Sales and Product - love / hate relationship?
The connection
This post has been inspired by this article I’ve read a couple of weeks ago in First Round, and evaluating my interaction with Sales in my three years at Nexthink.
A brief (and fictitious) story
Once upon a time, Cecile was appointed as a brand-new PM of a successful SaaS B2B company. She was eager to suck in as much as context as possible and being introduced to their main stakeholders.
She spoke to the main leaders from Support, Platform, Marketing, Professional Services, Solution Consultants, and more.
She was happy, but skeptical at the same time. “Why hasn’t she been introduced to the sales organisation?. They are the ones listening prospects before they become paying customers. They know the main struggling moments and why the customers ends up paying a subscription.“
Cecile was thrown off, and was looking to understand the why behind it
Collaboration between Sales/Product?
I have never been part of a Sales team. Nonetheless, if you look at the Sales pipelines, you can identify the main steps of how an opportunity, becomes a lead to eventually converting into a paying customer.
I tend to look at sales from the perspective of Jobs-To-Be-Done theory that is described in the book Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress, written by Bob Moesta.
As a PM, if I look at the above stages and systems, and there are three that immediately resonate:
Understanding the event that causes the lead to think about a solution to address a specific struggling moment is crucial. That’s the seed of innovation.
Being aware of the alternative solutions the customer is considering gives you the baseline you’re compared against.
Knowing the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make determines what is really really important when it comes to the final decision.
Understanding the Big Hire / Low Hire - what is the main reason (Big Hire) they are buying your product, and discover other potential uses that end up delighting customers because they didn’t expect it to be there (Low Hires).
There are going to be countless of additional touch-points where
Most of these stages are covered by a Sales individual, but sometimes with no involvement of a product person. I’m not saying PM should be closing the deal, but it gives a whole bunch of insights of what causes them to buy your product, in which situations or circumstances leads lean towards your product, and if the lead decides to choose another product, getting the why behind it.
Sometimes I have the feeling PMs are involved very late into the conversations. Once the lead buys your subscription, then we bring an army of PMs, to push the features to the brand-new customers. This, in my opinion, keep fostering the mentality of silo thinking, and provides zero context on why the customer end up buying your product.
The future about Sales/Product collaboration
Products that became successful (in B2B and B2C) have created defensible, competitive, and sustainable models to acquire customers by exposing end-users to the product directly via a self-service approach.
Most of these ideas are explain by people such as Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky, and Brian Balfour among others.
If today the main motion for growing (acquiring, retaining, and monetising) today is driven by sales (sales-led), there will be a ceiling at some point where more motions will have to be leveraged, as shown by
:
What is important to recognise is where you are right one, if you have runway to keep squeezing that motion, and what would you need to pull another motion at some extent. Link to post here.
Conclusion
Identify the best moment to incorporate the PMs into the selling pipeline.
Identify where the customer is on their selling journey to know what is the JTBD.
Understanding the buying needs from the demand-side - progress the customer is trying to make - helps PMs to become better at looking at the product as a system and removing the silo thinking.
Your PM is not going to close the deal, but it could gain significant knowledge to inform what to build.