Product & Startup Builder

Don't listen to your sales team

Added on by Chris Saad.

First a reminder: The goal of a product-lead, high-growth startup is not to fully serve the needs of an individual customer. It is to build a product that can scale quickly by serving the needs of a broader market. Products like this are focused, polished, easy to understand, easy to use, and require minimal support from customer service. Read more here.

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I see a lot of inexperienced b2b product managers who actually perform the function of project managers or account managers.

They spend most of their time triaging high-priority contractual obligations from customers (as negotiated by the sales team) into a jam-packed roadmap.

The sales team are amazing collaborators who should be deeply involved in the product ideation & road-mapping process.

They should not, however, be in a position to dictate features or product direction based on the needs of one or two customers.

Why?

Because sales teams represent an inherent dichotomy for product managers.

On one hand, they have an intimate understanding of what customers are asking for. On the other hand, they are often ill-equipped to understand the full product and prioritization implications of those asks.

This means that they are a strong source of customer feedback and market insights. But they are also a common cause of roadmap thrash and strategic drift.

Creating a strong, healthy, and productive relationship with sales demands a disciplined and effective product management process.

This requires experienced product managers to...

  1. Help the company get very, very focused on what problems it's solving and how. This might mean narrowing everything from the buyer persona, the target verticals, the geography, and even the specific use-cases.

  2. Have a healthy level of disregard for the needs of a single customer, and, instead, focus on what the business and the broader market really needs. For example, the business model may call for a b2c product strategy while specific customers might push for more b2b SaaS style features like white-label. A specific customer might want the product to solve their adjacent business problems, but the product strategy might require that the roadmap remain focused on a specific category of features and problems.

  3. Craft a clear and reasoned roadmap that allows their sales partners to understand the near-term, mid-term, and long-term evolution of the product. The roadmap should be described in user-experience and/or business value terms. Once a good roadmap is created, a lower-fidelity, near-term version might also be used as an alignment and communication tool with customers.

  4. Heavily invest in sales enablement: Help develop the decks, docs, and narratives that the sales team uses in the field to sell the product that they're actually building.

  5. Inspire the sales team with all the use-cases and business benefits that the current product and product roadmap can unlock for their customers. Encourage them to build a pipeline of customers for the product, vs a pipeline of product asks for their customers.

  6. Carefully manage "can't we just..." and "isn't it easy to..." style conversations. Remain disciplined and help the company understand the true complexity of building and maintaining each new feature. Every addition to the product takes time and sustained investment.