Why Collaboration between Sales and Product Teams is the Key to Success

Building a great and advanced tech product is a focus for the majority of product-led companies. But is it enough to have a good product to achieve commercial success? From my experience, the answer is no.

As your business keeps growing, the product becomes more mature and complex, and more people are involved in selling it. To ensure sustainable growth, one should aim to achieve strong engagement between product and commercial teams. The result of good engagement is a continuous loop of development, distribution, and feedback.

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, the symbiotic relationship between successful product development and sales is more important than ever. While product owners play a vital role in guiding the development and execution of a product, they often underestimate the invaluable insights and contributions that sales teams can provide. Similarly, sales representatives need to be aware of the long-term vision, upcoming features, and problem-solving capabilities of the product. Collaborative efforts between product owners and sales teams are essential to ensure that products effectively meet customer needs, maximise market potential, and drive revenue growth.

The lack of collaboration between these two crucial teams can create a significant challenge, resembling a "chicken or egg" dilemma:

• Sales teams may struggle to sell a product they perceive as poor.
• Product teams may believe their product is exceptional, but sales teams are not effectively doing their job.

“We often hear product development staff grumble that marketing and sales teams are not pushing their new inventions—and salespeople complain that new technologies alone do not make exciting value propositions for their customers.”

— How Leaders Bring Product and Sales Teams Together. BCG.

Source

As a product owner myself, I acknowledge that it is the responsibility of the product owner to equip the sales team with everything they need to ensure the commercial success of the product. This realization has been one of the most important lessons I've learned throughout my career. In this article, I will share my perspective on fostering efficient collaboration with sales teams and provide insights based on surveys I have conducted.

The significance of collaboration between product owners and sales teams cannot be understated. Failure to establish effective collaboration can hinder product success and limit revenue potential. To avoid falling into this trap, I have outlined five key actions that can be beneficial:

1. Tailor your approach for each sales team:

Sales teams are typically divided into Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) and Large Customer Sales (LCS). Understanding the different dynamics of these teams is crucial.

• The SMB tries to address as many leads as possible, using a unified approach.
• The LCS team may focus on a few customers for the next year. While each of those will require a lot of involvement, flexibility and compromises, the successful launch of such a client may double your volumes and bring your product to the next level in terms of recognition.

That being said, the type of insights that SMB and LCS team may provide you, will be very different in nature.

Whatever feedback LCS provides you is crucial to enable the adoption of your product by tier 1 customers. On the one hand, it’s usually a no-brainer that you should address the demands of large customers. However, doing so may require quite an effort: you as a service provider should stand out among other competitors to achieve success, which is not always straightforward to achieve. Therefore, be sure that your product roadmap reserves time to address requests of this type. The SMB sales team may provide you with quite an extended list of feature requests. Don’t get overwhelmed by trying to address all of those. Be critical and data-driven: assess the potential that each request can unlock and prioritise carefully. In addition, cross-check whether the features requested are in line with your product vision.

2. Share the results of your work:

Regularly update the sales team with product demos every 1-2 weeks. This practice ensures the team has up-to-date knowledge of the latest product features.

Fun fact: before the regular product demo had optional attendance, it was visited by only two sales representatives. Today, both of them got promoted to leads. Of course, the promotion was first of all thanks to their great performance, but I am confident to say that having up-to-date knowledge of what they were selling was one of the enablers for high performance.

Finally: be open-minded and value the opinions of others, even if they are not technically advanced or familiar with your product. Often, such colleagues serve as valuable proxies for your real customers.

3. Seek opinions:

Recognise that your knowledge may be limited in certain areas. Schedule short meetings with colleagues to understand the factors influencing customer decisions. This approach allows you to gain different perspectives and generate creative solutions.

A good sales representative is able to synthesize the demands of the market based on numerous interactions with its participants. You may get a pretty unexpected and, at the same time, useful insights about a particular industry, segment or competitor.

4. Provide an up-to-date toolkit:

As a first step, it is recommended to conduct an audit of the sales process. Seek permission to observe and take notes in a shadowing capacity, ensuring proper management of expectations to minimize bias and avoid adding unnecessary pressure on the sales representative. This approach will help identify areas for improvement within the sales process. Additionally, your contribution to the sales guide and materials would be highly valued by your colleagues. When considering potential improvements, please take the following into account:

1. Key metrics of the product, which you are proud of (conversion rates, average timings to complete main action)
2. Success cases (the detailed study exploring how your client achieved success by using our services)
3. Toolkit to demo your product or service. This may be achieved by different means: to identify the best, I’ve earlier conducted a survey with our sales team.

Let me share the key takeaways:

• The most preferred option (selected by 37% of respondents) is a simple presentation with screencasts of your product and some complementary statistics. People find it user-friendly and easily accessible, while the presentation format fits well into the pitch process.
• The second best option (selected by 32% of respondents) was a dedicated web page allowing you to explore your product, the good example could be: https://www.bolt.com/ checkout-demo. While it’s very visual and intuitive, one should keep in mind that creating such a page may take some time and development resources. If your team doesn’t have much capacity, the previous option would be a better options
• The most hated option is using your internal knowledge platform (e.g. confluence) to store demo materials there. 63% of respondents selected it as the worst option. Among the reasons they said that it’s hard to navigate and keep up to date

5. Put yourself in other’s shoes:

Try to speak with your potential client by yourself. This firsthand experience will help you understand and empathize with the challenges faced by sales teams when selling your product.

Additionally, it may provide you with fresh insights and alternative perspectives. Recently, I discovered that certain security and compliance features within our product serve as significant selling points that we should emphasise more. Finally, as a Product Owner you are expected to have advanced knowledge of your product. Leveraging this knowledge may help you approach the clients’ problems in a creative manner and ensure that your product will fit well into a client's domain. It’s crucial to get involved in this kind of conversation and support your sales team, who may not be able to answer all the questions.

To conclude

A lack of alignment between product development and sales operations can result in missed opportunities, broken feedback loops, and loss to competitors. Therefore, it is crucial to bridge this gap and foster a collaborative relationship between product owners and sales teams to drive business success in today's competitive market. Being proactive and actively engaging with other teams' daily activities is the key to achieving this synergy.