Consultative selling is a key competency for an enterprise software product leader

Making a good product is fundamentally about understanding the value customers would derive from it. The value may be different for different customer archetypes (e.g., small, large, federated, centralized, etc.) but the value must be clear. For example, a small customer may expect quick implementation and time to value, the larger customer may need more integration that takes more time, but yields better value longer term. A federated customer may require support for diverse methods of authentication, a centralized customer may require strict data locality. At the end, however, all types of customers must get a clear sense of the value of the product in terms of the business problem a product is solving.

The value must be expressed internally and externally again and again to establish and grow a product. Sometimes the value articulation must be tailored to the needs of a specific customer— understanding the customer’s need in depth. Good product leaders must be able to express the value, to sell the product in a deeply consultative manner with the customer. Especially for new or early life products. In highly competitive situations, even for mid-life or mature products, product leaders have the onus to express the product’s differentiated value uniquely to customers—until sales teams can do it at scale, repeatedly.

First order of business is developing a product that targets unique value to customer groups. To do that effectively, customer intimacy is essential in the development process itself. This comes in various forms, broad to narrow. Broad view of market needs, to competitor moves, to design partner programs, to user groups, early adopter testing and feedback. During a product’s active lifecycle product leaders must get active feedback from support, in-app user feedback, stakeholder feedback in advisory boards, from user forums, from field sales and success who are intimate with customers. Organic innovation is also best honed by feedback from early adopter groups and tuning its attributes that sharpen its value. When a product leader does this all well, she internalizes the customer value of the product and is able to consultatively position the product from the customer’s point of view.

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What is consultative selling after all? It is primarily positioning the product as the best-fit solution for a customer’s need in a particular area. No product is ever a perfect fit for any sufficiently complex enterprise. Consultative selling is the art of understanding the most critical customer needs and showing the customer how the product addresses those critical needs better than other alternatives. Clearly, this would not be possible if the product was not built consultatively with many customer archetypes. If it is built as such, chances are high that the product can be positioned strongly with any of the customer archetypes involved in the design process.

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Seeding the product in the market is a key role for a product leader. Before the product has proven itself with a few hundred customers, and among them some big ones, enterprise sellers are often hesitant in positioning the product. It is only natural. Sellers want quicker transactions and those are easier with a proven, repeatable product. Sellers are also concerned about their own overall reputation with a customer when the product is new or unproven. For the first several years in a scaled enterprise software product, could be up to 5 years or more, product leaders often must consultatively sell to many customers. Good products often don’t get traction or die on the vine if product leaders do not go out to customers and sell the product along with a salesperson. Upon doing this repeatedly a few good things happen. Product gets a footing in the market, confidence of the sales team grows in the product, and some sales folks learn to sell consultatively. The product leader also gets valuable input for the roadmap in the overall process. A flywheel begins to form.

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Selling around corners is also a key part of consultative selling. Suppose there is a critical need that is not currently met by the product, what does one do? There are several possible approaches. Starting a pilot with the customer to prove all the other critical needs is a good approach to keep the customer engaged during the time the missing need is developed. Often, a missing or incomplete aspect of the product can be complemented by professional services. Sometimes a customer may be open to a favorable commercial arrangement and deploy the product building internal processes to work around the missing need. Inviting the customer into design partnership also often builds trust and disarms the customer. They may not deploy the product yet, but they have not moved on from you.

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One of my mentors always reminded me that “everyone sells”. It took a while for me to realize how critical it is that enough people in the company can consultatively position and sell. After a few years, consultative selling along with actively developing the product becomes exhausting for a product leader. To fundamentally scale, product leaders must find a way to coach internally and create many consultative sellers. The consultative sellers can come from many functions. From product, engineering, sales, success, support, marketing, and strategy. A structured program with opportunities to shadow real deal situations is a good way to build this in an organization. Ideally every salesperson should be a skilled consultative seller, but that is far from reality in many organizations.

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It should be clear that while a good product leader is a good consultative seller, she is not a sales leader. Operating a sales organization at scale is a complex and a distinct job. Territories, quotas, segments, channels, resellers, legal aspects, discounting, negotiations, training, forecasting, are only a handful of things among all the things that a seasoned sales leader does. When a product leader and sales leader are in tune, they are jointly able to scale the art of consultative selling to many salespeople. A sales leader is also often a consolidated voice of the customer who can influence a receptive and consultative product leader.

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In enterprise software, if you build it, they don’t just come. It takes so much more than building a good product to have a commercially successful product.

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