brief, with a human supplying the point of view and the edit. Never the reverse. It helps with harvesting: two years of call recordings read for the questions that actually keep coming up.
It does not create fluency. A rep becomes fluent by being asked a hard question by someone whose opinion they care about, getting it wrong, and then getting it right. Automating the observation removes the part that worked.
And your buyer can tell. Everyone can spot generated writing now. When it arrives from your team it does not read as efficient. It reads as nobody here spent two minutes on me. The failure is not that a model wrote it. It is that nobody had a point of view for the model to express.
WHAT YOU ARE LEFT HOLDING
The audit, the five questions with their answers, the drill and its cadence, and every asset built during the engagement in the tool where your team uses it.
NINETY DAYS OF REVISIONS
A new objection appears, a competitor changes their pitch, the ROI model needs a different input. For ninety days after handover that is part of what you already paid for.
THE FRAMEWORK
None yet, and I would rather say that than invent one. The drill works and the audit works. Neither has earned a name.
THE ARTICLES THAT PROVE IT
The people person era is over. The product guru era is here.
The Five Questions, the working document
Thinnest of the four components on published proof. Two more pieces are the next thing I write.
BEST FOR
Teams selling something real to a buyer who asks hard questions, where the answers have never been written down and the good reps are good because they worked it out themselves.
NOT FOR
Companies looking for an agency to produce assets on a retainer. I build the system and the first version, then your team owns it. If what you want is a content supplier, that is a different purchase and a reasonable one.
Run the Six Reads. Six questions, three minutes, and it names which of six problems you actually have.
The next step
Thirty minutes, no deck and no discovery script. Tell me what the last two quarters actually looked like and I will tell you which of the six you are dealing with, and whether I am the right person to fix it.