Sales Support for Product Managers
How to help sales while keeping product momentum
Your sales team needs support on your product. As a product manager, how should you respond? It is difficult to decide how to respond to sales without hurting sales cycles. Let's look at the different points in the sales cycle and your possible response.
Key Techniques for Product Managers
Product managers naturally want to engage with sales and customers on their products. There is a risk that a product manager becomes a bottleneck in closing sales. Each account team is in a better position to close a sale than depending on a product manager to help on routine sales support activities. A product manager is in a better position to help multiple account teams at one time.
Material for Account Teams
The first technique for product managers is to prepare material for their sales teams on the product. Sales enablement material is different from customer marketing material. The key items in sales enablement material are:
Key drivers for the product or feature: what should sales look for in potential customers? What are signs that a customer would need your product?
Qualification criteria: what qualification questions should sales investigate with potential customers?
Sizing and ordering guidelines: Including examples and directions for sizing the product. Internal ordering guidelines for account executives and sales engineers
Links to marketing material and sales training
Where to go in the sales organization for help
Respond Quick and Ask Questions
Product managers get a lot of questions from account teams and they need to respond quickly to avoid any delays in the sales cycle. The questions typically fall into 2 categories:
Basic information on the product: product managers can respond with a link to the sales material or refer the sales team to the appropriate subject matter expert
Timing: the best response is "we are targeting this for the 2nd half of the year". The key is to let the account teams know there is uncertainty on the timing up until it is delivered. Product managers typically cannot commit to a delivery date.
Often account teams need information urgently from product managers. Your best practice is to respond quickly to the account team. It is ok to say you don't know the answer!
Any response to account team questions need to be ended with a few questions back. For example:
Why does your customer want this?
Will this time frame be acceptable?
What alternative does the customer have besides our product / feature?
When would this deal potentially close?
Always Track Demand
It is important to know how many customers are asking for certain items on your product. You can track demand in several ways:
Put email requests in a special folder for later searches and tabulation
Have a shared spreadsheet with the requests: show the description of the request, the date of the request, the size of the deal and who requested the item
Track the requests in your backlog management tool, such as Jira or AHA
Use a tool for sales to vote on features
Figure out a way to track the demand so you can prioritize items in the roadmap and know who to contact for more details.
Sales cycle vs release cycle
Customer sales cycles are on a different timescale from your release cycle. Generally sales cycles have these phases:
Early leads: customer asks about a product or feature and sales develops the lead
Qualification: sales checks if the customer has budget and a true need for the product or feature
Objection handling: sales responds to customer's issues with the product or feature
Sales closing: sales has verbal agreement that the customer wants to buy and works on the sales order
Ideally, the account teams handle all the phases without needing your product management assistance. Newer products and services usually need extra help from product managers. Below is a table for general guidelines in sales support questions.
Generally product managers would get engaged with a sales subject matter expert on large opportunities after the product is released.
Sales Support Examples
Now that you have the product manager techniques, lets discuss a few examples in practice.
First Example
Situation: Account team heard from an executive that a new product is being developed.
Request: They want you to talk to their customer about this product.
Your Response: Before agreeing, ask questions to be sure this is a good use of your time. Items to ask are:
Can the customer give you good information?
Is the customer a good one for early engagement?
Does the customer want more detail than you should give at this time?
Your Conclusion: Use this information to decide if you want to invest time in this customer. It is important to let the account team know quickly if you will or will not talk to the customer at this time.
Second Example:
Situation: Account team has a new customer lead that isn't engaging with them.
Request: They want to schedule time with you to hopefully get the customer to respond.
Your Response: This is a very rare case in which a product manager can help. If you are working a new product and having trouble with customer conversations, then this would be a good case to accept a meeting request.
Your Conclusion: You will want to ask questions about the potential customer, budget and motivation to prepare.
Third Example:
Situation: Account team has a customer that wants your product with features on the roadmap. Customer may not buy if the roadmap features are not delivered quickly.
Request: Account team wants your help in closing the sale.
Your Response: Next step is to understand the nature of the deal in terms of size of the deal and customer's deadlines. If the deal is small, then it is best for the account team to ask the customer to wait for the roadmap feature. If the deal size is acceptable and the timing is close to the roadmap, then you would ask a few more questions:
Why is the roadmap feature so important?
Is the customer willing to be a reference for your product?
Is the customer able to do early testing of the roadmap feature?
Can the customer discuss their requirements in detail?
Your conclusion: Wait for this information before agreeing to meet with the customer to avoid meeting with the customer too early.
Sales Support and Product Managers - Conclusion
Having a good relationship between product managers and sales is crucial to the success of products. Picking the right time and right engagement with sales is important in keeping focus on your deliveries and roadmap. Sales teams are incredibly resourceful and they really value having product managers involved in the sales cycle. While it is flattering to be needed in the sales cycle, in some cases it is better for product managers to focus on product priorities.
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