A Podcast Episode Bonanza and Pondering the Tricky Relationship between Sales and Product Management
A few weeks ago, I got this cold outreach that claimed that I needed help from Some Guy™️ because my newsletter is “kinda weak”.
I flipped the guy off with a “Let me know if you want me to introduce you to any cold outreach coaches” message and got on with my life, or so I thought. A few weeks later, I realised that I hadn’t actually written a newsletter since receiving this thoroughly excoriating criticism. And then I started thinking about what this newsletter is for.
Originally, it started as another way to tell people about my podcast episodes (to escape the yoke of algorithmic social media), but soon became a channel for me to talk about, well, whatever was on my mind. I speak to a lot of product people, alongside my day jobs, and I hear a lot of stuff. I like to talk about things I hear, problems I’ve helped solve, approaches I’ve seen work, or sometimes just be a bit sarcastic about something. Overall, I want to be helpful and authentic. But… is that what you want?
To find out, I’ve pulled a few questions together here! I'd love some (anonymous, unless you don’t want to be) feedback on how I can make the newsletter more useful for you.
New Podcast Episodes:
There are actually four new podcast episodes to catch up on, so I hope you’ve got some comfy headphones. Let’s get straight to it!
First up, we have Andres Glusman. Formerly an early Meetup employee, Andres is now the CEO of DoWhatWorks. His company aims to help you measure A/B test performance across multiple businesses, allowing you to focus on the right growth experiments. We spoke all about his company and some of the dos & don’ts of split testing. Give the episode a listen here.
Then, we have Erika Klics. Erika’s a job search strategist who wants to help product & tech leaders get their next job by leveraging their inevitable edge. She’s got oodles of free content on her site, and we spoke about how to approach your job search and whether we should ever “settle”. Check the episode out here.
Next up, we have a returning guest! I spoke to Yana Welinder last year about her IoT startup, Kraftful. She’s since done a great big pivot and turned Kraftful into an AI-powered co-pilot for product managers. They’re growing like crazy and she’s even been a guest on Masters of Scale. I was delighted that she was kind enough to come back and chat about how AI is going to change product management (and whether it’s going to put us all out of a job). Give Yana a listen here.
Last, but most definitely not least, I was really excited to speak to Dave Farley, the author of the book Continuous Delivery, as well as the host of the YouTube channel of the same name. I’ve been following Dave’s content for a while and it was great to speak to him about why we need to make sure our software is always releasable, and how product managers might help with that. Check the episode out here.
Plenty more episodes coming up but, I hope these will keep you satisfied for now!
Good Sales, Bad Product?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dynamic of sales-led product organisations. Obviously, all of the cool product-led organisations are getting the attention right now, but there are still loads of companies out there that use sales teams to sell their products. I’m a strong advocate of exploring alternative approaches, but they’re not for everyone and, if you’re working in a sales-led growth motion, it’s important for this approach to work well.
I also started thinking about some of the characteristics of companies that I’ve seen, and how product management intersects with sales. As ever, it’s time for a quadrant!
First of all, it’s worth explaining what “good at” and “bad at” mean on these axes. As ever, I’m oversimplifying in order to make a point. Let’s just assume that if a company is “Good at Product” it has a pretty decent product and product management team. If it’s “Good at Sales” it has people that can sell you a pen in 5 seconds flat. If they’re bad at either of those things, it’s the opposite. So what does all of this mean?
Bad at Product / Bad at Sales
Oh, dear. The product is awful, the product team aren’t making it any better but, even worse, the sales team can’t sell for toffee either. It may be that one of the founders is carrying the commercial efforts, or maybe growth has flatlined (or even started to decline). A sense of panic starts to set in, and everyone starts to blame each other.
Bad at Product / Good at Sales
I’ve long argued that a good sales team can sell a bad product, and probably for quite a while. In a product-led growth motion, these products wouldn’t last five minutes. In a sales-deck-led, guided demo with a decent sales story and a penchant for putting feature requests in the roadmap to win the deal, these products can last for quite some time. The product management team are generally not happy in this situation.
Good at Product / Bad at Sales
So, you’ve got a great product and a product team that’s doing good work. However, the sales team aren’t able to sell it, so growth is stalling and nothing seems to make it any better. The product management team accuse the sales team of being garbage, the sales team accuse the product team of being garbage, and no one fixes the problem. The most important thing is to work out what the product management team can do to support the sales team in this situation.
Good at Product / Good at Sales
In theory, this is the point where you all go off on a cruise and drink champagne (only kidding, it’s just the sales team that gets to do that). But, in any case, if you’ve got a product that is humming and a really effective sales team that you collaborate well with then you’re in a super-privileged position. I’ve only seen this rarely!
So… what to do?
For me, the most disappointing thing I see in a sales-led company is not that it’s sales-led. I love salespeople! The most disappointing thing I see in a sales-led company is when there’s no relationship at all between the sales and product management teams. I’ve seen companies where the product management teams literally only ever speak to the sales team when they‘re fending off a feature request. This is not right and it has to change.
I’m a strong advocate of regular catch-ups between product management and sales teams. I’m also a strong advocate of the “deal review” meeting, where the sales team present any deals past stage X in the funnel to cross-functional colleagues (very much including the product management team). However much that PMs might moan about feature requests being written into contracts, the real problem is when you only find out about this after the deal has been signed. Get ahead of it and find out early. You might still have to do the thing, but at least you’ll know.
Regarding sales enablement, I’m a strong believer that product management teams have more of a role here than they usually think. It’s very tempting for product management teams in sales-led organisations to defer all decisions about packaging, pricing, positioning, ICP etc to the sales team. And, let’s be fair, the sales team have a massive say in this. But, any product manager worth their salt needs to be interested and have an opinion on all of this stuff. It all has an impact on the product and, if you’re spending all your time arguing with developers about story points, you shouldn’t be surprised when all the important decisions get decided without you.
Final thoughts
I cannot repeat enough how important I believe it is for product management teams to make peace with their sales counterparts. You don’t have to become a salesperson or leave all of your product principles at the door. There’s give and take in all relationships. But, if you don’t take some steps to get this right then you’re going to be overruled repeatedly because, at the end of the day, sales teams are very often seen as the most important revenue generators in the company. And no leadership team can ignore revenue.
Writing this newsletter is fun, and I love to give stuff away for free. But, if you want to buy me a coffee, you can always buy me a coffee. In any case, if you enjoyed this issue, please share it with your friends!
The sweet spot for me now (and many times in the past) is wedged in between sales and engineering. I've love to see you cover experiences on transitioning orgs from being sales led to product led if you have any.
I worked with a couple of good salespeople who understood Product (and I'd hire them as PMs in a minute!). It's amazing what you can achieve when everyone's pulling together to solve a customer problem - which for me is the very definition of product-led.