Product Pitch to Sales Play - follow up story

Bulding a structured approach to sales success

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for premium subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about making a sales playbook:

Product Pitch to Sales Play

What Prompted This Article?

I work on a multi-product solution jointly with several product managers. I launched a product in coordination with 3 product managers. We, the 4 product managers, took different approaches to getting sales interested in our products:

• Sam and George: Focus on the next release while responding quickly to questions from sales

• Me: Join sales enablement training sessions and track the pipeline

• Vern: Send broadcast emails to salespeople about the launch

I was surprised that experienced product managers didn’t do the same activities! I’ll admit that I thought my way was the best way. 😊

I researched best practices for B2B sales enablement. I defined these steps to enable sales:

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: A central place, such as a CRM, to track deal progress and metrics

4. Track enablement progress: Progress benchmarks on sales enablement

My research showed a 4th way to get sales started after a launch. The key difference from research is a sales playbook for opportunity handling by use case.

Did any of these ideas increase sales?

What Happened After This Article?