Those Dreaded Sales-Led Feature Requests
I’ve had a few conversations recently about those dreaded sales-led feature requests. You know, the ones where a sales team comes back from a sales call with a must-have feature that absolutely must be inserted into the roadmap immediately otherwise they can’t get the deal, and it sounds pretty easy anyway, and it’s just table stakes functionality and it’s obvious that we need this. Oh, and also it’s worth £250K in revenue, which will help hit quarterly targets, and this customer is a named logo that gives us credibility in such-and-such market.
A plucky product manager who is well up-to-date with their latest LinkedIn thought leader advice might think they can defeat this argument through the awesome power of Product Thinking™️. They will construct a sensible argument around the fact that the opportunity cost is high, there’s other, more important stuff on the roadmap, and that we’re not supposed to be serving this market anyway. They will say things like “revenue is not a good product goal”. This will end up being escalated to the CEO because these types of impasses always get escalated to the CEO (who is, after all, the actual CEO of Product).
I would bet that the product manager walks away from that conversation disappointed 9 times out of 10.
“Why can’t we just do our jobs?”
It’s quite curious in some ways that, in many B2B companies, product managers and salespeople seem to be directly set up to make each other fail. And this is in the good companies! Leaving aside totally toxic environments, the setup looks something like this:
Salespeople are incentivised to hit quarterly sales targets and, in many cases, will get fired for not hitting them. Depending on how the company structures account management, they may or may not have an interest in prospects after they become customers. This directly incentivises them to do whatever they can to hit the numbers and move on, whatever the impact on the product team, their roadmap or their overall product strategy.
Product management teams are also incentivised to hit quarterly numbers (OKRs, or whatever else they’re using to measure success). Generally speaking, those numbers are not revenue-bound but something that the product management team can move on their own through the product (retention, NPS, some other measure of product quality). Having to build a feature for just one customer doesn’t make their numbers look good at all, because all the other customers are likely to be unhappy with planned product improvements getting parked.
This leads to the scenario where a salesperson can be legitimately excited about the “biggest deal of the year” coming across their desk. It’s a huge amount of money! It shows we’ve arrived! We just need to come together around this and find a solution! Let me just find time in your calendar!
Situations like this make salespeople (and CEOs) very excited but tend to leave product managers downhearted and wondering what they’re there for. Is this what product management has become? Just writing tickets for prospect requests in the order the salespeople spoke to them?
There’s still good product management to be done here
That’s right, you heard me. There is still good product management work to do here. Is it perfect product management? No! Will you read about it in a book? Not yet (please bear with me). But, there is still an incredible amount of good work you can do to help sales and product management teams be successful.
Speak to the sales team
B2B product management teams often complain about not being able to do discovery or have the chance to deeply empathise with their users. This is often a very valid complaint, but they seem to forget these very same principles when it comes to their internal stakeholders. The salespeople are your partners! Speak to them!
I’ve seen too many companies where the sales and product management teams barely speak at all, apart from the occasional angry interaction when they start complaining to each other about some big feature request. Go and speak to the salesperson and get some intel on the request! How important is it really? Is it the linchpin of the deal, or a nice to have, or just something that was mentioned in passing? Remember, salespeople generally want to close a deal with the least fuss possible. All this extra work is not helpful for them at all.
Also, many sales teams these days are recording sales calls via Gong (not an affiliate link - other recording solutions are available). Go and see what happened in the sales call directly. And, whatever happens, get the sales team to introduce you to the prospect for step 2.
Speak to the prospect
Sales teams are doing discovery all the time, but they naturally ask different kinds of questions than product people; that’s because they’re trying to work out the problems that the prospect is facing and what is needed to close the deal. There’s nothing wrong with them asking their questions, but you’ve got at least 5 Whys in your backpack and you’re going to want to go and ask them to dig deeper. What problem are they trying to solve? How are they solving it today? What’s the cost of not solving it? Do they really want this thing done, or is it just nice to have? Are there any workarounds they can live with? What about this feature that does most of the job already? Have you seen our API?
