A man is not affected by events, but the view he takes of them - Epictetus
Hey š team, Andy in the house today! Letās explore how money is made at your company and how you can play a pivotal role in increasing the revenue with the front line teams.
PMs and Sales teams are a match made in heaven for B2B companies. This relationship needs a strong foundation and I will discuss how to build that foundation today so they can effectively sell what you build. There are 4 key components in establishing a strong relationship with Sales:Ā
Building a good GTM strategy
Sales teams involvementĀ
Landing your first few salesĀ
Projecting revenue based on pipelineĀ
Importance of building a good GTMĀ
The go-to-market side of Product Management is spoken very little about. This in my opinion is one of the hardest things to get right which is a key driver of product market fit.Ā
Alright, you built this amazing product by rallying your team, getting leadership buy-in, and cross-functional teams. Now what? Do you expect Sales teams to go sell your product and customers to magically discover your product? This rarely happens.Ā
As a PM you need to understand pricing, purchasing power, entering the market from upstream vs downstream, add-on vs free, and partnering with Product Marketing to develop a good story. All of this feeds into developing a great GTM which is very crucial for your front-line teams. In my opinion as a PM, it is my job to shepherd this product to launch and make sure we land the first few strategic customers.Ā
This is not just limited to new products, it is by expanding existing products too. Giving an insight into the sales team's objectives, they can either sell more stuff (add-ons) to the same customer (install base) or land new customers (newCo) both of these are a different ball game. As a PM you need to understand these intricacies.
Involving Sales teams early and often
One of the best ways to help Sales be on board with your vision is to involve them early and often. Just like how you share your roadmap with Engineering teams, I would encourage you to share it with the Sales teams as well. This gives them deeper insights into what is coming and when. Since Sales teams are so close to the customers, they can provide some interesting insights and trends that may be hard to access for you as a PM.
This is where a great PM shines, which is bubbling the best ideas from all corners, not just coming up with good ideas yourself.Ā
Assisting Sales teams with the first few strategic dealsĀ
Sales teams face fierce pressure from customers and internally to meet quotas. I see myself as a quarterback for Sales, especially during strategic conversations or just after launching a new product/add-on. I will assist sales in pitching the value proposition in a compelling way and make sure they feel comfortable moving forward by themselves.Ā
Several front-line teams work closely with Sales teams including Renewal management, adoption consulting, Solution consulting, etc. I will take a step back once this machine is well-oiled but until then I help our front lines with the necessary ammunition and help them go bat for us.
Appreciating the longer Sales cycles and factoring them into new revenue projection
Another important yet overlooked aspect of being a great PM is the ability to appreciate longer sales cycles. Especially since it influences a top metric that we care about as a PM team which is āTime to marketā and by extension revenue projection. If you work for an enterprise software company, you must be knowing already that the Sales cycles can be extremely long, as long as 18 months in rare cases. They are also very slow to roll it out to their entire company. This can have more implications for you as a PM especially if they are consuming your APIs to integrate them into their product or workflow.Ā
For example, for one of the API products I launched recently, I was always the Sales team's right hand to make sure the customer is architecting the product in a way that simple and yet scaleable. I was the direct line of sight for almost a year into any bugs or issues this customer would run into, not that I did not trust customer support and professional services teams to help out but I took it upon myself to see this customer being successful and set it up as a template so Sales teams can run with it for future potential customers. I slowly started taking a back seat and let customer support teams help with new implementation issues. This is now a well-oiled machine and I am completely off the hook. We have grown manyfold since the launch and we now have potential customers in the pipeline. Sales teamsā incentives and ProdDevās incentives are aligned.Ā
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