The Sales ←→ Product Relationship According to Rolling Stones

Tension between sales and product often comes where the customer expresses a need which cannot be solved by the product in its current form. If they understand the direction of your product, then sales teams will be better equipped to overcome objections associated with missing features and can make their conversations more constructive. — Liz Love from Mind the product

A couple of years ago, fresh in my role as Product Manager at Lime, an internal sales and marketing conference was coming up at the end of the year. This conference was one of the highlights for us in the product team as it gave us the opportunity to present upcoming products, new features and add-ons live at scale to all our colleagues in marketing and sales.

5 minutes before I was going on stage, I decided to change my intro to put the finger on something that had bothered me the past couple of months…

Instead of starting the session with the deck of slides I had prepared, I played two different Rolling Stones songs and talked briefly about a realization I got from a recent concert with them.

During that concert, the band played two of their most famous hits that to me summarized the sales ↔ product relationship I had experienced the past 6 months leading up to the conference:

Satisfaction

“I can’t get no satisfaction”

To me, this song symbolized the sales team speaking to us in product; asking for more features, more flexibility, more add-ons, more EVERYTHING. What we usually heard back then was that the product could not be sold to customers due to the lack of features X, Y or Z or that the set of features we had was not good enough.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need”

This song represented us in the product team, speaking back to sales. We had not used those specific words, but the sentiment was spot on. The (back then) strained relationship meant that the product team often had to defend the value of the product and decisions rather than working together with sales to find the best product-market fit. And while sales were constantly asking for more, our response to sales was — “focus on the problems we can solve with the current product and pitch that value rather than complaining about missing features. You are going for the wrong customers!”

After the surprising introduction, some sales reps in the audience were laughing, some were nervously looking around at the other participants and some were nodding their heads. I felt that at least I had caught their attention and continued with my deck of slides and live demo of the recent product capabilities.

Later that day, I talked to a couple of the sales reps about the problem I addressed in my introduction, and not only did it become clear that we shared the same view of the problem, but it also became clear that the problem was due to lack of communication. To no surprise are communication highlighted as one of the most important Product Manager skills according to Product Management guru, Ian Mccallister:

Being a great communicator demonstrates two different things: (1) the ability to think clearly, and (2) the ability to communicate clearly.

While the product team had focused heavily on working closely with the engineers in solving prioritized problems, the sales teams had continued pitching and selling the product the same way as before, without knowing about the limitations and possibilities.

So why did we end up in this situation and where did we go from here?

Our main product, Lime CRM, was in the middle of a total makeover at the time. We rebuilt the product completely and at the same time changed our business model. The big changes, all happening at the same time, were confusing for the sales team. And to be honest, we on the product team had also over-promised what features and capabilities would be delivered when.

The weeks and months following the conference we put quite some effort into create a shared/common vision of where the product was heading and why/what it should be through several initiatives:

• Bi-weekly product updates — We hosted bi-weekly product update sessions for the entire sales organization where we showed the latest features, including the possibilities and limitations of these. The sessions were recorded, published internally, and included a Q&A part for sales to ask questions and give feedback.
• Early product demos — We invited sales representatives to our product demos during the development process. This gave sales a better understanding of the things to come and gave them an opportunity to ask questions and give early feedback about these.
• Frequent, local sales meetings — We toured our offices and arranged more intimate product ↔ sales meetings to strengthen the relationship. This made it possible for us to answer questions and receive feedback from sales reps not feeling comfortable raising their hands during the larger bi-weekly product update sessions.
• Transparent roadmaps — We re-visited the way we presented our roadmaps both externally and internally and used the new format as a communication tool to align on the direction. Important to note is that we never used dates in the roadmap, rather a now, next, later approach.
• Product involvement in sales process — We were involved in more ongoing sales opportunities early in the sales process to assist sales reps to know if and how our product offering would solve the problems for the customer or if we should walk away.

Overall, the initiatives improved the overall visibility and understanding of the product’s current status and direction. The clarity allowed for better alignment between the sales and product teams, regarding both short-term and long-term goals and objectives for the product. This increased transparency and understanding of where the product was and where it was heading, which in turn helped the product team to make better informed decisions and plans for its development and success. Also, this meant increased product confidence for sales in customer contact and made it possible for them to focus on deals where the product as is solves the customer problems, increasing the probability of a successful deal and in the end, happy customer.

Want to read more about the importance of a healthy product ↔ sales relationship? Check out this blog post: Relationship Goals: How to Resolve the Tension Between Product Management and Sales — Mind the Product