Generally speaking, prospects love speaking to product teams and many sales teams love getting product experts in front of them. In some cases, you may face resistance to going in alone. That’s OK, they’ll trust you eventually! In the meantime, just go along with them and make sure you get to ask your questions.
Speak to some other customers in that segment
You do have customer segmentation, right? This prospect does exist somewhere in one of those segments, right? If they do, finding similar (existing) customers should be easy. If not, well, there’s some sales enablement and go-to-market work to come back to, but you can’t fight that fight now.
Try to find a segment of your existing customer base that is as similar as possible to this customer, and go speak to 3-5 of them. Explore the same problem space that this new prospect is asking you to provide solutions for, and ask good questions to understand whether this is actually “table stakes” functionality and something more broadly applicable.
Worried that that’ll take too long? You can get this done in a week or two, and you’re almost certainly talking about long sales cycles if you’re getting dragged into this type of conversation. Use the sales cycle length to your advantage.
Limit the blast radius
Let’s assume you’re going to have to build something this time around. Again, there’s work you can come back to around go-to-market and make sure that you have better sales enablement and all of that good stuff. But, for now, you’re building the thing.
The trick here is to build the smallest possible version of that thing you can. It’s quite common, and incredibly frustrating, to try to throw the kitchen sink at a solution (gotta get that deal across the line!) but, in general, this should not be necessary. Your job is to build something that satisfies the fundamental ask, no more, no less. Be creative, be brutal on scope, and get it done as quickly as possible.
Build a generic solution
You may have been strongarmed into building something for one particular customer now but, in general, you should strongly push against building something that only that customer can use. Through judicious use of feature flagging, dark launches, configuration options, etc., you can build something that can be demonstrated to other customers within that segment and potentially upsell it to them. Even if it is super-specific to their needs, try to get the engineering team to engineer it so it can be built upon in the future rather than everything hardcoded and tightly coupled.
Epilogue: Checkbox Product Management
You should absolutely carve out success metrics for this solution (usage being the obvious one to go for), but the curious thing is that, sometimes, these features end up being barely used at all, even by the customer who signed on because of them. What gives?
I’ve been thinking for a while about checkbox features. The sort of features that prospects ask for even when they don’t really want them or expect to use them, but they need to have them to satisfy an internal stakeholder. There’s often talk in product management circles about removing dead features and getting rid of bloat. I agree with this principle, but I’ve spoken to product leaders who would dearly love to get rid of stuff but simply can’t. Maybe it’s just a requirement on every single procurement questionnaire they get. I’ve seen products with features that can’t be turned off because they support a particular geographic region, from which no one ever logs into the product, but the customer needs to show that it’s a “global initiative” to unlock the budget to buy your solution in the first place.
This led me to add another line to the well-known Kano Model diagram - “the checkbox attribute”.
The thing is, as disappointing as it can be to have unremovable, poorly-used features in a product, I think it’s OK to some extent. Part of building a good product is building something that our prospects can safely champion within their organisations, and get their own internal buy-in to invest in our solution. This is a core element of many sales methodologies and brings us back full circle. We need to build products that our users love, that our customers want and that, crucially, are easy for our customers to buy.
Speaking of B2B Product Management, sign up for my new course!
My friend Saeed Khan and I have been collaborating for a while now on a new course aimed at B2B Product Managers, coincidentally titled “Succeeding in B2B Product Management”. It’s a live cohort course and we’re running it on Maven, which is just the place for that sort of thing. We have cohorts coming up in January and February, and we’d love to see you there! Make sure you use discount code OKIPNEWS to get $100 off the asking price.
Here’s the link again: Succeeding in B2B Product Management
My Final Podcast Episode (of 2023)
There’s one final podcast episode to catch up on. I spoke to Orly Zeewy, author of “Ready, Launch, Brand” and general brand marketing guru. I met Orly on Lunchclub, a networking site that I’m still mystified about how it makes money. We got together to speak all about branding, and how startups leave it way too late to spend money on marketing and don’t spend enough money on it when they do.
Check the episode out here. I’ll be back with more fantastic guests in 2024! For now, I wish you Happy Holidays and a Fabulous New Year.