Growth = Sales + Product

Two of the core pillars of all B2B SaaS startups are their product and sales teams. It is critical, therefore, that these teams must be well-aligned and cohesive.

Product teams tend to be largely inward-looking while sales teams are, by nature, customer-focused. This disconnect can be exacerbated if you fail to properly define your processes.

To ensure your teams are properly aligned to drive growth, consider the following:

1. Team Ownership. A key strategy is to ensure that your teams really own a piece of the revenue pie. When product is able to own the roadmap and near term feature developments, they feel more strategically connected.

Following the EOS framework, have them break down their backlog to "Big Rocks" and "Small Rocks" with the bigger “Rocks” being more 6-12 month timeline revenue focused projects, rather than the day to day smaller “Rock” features or bug fixes.

In doing so, you give your product team a greater focus on what moves the needle for your business. Additionally, sales / pre-sales teams are able to own requests from prospects and communicate them effectively up the chain of command for prioritization.

If you define your processes clearly, you can avoid miscommunication and keep product and sales aligned.

2. Avoid Tunnel Vision. Everyone has tunnel vision. It is easy to get caught up in what you think is the right direction. However, your perspective is invariably shaped by interactions with set of customers and the markets you engage with, which can be dangerous. You need to prioritize. To overcome this issue, a point person (e.g Non-Founder / Product Manager / CTO) should be appointed to amass the information and manage it. The point person can then aggregate perspectives from the entire team and make more informed decisions than any one perspective could provide.

3. Figure Out How Sales Feedback Makes It To Product. Building camaraderie within your team is important, but it can backfire if sales start requesting features from product directly without a known process. At a small scale this can be effective in the short term, with less turnaround times and organic growth, and may be the process you desire initially. As you scale, it is unsustainable in the long run. When sales members are speaking directly to product members, this pulls development in several different directions. If the leadership decides to move in a particular direction, the entire ship should turn together. Having developers work on individual requests that do not align with strategic direction is often the root cause of misaligned sales and product teams. Again, a single point person and proper request processes can alleviate this issue.

4. Bigger Is Not Always Better. It is extremely tempting to divert product roadmaps for one big contract. Why would you prioritize smaller client requests if a $1MM contract comes along and offers to secure half the ARR necessary to raise a Series A? Of course, you should be receptive to these requests, particularly if they match up with your roadmap, but be very cautious. Avoiding "one-off" requests to satsify these contracts is critical to grow and effectively understand trends in customer utilization which allows you to make more informed decisions about roadmap prioritization. Define your processes on how frequently customer requests will be discussed in team meetings now.

5. Update Sales. When people typically talk about product and sales alignment, they tend to zoom in on sales teams updating product teams with what customers are asking. NOT ENOUGH! A bi-directional communication system between the two teams allows the Product Team to understand how customers are actually using the product, as well as allows them the chance to talk about new features that are rolling out. This can frequently help steer sales discussions in more effective directions, and keep product and sales aligned.

The consistent theme, again, is to define your processes early. It does not matter what process you use. The actual tool you use to get to where your product needs to be is not the driving force. The driving force should be: have we found product market fit; should we develop feature organically or according to a final vision; how does my roadmap look 6-12 months from now?

My tip for founders this week: Build a culture of continuous improvement. In Japanese there’s a term for this – Kaizen. Recognize that things change as you grow, and be ready to alter your processes to meet that growth. A lot of early founders can be process averse, but if the founder is process averse, the rest of the company will be that way too. You as the founder have to be the one setting these up initially but knowing when to get others onboard to execute is critical to success.

Additionally, especially at an early startup, never assume something is set in stone. Market target, product, processes, are all on the table as something that can be changed. Everything should be seen in the light of what we’re doing now. Maybe it’s working, or maybe it’s not, and we should be doing something else.

As long as we’re having discussions for improvement, that is good and healthy.