A Sales Leader's Guide: Operationalizing the Customer Voice via Feedback Loops

By Trevor Jett (Childers) , VP and Global Head of Sales, Vivun

This is the second article in a series exploring how revenue leaders can improve cross-functional alignment for a more efficient GTM motion, more accurate product-market fit, and more seamless customer experience.

Every SaaS company I know is re-tooling around new capabilities that aren't even months old.?Without harmony in the sales/product relationship, your business risks falling behind. To gain or maintain an advantage in this climate, it is the responsibility of sales leaders to represent and amplify the voice of customers when helping rationalize roadmaps.?

It has never been more important to be able to efficiently provide feedback from buyers to product teams to highlight exactly what in the product is stalling or losing deals, from both the net new and renewal sides.?

It’s critical the CROs have the right information strategy in place to operationalize the voice of the customer. How do you make it happen?

Common Pitfalls

In my experience, most teams struggle with capturing and isolating the right information, and presenting it to product in an evidence-based manner.?

Most companies lack the right method and means of cross-functional collaboration. The typical motion includes the monthly “pizza party,” with product and sales in a room. Sales raises concerns about what is difficult to sell without backing up claims with data. The loudest voice in the room might win product's attention.

It's not a lack of information, it’s the believability. From the sales perspective, it is easy to say: “make it faster, make it bigger,” but that doesn’t actually help product make decisions.?

Without specificity and evidence based numbers, sales will be seen as complaining, and the points they raise are not specific and not believable.

Product is left without usable feedback, and your sellers are left to puzzle out how to sell around gaps rather than being able to directly offer what buyers want.?

CROs can resolve this by establishing:

1. Feedback loops to surface the right information
2. Analysis and communication methods to ensure product teams receive the information they need in a language they understand

Required Feedback Loops

You must create the following feedback loops between sales and the following teams (see a summary in the below table):

• Product/Engineering: What features, functions and capability should the roadmap prioritize, based on the voice of the customer??
• Product Marketing: What is the TAM and specific ICP as it relates to our present and future capability??
• Enablement: Do we see indications that we are not adequately selling around feature gaps or following existing sales plays??
• Sales Execution: Are forecasted deals at risk due to product gaps?

Methodology

The data model and the connectivity between your system at scale is critical. This is unattainable and unmanageable via traditional methods, like spreadsheets, or free text fields in your CRM.

These methods fail to provide the level of detail and aggregate impact the product teams need to take action on feedback. Furthermore, they make it difficult to keep data current.

To capture a sufficient level of detail at scale, I would suggest you rely on technical customer-facing experts, like sales engineers, to source this information. The presales leader is then responsible for triaging, deduplicating, and aggregating feedback by revenue impact on a weekly basis.

This continuous review process ensures up-to-date data points that the CRO can bring to the monthly “pizza party” and have a productive discussion that accurately and reliably represents the voice of customers.??

Execution Advice for Sales Leaders

My top three lessons learned from trying to implement these feedback loops:

1. Come to product prepared.?You must be able to express your views quantitatively, backed by objective data. Without it, you won’t be taken as seriously, and in many cases you may be left holding the bag (i.e., critical deals fall through because you fail to surface the right information to product in a persuasive manner).?
2. Adapt behavior with gap data.?With the correct data, you can understand how feature gaps truly impact your sales. What gaps are we able to “sell-around” vs. what gaps actually kill deals? This knowledge can drive efficiency in your sales process, whether by allowing reps to disqualify unrealistic deals faster, or by allowing you to proactively backfill pipeline if too many deals are at-risk due to product gaps you cannot sell around.
3. It’s worth the effort to get the right level of detail.?Your view on those gaps needs to be a lot more detailed than a post-it note. Your CS and Presales teams should be informing the details as they will be needed to gain and retain customers.? If you leave it as something as nebulous as “multilingual,” you run the risk of the new feature not getting it done.?

Conclusion

When executed correctly, this process not only gives product a more accurate representation of customer needs but also provides sales leaders with the ability to address revenue risks and opportunities that may have been otherwise overlooked.

Rather than relying exclusively on qualitative sales risk assessments, you can view forecasts through the lens of the product roadmap and sales engineering sentiment. Should something change, you can instantly show the impact to new business or renewal revenue and act accordingly.

In today's market, you cannot afford not to have this flexibility.