Product Pitch to Sales Play

How to build a structured approach to sales success

Your product is ready to launch at last. You have the exciting yet daunting job of getting the word out to your sales teams. Is it enough to announce your newly launched product to sales?

Probably not.

Awareness of a new product is only the first step in selling a product.

But other product managers send an announcement and the sales leads fly in to the product managers. Look under the covers of those sales leads - you will see unqualified leads and repeated follow-up questions to the potential customer.

Lots of activity and no results.

This article provides a structured approach to launching a product that sets up long-term sales success.

The Pitfalls of "Awareness is Enough" for Product Launches

While enterprise sales teams do amazing work to develop sales, they have multiple decision-makers in each potential sale. Stand-alone product material won't convince buyers and users that you have a solution to their problem.

However, your product brief covers the use cases, the cost savings, and features of your product. What's missing?

The context around your product is missing. Enterprise customers don't buy off a product brief. Likewise, sales teams need context to sell to enterprise buyers and users.

What this means is sales awareness of your product is useless without context. Before working on product awareness, you need to develop an internal audience ready to consider your product.

The Alternative to Awareness: Structured Sales Enablement

You have been living with your product for a long time before launching. Your days are filled with thinking about your product.

The rest of your organization doesn't think much about your product. Salespeople and business development people are thinking about how to reach busy customers who have problems to solve. Your product is part of a solution to customers' problems.

If you want traction for your newly launched product, then you need a process that goes beyond sharing information. This is where structured sales enablement comes into play.

The goal of structured sales enablement:

Sales teams own the product narrative, engage with customers effectively and move deals through the pipeline without relying on the product manager.

The structured sales enablement process consists of:

1. Product messaging and positioning

2. Target customers and use cases

3. Opportunity visibility

4. Handover plan to transition ownership off of product managers

If you think this has nothing to do with product management, then think again. Your product is going to sit on the shelf until you have customers interested in buying your product.

This isn't a sales job - product managers need to build demand at scale. For scale, you need to coach the teams that hunt down opportunities.

Overcoming the Cold Start: Product Manager's Role in the Early Stages

Product managers are the best to kickstart the sales process with messaging and initial coaching. This early stage isn't doing selling! It is about setting a foundation for sales success.

What does this mean in a fast-paced organization? Product managers get actively involved in the deals. Being actively involved means preparing sales-focused summaries:

• Use case overview: why certain customers can use your product

• 1 pager qualification: how to tell if a deal in the pipeline is with your target customers

• Battlecard: explaining your product's unique value proposition

This material supplements your product brief, marketing slide deck, and product FAQ.

After you have sales-focused material, you are ready to start engaging in your organization's sales pipeline. Your goal is to contribute to the active sales in the pipeline. Your coaching consists of:

• Rapid response to questions about your product

• Adding value proposition material to pricing and quotes

• Prioritize roadmap items in response to customer feedback

• Sharing customer use cases with stakeholders and product teams

• Updating the FAQ, marketing materials and sales summaries daily

• Characterization of early customer engagements

• Build objection handling material

By incorporating all this learning into the structure, you are enabling sales to find and handle customers without your help. If you tag along on sales calls and ping busy sales teams for status without this structure, you won't scale.

You need to be actively involved early and with structure and then back off to build a knowledge base that multiple sales teams can use.

Priming Sales for the Long Term

Your goal is a sales team equipped to find and handle deals with your product. It’s a fine line between getting involved in a sale and carrying the sale to close. When it comes to a sales opportunity, you are the follower of the sales team. You are never in charge of closing.

You are proactively offering materials that help sales. You are sitting in the backseat of the deal anticipating what is next. Here is how you add value as a coach on these early deals:

• Has a customer gone silent after sales provided a price quote? You can provide fresh insight to sales so they can get a meeting with the customer.

• Are you getting feedback that your price isn't competitive? Respond with a checklist of your product's extra value. Use the feedback to consider price adjustments in the future.

• Do the quotes going to customers reflect your product's value? Provide supplementary information to sales to be ready for the customer's response.

• Are handoffs from initial inquiry to configuration to ordering smooth? Provide configuration and ordering guidance for the handover process.

• Are there patterns of success in the sales process? Be sure to communicate broadly on sales successes. These patterns are valuable for tuning your structured sales approach.

• How do you measure sales success beyond revenue and win/loss? Establish measures that celebrate the sales transition. For example:

  • Sales use of materials like the FAQ, marketing materials, objection handling

  • Transitions from initial interest to pricing to ordering

  • Sales requested roadmap and knowledge base changes

  • Pricing over time

These steps build confidence in selling the solutions with your product. Enterprise sales cycles can be long. Product management helps best by anticipating sales challenges through metrics. Make sure that your hands-on approach is leading to a self-sufficient sales team.

Quick Start Guide for Product Managers

Empowering sales and business development to handle potential customers is beneficial in the long term. It is more efficient for sales to develop opportunities while product management stays focused on product strategy and customer success.

With a few extra steps, product managers can create a process to enable sales of their product without going to every sales conversation:

1. Product Messaging: how the product meets the customer's pain points

2. Sales training on the use cases: sales playbooks that help sales handle the initial customer conversations

3. Deal visibility: central place such as a CRM to track deal progress and metrics

4. Track enablement progress: progress benchmarks on sales enablement

A deep dive into each step and 15 ways to quick start your own sales enablement content is available for paid subscribers.

Conclusion: From Awareness to Action

Announcing your product isn’t enough to drive sales. Without context, sales teams struggle to position your product effectively, and enterprise customers won’t buy based on a product brief alone.

Structured sales enablement ensures your team owns the solution, engages with the right customers, and builds momentum without relying on product managers for every deal. By actively coaching sales in the early stages, creating the right materials, and enabling long-term independence, you set your product up for success.

Sales success doesn’t come from awareness alone—it comes from enablement. If you want your product to move, don’t just make noise. Build momentum.

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Overview of Enterprise GTM including background on sales enablement (guest post with Maja Voje)

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Last week’s backstory for paid subscribers covered how I used advice from product coach Jori Bell on influencing without authority. What I Learned from A Product Coach

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