If you are a product manager and checked the latest sales report, you might have seen something like this:
Same product, same region, same vertical.
Different salespeople. Different results.
So, why do Product Managers underestimate Salespeople?
- Product managers think the product will sell itself, and sales are just there to deal with the paperwork. It is hard to accept that one single person can amplify the value of your otherwise perfectly engineered product. This is made worse by the belief that SaaS products do not need enterprise sales and all that expensive headcount can be replaced with an online payment system.
- Product managers think sales is easy, and anyone can sell.
- Because salespeople get fired more easily, they are considered a commodity.
- Salespeople do not share your enthusiasm for Kubernetes, micro services, MongoDB and not even Kafka… They are other people!
That is plain wrong and inefficient.
If you want your Enterprise Product to be a success:
Pay more attention to your sales and pre-sales colleagues, especially if you are a technical founder or a product manager.
They are the best, most honest source of intelligence. Sales are interested to give you the best information because they have skin in the game. This is a crisp clear signal in the sea of noise generated by industry reports and market researchers.
And there is always time to spend with salespeople, especially when you stop to harassing the engineers about story points. A product manager’s role is not only to ship the product, but ship a product that customers want. Salespeople can help you with the last part.
Do not underestimate what they do.
They have a tough job, which is much harder than you think. I challenge you to take 1 day per month and try to make a sale!
I have a massive appreciation for salespeople because they get evaluated by the market. Whilst a product manager, can succeed or get promoted based on peer reviews or 360 reports, the salesperson gets reviewed by the customers. That is hard to fake.
tl;dr
Listen carefully to what salespeople have to say – and in doing that you will become a better salesperson yourself – and as Lord Naval says – unstoppable!
