Talk to your sales leaders and you might hear,
“I can’t get anyone in product to listen to me. Every time I ask for a feature, they tell me there’s no demand. But I am literally on the phone with buyers who won’t move without this.”
Talk to your product leaders and you might hear,
“Every time the sales team sends me a call recording I hear them promising some feature we have no plans to build. We have no evidence anyone wants it, but we do have a 16-page list of features that our current customers want.”
Who is right? Who is wrong? Who do we blame? Who can we replace with 5 Claudes in a trenchcoat?
(Both, both, neither, neither.)
I used to be a blamer myself. I used to snark-snarl when a Sales leader shared a video, “That’s not research, that’s a sales call, not the same.”
Then I saw an opportunity to increase my product team’s revenue impact by proactively working with the sales team – and treating their calls as intel.
I changed my tune. I started asking, “Hey, what if I’m missing something here?”
This is what I observed.
Underpinning the sales-product blame game is a set of differences in how each team sees the world, in how we are promoted, in how we say, “that’s great work.”
In one corner, you have your Product leaders. These folks:
-Research individuals to build an individual-level ICP, JTBD stories, & user stories
-Build “experiences of use” for one computer user at a time
-Increase revenue by shipping work that helps individual users
-Track metrics based on how many individual computer users did a thing with the computer screen we built
-Say no a lot, even to good ideas, in service of prioritizing demand and impact
In the other corner, your Sales leaders:
-Sell to committees of people, each with a unique ICP/JTBD story and opportunity
-Build experiences of purchase that need to satisfy all 10+ people they need to say “yes”
-Increase revenue by multi-threading with several people, many of whom will not ever use the product
-Track metrics (and get comped!) based on how much a group of people agrees as a unit to do something that does not happen inside the product
-Say yes a lot, even to bad ideas, because sometimes the HIPPO wants a widget. If they don’t get it, they won’t budge. No HIPPO, no deal.
This re-orientation away from a blame-game toward an understanding of what’s behind it has shifted my thinking in how I understand who we – the people in every department of the company – serve.
Out with the Individual ICP & JTBD and in with the Enterprise ICP & JTBD – a map of all the stakeholder demand among people in a user base AND the folks on a buying committee who may never touch what you’re selling.