On Sales-Marketing-PRODUCT Alignment

How much have you read about Sales-Marketing alignment? How often is Product mentioned?

In Does Sales-Marketing Alignment Include Product?, I touched on alignment as part of Go-To-Market Strategy but, admittedly, I left a little on the table. I’m back to grab it here.

At the risk of inserting myself into a long-running conversation about the topic of Sales-Marketing alignment while not being a member of either of those teams, I continue to get the sense that organizational effectiveness suffers when the Product team isn’t also aligned with Sales and Marketing.

The Need for Customer Alignment

Sales-Marketing alignment is complicated and difficult. Sales and marketing must work hard to align around campaigns, leads, qualifying leads, custom campaigns….hopefully aligned around the problems your customer has and those which your offerings address. Are these efforts based on an accurate understanding of what your product does? And what it will do in the future?

What if you have a great product that the other teams don’t understand?

SiriusDecisions puts interesting metrics around sales/marketing/product alignment:

SiriusDecisions believes that the alignment of sales, marketing and product is the hallmark of high-performing organizations. Our recent study found that organizations that create alignment between these three functions outperform their peers with 19 percent faster revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability.

Alignment takes a few flavors.

Sales — Product Alignment

In many organizations, Sales and Account Management often own the customer relationships, whereas Product owns the roadmap and what’s being delivered. Are you sure Sales and Product are going in the same direction?

Often times, they’re going different directions. Product is pushing to build capabilities that support markets of customers, whereas Sales is pushing for what will win a single deal. Jock Busuttil describes the conflict between Sales and Product this way :

…[N]ot all customer problems will end up being solved. Remember: the dealership sells cars, not speedboats! Don’t take it personally if they occasionally say “no” to you — they’re balancing the needs of the whole market against the needs of an individual customer and taking into account the long-term and short-term gains of what they will deliver.

Sales encounters needs all the time. Are they needs we can address today, needs we might address in the future, or needs you won’t address in the future. If it’s in the third bucket, how much time do your sales teams waste pushing for those needs to impact the roadmap? Or do you allow that pressure to derail you?

Product -Marketing Alignment

Does the product fulfill the statements being made in marketing materials and by sales teams, which are ideally the ones your prospects actually have? Is your product going to better solve those problems as time goes on?

What problems are you going to write consideration-stage content about? Problems you don’t solve very well?

Product is a business role responsible for market success of a product — NOT in charge of banging out features in response to the orders Sales brings to the table. Jeff Lash elaborates:

Product managers are responsible for the overall success of the product. They need to care about everything that influences the overall success of the product, including marketing activities. Product managers may not be responsible for leading or delivering on each individual element, but they should participate in, or at least have input into, most of the marketing activities and deliverables. After all, the success of their products — and their paychecks — depend on it.

As Marketing (and Sales) learn more about prospects and their needs, how are you funneling that back to Product to ensure you address those needs as the product evolves? How is Product capturing that knowledge you share and integrating that with everything they’re learning from their own efforts?

An Idea Gone Bad

Annuitas wrote this interesting and painful illustration a few years ago (emphasis mine):

I used to run the global mid-market group for an enterprise software company. Our company made the decision to develop a “small business” version of our software. With millions of SMB’s fitting our target market profile, it was very enticing and seemed logical. So, we went for it. After two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on development, marketing, sales, the product life cycle was over. We only had a handful of customers.

Why the crash and burn? Because marketing-sales was not aligned with product management/development. Marketing-sales saw what was thought to be an opportunity. Product management/development thought otherwise. Together, both groups failed to do what was necessary: seek to understand the market. Instead, we rushed product development, and then sped to market with a product nobody wanted. We were not aligned. Looking back, what seemed like a great idea probably should never have made it off the back of the napkin on which it was first drawn up.

From the outside, this seems like a simple case of following directions without asking enough questions. This is one of the disaster scenarios that can result when Product is thought of as only a technology/customer role, ignoring the business element. David Cancel’s position on never hiring experienced product managers would seem to make this more likely if applied in a larger organization.

What Alignment Looks Like

Knowing your market well and understanding their buying criteria should influence the product you build. And the things you learn as the product is built should influence the way you sell and market it, as well as the features you build on an ongoing basis.

Companies with the best alignment among Sales & Marketing grow faster than their competitors. Don’t you need your Product organization there lock-step? Is Product investing the right percentage of spend in new products compared to maintaining and growing existing ones? Are you pounding the pavement on the products you’re not investing as much in, but ignoring the ones you are?

When you put leads into a drip campaign, are you building awareness of a problem your product solves well, or one that it won’t solve well for some time? Are you delivering business value to your buyers, but not invested enough in meeting the user’s needs to ensure satisfaction after the sale?

Are your incentives aligned among the groups?

If you’re launching into a competitive space, should your marketing emphasize the core capabilities you nail in the beginning, or the ones that you built more thinly to allow you to launch?

Just because you can talk about it doesn’t mean your product can do it.

And how important is that overlap? Depending on what’s important to your client today, and what needs they will be able to address today, perhaps the things you can’t do yet are things the buyer won’t really need yet. You have to know your buyers well to make that call.

In your organization, is growing the new customer count more important than minimizing churn? In SaaS, churn must stay low for you to grow. Where do you draw the line?

Personas

Marketing teams know about buyer Personas. How many times are those Personas vetted with Sales and with Product? Ideally, you should align on Personas before you build the product in the first place — and adjust as you learn more.

Why?

Getting a clear picture of the kind of customer that will purchase your offering helps you understand clearly what kind of product to develop.

It’s not efficient to figure out the product your customers need after you build it — you should be discovering that before you start and iterating through development. Building in a vaccuum often leads to failed product, or worse, failed startup.

Even though you’re still iterating during product development, it still pays huge dividends to align on the go-to-market strategy and your personas before you start — and to make sure Sales, Marketing and Product have the same understanding. Then, review them from time to time to make sure you’re still aiming at the same target.

Closing Thoughts

What do you think? Shouldn’t Product be just as important to align as Sales and Marketing?

Images courtesy Pixabay.