Best Agile Practices to Align the Sales Team with the Product Team
Moving at the speed of business is critical for any company trying to compete in the digital era. The sales team, by nature, is always in search of the next deal. That’s how they make the big bucks, and that’s how the company grows and takes care of investors and employees. In a perfect world, the sprint engineering teams easily digest all product backlog items into their sprint backlogs without batting an eye. However, the reality is often far from that dream.
How do product and sprint teams scale up to deliver quality to the stream of new B2B customers coming onboard? It starts with the sales team being in perfect alignment with the product team. Technically savvy digital enterprise advisors with a cloud solution architecture background such as myself can help.
In Agile DevOps management, it is crucial for the sales team to be in alignment with the agile product team to ensure that the product quality meets customer expectations. Here are some ways that the sales team can align with the agile product team to achieve this:
Collaborate on product requirements
The sales team should work closely with the product team to ensure that customer requirements are well understood and documented. The sales team can provide valuable insights into the customers’ pain points, preferences, and expectations, which can be used to prioritize product features and enhancements.
Attend sprint demos
The sales team should attend sprint demos to see the progress made by the product team and provide feedback on how well the product is aligning with customer needs. This will allow the sales team to have visibility into the product development process and help identify any gaps or areas that need improvement.
Provide customer feedback
The sales team should be the primary source of customer feedback for the product team. They should provide feedback on customer satisfaction, feature requests, and pain points to help the product team adjust priorities and make product improvements.
Attend retrospectives
The sales team should also attend retrospectives to provide feedback on the product development process and collaborate with the product team to identify areas for improvement. This will help the product team to continuously improve the quality of the product and ensure it meets customer expectations.
Develop a shared understanding of quality
The sales team and product team should develop a shared understanding of what constitutes high-quality products. This shared understanding should include customer expectations, usability, and performance metrics, among others. Quality can’t just be a slick marketing gimmick or a buzzword to tell to investors. It has to be deeply ingrained into the entire value pipeline from the customer journey to the sales team to the product team and finally all the way into the sprint team engineering the product or service.
One of the benefits of soliciting digital enterprise advisors such as myself is that we can build bridges between new customers you’re onboarding and the internal product and sprint teams. Let’s say that your business currently has 5 corporate B2B customers. To keep things simple, you have one product team and one sprint team. That sprint team is currently at 80% capacity, meaning they have about 20% capacity available for unexpected problems or a few new user stories.
A Hypothetical Scenario
Now let’s say your rock star sales team just landed 3 new sales deals. This means 3 new corporate customers to onboard soon. Assuming all customers are about the same size and have similar workloads, your sprint team will now have to prepare for a 60% increase in work (3 divided by 5). With only 20% capacity, your current sprint team may have room for 1 of those 3, with the risk of stress due to overwork increasing. You can pay performance bonuses as incentives to buy time while you recruit help. Some companies forego this by ignoring capacity planning, expecting the sprint team to just magically scale up to handle more customers. This is a huge mistake as it can lead to reputational damage and the failure of sales deals.
That’s where professionals such as myself come in handy. I can work with the product and sprint team leads to identify the right roles, and numbers of bodies in those roles, that will be needed to support the new customers. I can work with HR to come up with the best job descriptions. Whether to hire fulltime vs contract workers depends on how patient the new customers are. If they are anxious to get started asap, then contract workers might be a short term solution. Meanwhile, I can work with the technical leader of the customer to discuss high level technical architecture details and build out a roadmap to onboard them. This can also buy time as the customer will appreciate the instant engagement, knowing that a path is being created for their success. In light of the onboarding logistics, we’ll need to create some KT sessions to help new hires hit the ground running sooner rather than later.
In summary, by collaborating on product requirements, attending sprint demos and retrospectives, providing customer feedback, and developing a shared understanding of quality, the sales team can align with the agile product team to ensure that product quality meets customer expectations. If your team needs hands on advice, do contact today.
