Sympathy for the Sales Team
Until you’ve done Sales, you don’t know how hard it is. First there’s the emotional strength required to persist through the emotional gauntlet of skepticism, rejection, even the occasional spark of outright hostility. Despite what other emotions you may be receiving you must feel and project confidence and positivity. On top of that, there’s the quota system, which by resetting sales numbers to 0 on a quarterly (or monthly) basis takes away the possibility to chill at the top of the hill. Even if you’ve killed it this quarter, the next one is always right up. Talk about living in stress-city.
Now, I’m not in Sales. In fact, I’ve spent much of my career as a Product Manager at very young B2B companies. If you’ve been in one, you know that environment results in some jostling between Product and Sales. Those groups want the same thing, but on different time-horizons. Sales is trying to save their quarter.
Product, meanwhile, is on a different time-scale. At companies new to B2B, Products main goal is often to build the roadmap. While roadmaps aren’t perfectly accurate, they reassure different elements of the business and help them plan. Building a roadmap requires cycles of input and iteration from stakeholders that create a commitment for what those very expensive developers will do for months. While the roadmap is not perfectly accurate, changing it is a huge pain. The odds all commitments will be met go down — annoying some stakeholders, in particular the engineers, an extremely important constituency. Keeping engineers happy and protecting their time are foundational elements of survival for PMs.
I understood this as a young PM. What I didn’t understand was what it’s like to be Sales on calls where the customer says a deal is contingent on features outside the roadmap. In the worst cases, it felt like Sales made features up because they didn’t fully understand how the product worked. After all the time spent negotiating and planning a roadmap, for someone to demand features that aren’t on there as part of their time is galling. Don’t they understand how much work went into this plan, how this doesn’t get us closer to our goal, and how much chaos this hack will cause, not just now, but maintaining it in the future, for one or two customers? It feels not just like a dismissal of the Product teams work, but of the stated company goals.
In defense of Sales, the pressure to say yes is immense. Most product people don’t know what it’s like to be on the call. In Product terms — it’s like being under pressure to create a roadmap in a set timeframe. After several corralling attempts you’ve gotten all the stakeholders together and have gotten 90% of the way to agreement, when everyone suddenly agrees there should be a landing page change. Ideally you’d have one more round of conversation, but if you don’t agree to the change during this meeting, you have to start the roadmap process all over again. Besides, there’s always some uncertainty in roadmaps anyhow. So you agree to the change unilaterally. 🎉
The solution here is not for Product to always cave to Sales. However, with a deeper understanding of the challenges, Product can help Sales out. So hang out for some sales calls! Try to understand thecommon threads in the outlying asks. And if the company culture/trajectory can handle it, help them out once in a while. We’re all on the same team.