Collaborating with sales teams doesn't always come easily to product managers, and it’s all too common for product and sales teams to have an antagonistic relationship. Sales reps are asking for “just a quick thing” to close a deal, while the product team already has a full roadmap and their own long term vision of where things are going. Collaborating with sales teams can feel like an uphill battle.
Such adversarial dynamics are far from ideal. It’s emotionally wearing on everyone, consumes huge amounts of energy with teams managing each other, and doesn’t result in the best outcomes. It also doesn’t have to be like this.
This article sets out the ideal relationship state you're aiming for, a practical approach to collaborating with sales teams well, and further advice for nurturing a productive working relationship.
The ideal state
In an ideal world product, sales and other disciplines come together to create a shared vision of how the company grows built on their combined wisdom. With this alignment, everyone can bring their superpowers to bear on the challenge, and great things happen.
Sales teams develop deep relationships with customers and prospects, understanding their needs and helping them solve pressing problems with your product.
Product teams develop new products and features that solve customer problems faster, better and cheaper, accelerating the sales cycle.
Sales and product teams respect and rely on each other. Product collaborate with sales teams to add business value. There is no conflict between them because sales sells the existing product to people who value it, and the product roadmap consists entirely of what the sales team would consider high priority work.
However, as we all know, it’s rare to be in such a happy place …
The reality
More likely, there’s at least some tension between the sales and product teams. This stems from misalignment on who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, and how you can grow the business.
The symptoms are familiar …
Sales asks for “just a quick thing” to help close a deal or prevent a big customer churning. Product teams freak out that incoming sales requests will blow out their roadmap. Not only is “strategic” work delayed, but triaging, prioritizing and responding to these requests consumes a huge amount of time and effort.
Everyone is unhappy with the results.
Root causes
Most sales reps are deeply invested in the success of the business and their customers.
From a product perspective it’s easy to assume that ad hoc sales requests are the result of poor discipline, but this prevents you from digging deeper and understanding the root causes behind them.
Ad hoc sales requests stem from a variety of reasons:
- Customer definition - Do you both have the same understanding of who the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is? Is this definition both focused, and built off visible signals (rather than attributes which are hard to assess from the outside)?
- Market Size - Are there enough leads to go after? If your sales team doesn’t have a big enough pool to fish from, they will naturally start looking at adjacent markets.
- Product Market Fit - Are you offering sufficient value to your customers? If the problem you are targeting isn’t a big enough problem, or your value proposition isn’t strong enough yet then you’ll struggle to get traction. Sales teams will notice this and try to work out how to offer customers more value.
- New insights - Has the sales team uncovered new customer insights? Sales teams spend lots of time speaking to customers and trying to understand the challenges they are facing. They hear why you lose to other products and often have valuable insights that they are eager to share.
- Effective incentives - Are goals aligned across teams? Sales teams naturally want their bonuses. It’s important that you not only have alignment in principle about the customers you are going after and product you’re building, but that sales incentives and product roadmap are aligned.
- Bespoke requests - Is a large existing / prospective customer throwing its weight around asking for integration support or features that only they need? If you can limit this then you should, but for some products you need to factor in some integration work for every new customer.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, and it’s not always easy to establish the true causes of sales requests, but there are important clues here to unlocking growth if you can find them.
An approach to collaborating with Sales Teams
Ok, so let’s assume your relationship with sales isn’t as smooth as it could be. What are the steps you can take to get collaborating with the sales team back on track?
The following approach walks you through three steps to improve things:
