Should PLG and enterprise software companies staff a product person to build what the sales team asks for?
When a sales leader comes knocking on a product manager’s door, a product person’s response is often, “Sorry, it’s my job to say no, please don’t promise things in prospect calls anymore, they’re not on the roadmap.”
Then the sales leader has to figure out a way to say no to the prospect. Maybe the prospect agrees that it’s a big ask to make this custom thing for compliance, maybe they even think compliance is a perennial thorn in their side.
But maybe saying no to this request scuttles the deal and the revenue that came with it.
Is the revenue lost to cross-functional side-eye any one individual’s fault? No.
The PM – call them a “Downstream Product Manager” – owns metrics that often happen after the “Big” sale. Often, they get evaluated and promoted based on how fast they ship and how many people adopt what they ship.
They build individual experiences for individual users. But not people on a buying committee who may never log in after the deal is done. So of course they say no to a sale leader’s custom compliance request. What’s in it for them?
Meanwhile the sales leader needs 88 touchpoints (thank you Dreamdata for this stat) to close a deal. Not every deal looks the same. Deals take months or years to close. The scale of adoption for any feature they ask for might truly be 1 person, 1 time. And they might need a whole lot of these – call them “Single Use Features.”
When I was a product person working closely with a sales team, I was excited to build a strategy and ship work that was so closely tied to giant revenue figures. I could see that the game is different over here and what a treat to get to play it.
But I still needed to know:
-“How can I go back to my product team and say, ‘Here’s what I shipped, here’s the result’?”
-“Here’s how our strategy has evolved, here’s why we won’t be able to know if anything ‘worked’ for 12 months.”
-“How am I going to attribute the impact of any single thing I built to closed/won deals?”
After all, “New workflow generated $1.2 million in MRR” sounds great, but does a sales leader have the time to tell a PM the impact of the workflow vs the other 87 touchpoints?”
So I wonder. What if a product person was designated as a sales enablement leader? Call them an “Upstream Product Manager – Sales Enablement.”
What if the actual numbers Upstream Product Managers owned were not usage, but sales?
How does cross-functional sales-product side-eye change when Sales Leaders get the Single Use Features they need to close deals, Upstream Product Managers get to claim big buckets of revenue, and Downstream Product Managers get even more users and even bigger numbers?