Role of Product Manager in Sales discussions

Sales teams master the art of sales. They influence, convince, and sell, sometimes even things which do not exists (believe me I have been through this situation), or they end up selling an offering to customer who does not need it. (I felt the above Dilbert strip summarizes this with humor). At this point, I want to be categorical in saying I appreciate the effort sales teams put in and respect their role. This post is to provide my perspective on how to avoid wrong expectation setting with customer.

Based on the Organization and product maturity, you might have a dedicated sales team for your product or a common sales team which spans across multiple products. In both these cases, you cannot expect Sales to have the same level of clarity you have on technology as a product manager. Apart from this, there can be several reasons which might lead to wrong expectation setting by Sales team with customers, but I will highlight three major ones here,

1.     New product/technology: The lack of evangelization about the technology and product offerings within the organization can lead to Sales teams doing their own research which means reading any material out there and at times finding a short cut to skim through the compete offerings and assuming their own organizations offering also provides similar capabilities.

2.     Compete pressure: For a matured market or product, there are well established comparative analysis and silver bullets which Sales teams are equipped with but for a new or relatively fast changing technology such luxury might not exist. Under such scenario, if your sales team gets into a head to head or feature to feature comparison, then few misses are bound to happen. Sales teams are not trained to handle such a scenario; they are not equipped with latest and greatest of the technology insights to draw out the differences or make customers aware of the nuances involved in such comparative scenarios.

3.     Opportunity Size and Customer Criticality/Importance: Sales teams are under tremendous pressure when dealing with huge opportunity or a critical customer, added to that the time constraints to put up proposal or respond to customers. On the other hand, Engineering teams are busy; oversubscribed with the backlog than what they can deliver. It’s not fair to expect engineering to spare any resources to do estimations on the efforts involved to cater to each demand/clarification which field hears from customers. In such circumstances, Sales tend to make few assumptions like given the opportunity size or the importance of the customer, like certain asks can be fulfilled in the timeline customer is looking for even though they do not exist today.

Its recommended to include Product team (typically Product manager) in all such situations. I still remember one of my bosses telling me, as a Product manager you are the best guy to make first few sales of the product since you know what the customer problem is, how your product addresses it, and (When) what you have in roadmap. Sales teams can hugely benefit by learning from your Probe(why) customer, Pitch(how) solution and Pacify(when) [workaround till you have solution/feature built] approach in the initial stages. As a Product manager, you know what you can commit for and when you have to let go an opportunity because ultimately you will have to deliver it.

Off late, there has been demand from customers as well as Sales teams to have Product manager in sales conversations with customer as they have realized the importance but, I see few Product teams struggling with this approach because of lack of clarity and time this takes up. So, let me answer few key questions.

Should Product managers be involved in all Sales conversations?

No, it’s simply not a scalable model to be in all sales conversations. Although as a Product manager you should participate in as many customer conversations as possible, you should be selective in Sales conversations you participate in.. Some organizations put up dedicated team of product specialists to counter this but not all products will be able to afford such arrangement and their effectiveness is questionable. It’s a good practice to be in loop on all major sales conversations but based on the sample list of scenarios presented, step-in and participate in the meetings where it’s appropriate (ROI),

• To either seek information from customer on scenario or provide clarity about the solution
• To help build confidence with customer and credibility for Sales teams
• To set right expectations on feature roadmap

What’s expected out of a Product guy (Product Manager) in sales conversation?

As a Product guy you are the subject matter expert with conviction to product and your role is not to sell what you have built but it is to empathize with customers pain points, decipher their scenario and identify core issues which can be addressed by your product. You need to make customers realize the value of your product against their issues. Lastly, do not sell features in a sales conversation.

At times, your product might seem to be an overkill or not relevant based on the first level of discussions, do not blurt about it right away. Try to probe deeper to understand if they have any specific scenario where your product or other product offerings of your org can be of help and how critical is that scenario for the customer. If your product addresses only 1 use case which is of high impact to customer say 80-90% in value or it happens to be 80% scenario then the likelihood of customer opting for your solution is way more than the case of your product addressing 9 out of 10 low impact use cases.

Although customers respect your honesty in being upfront about not supporting few scenarios or features don’t just drop the ball there, it’s neither helping your sales nor the customer. Instead, try to empathize with customers by engaging them in collaborative approach of figuring out workarounds for these scenarios, thus alleviating their pain point which is more appreciated by Customers.

If you do not find any merit or match of expectation, then pull up your sales counter part to communicate it. You need to appreciate the effort Sales would have put in to build the connect, establish credibility, and get the meeting setup.

How to build the art of sales with conviction?

If we do not believe in an idea, then we can’t sell it or influence someone about it (Sales teams are an exception). Same thing applies to product as well. You build a product or a feature within a product only if you are convinced that such a problem exits and the proposal is the best possible way to address it. The way you convince yourself is not by the fact that you came up with the idea but it’s through hypothesis validation and experimentation.

Don’t expect everyone to subscribe to your idea right away, you will have resistance, you will have heated arguments, and some might agree to disagree entirely. If you want to avoid the scenario depicted above then as a Product manager, it’s your responsibility to convince the stakeholders especially your product team who is building the product after all it’s their product too.

If you have reached this point with entire product team believing in what they building or have built and you have a product in hand, then you have all the data and conviction to convince customers.

Crazy suggestions when dealing with Sales team:

#1: Do not discuss your vision for product with sales, they are interested in what they can sell today so your vision for the product might be easily confused for what exists today and get sold. If you are pressed to share the roadmap then have a well refined version of Roadmap (one which has got blessings of/funded by all stakeholders) for sales, which in most organization is published for next two quarters. Do not include any stretch or * marked items in it.

#2: Be in good terms with Sales team, they contribute to the success of the product as much as product itself does.

#3: Do not take everything sales comes up with at its face value, always have your own checklist to validate the upside of the opportunity and apply 80:20 rule to see if it makes sense to build it. Sales team can turn out to be very optimistic (Optimism is a key trait in sales, without which they can’t give 100% to all opportunities).

(All views expressed in this post are solely my own  and do not have any relation to my employer or my association with any company. During my interactions with Product management community and mentoring product managers this is one of those areas where I find lack of clarity hence the post)