Product Collective - Be amazing together

Working with Sales

The relationship between product management and sales is... complicated. On one hand, salespeople can be a source of endless feature requests and invitations to help out with “just one more demo.” On the other hand, they do have access to potential and existing customers and are witnesses to several trends that drive your market. While you may be tempted to keep sales at arm's length, you’re better off working with sales to sell products and gain insights in your customers’ needs.

NEW TO THIS NEWSLETTER AND LIKE WHAT YOU SEE?

3 Ways product managers can help sales. To understand how product managers can help sales, Brian Lawley, CEO of 280 Group talked to Dave Dersch, an experienced sales person with experience at several tech companies. The three ways product managers can help sales include: provide a compelling message and value proposition, help drive effective lead generation, and maintain open communication with the sales team.

(via @the280group)

Product managers and sales: The alliance that leads to a better product. If sales people at your company fail to meet their quotas, they are likely to blame lost deals on missing features. Hearing your product broken down into missing features and lost deals is enough to make any product manager wary of working with sales. The thing is, sales has such good insight into the market, and they know very well what your product’s strengths and weaknesses are. Julia Chen explains why you need to collaborate with sales and how you can approach it in a way that creates better products.

(via @appcues)

Continues below...

Happy Birthday, iPod!

Just a few days ago, Apple’s iPod officially turned 20 years old. If it were a person, it’d probably be going out with their college friends celebrating with a night on the town just off-campus. Alas… it is not a person. But perhaps surprisingly, it’s still very much a product. Despite the changes in how people today consume audio content in this always-online, always-streaming world -- you can still purchase an iPod today. Of course, because of those changes… the iPod looks and acts much differently.

Could Apple have predicted back then that music would eventually be consumed in a way that it is today -- where songs no longer are owned, yet are consumed legally through streaming?

Did Apple know back in 2001 that people would crave to touch and swipe screens?

Whether they accurately predicted how consumer behavior would evolve for the way that people listen to music today is uncertain. But they certainly have made sure to iterate as that evolution has happened.

All of this reminds me of an essay that Ken Norton wrote a few years back about how Product Managers can predict the future. While we may not be able to know exactly what our products will look like in 20 years, this essay helps us think through important questions that may help us design those products today. It may not be able to help us future-proof them completely, but as Product Managers… we ought to be forcing ourselves to think critically about the future.

So later on this weekend, have a piece of cake in honor of that old Apple iPod you probably have stowed away in your attic somewhere. (And, you may want to find it… some original 1st generation iPods are going for $1,000 or more on eBay!)

What sales wants from product managers. There is a natural tension between sales and product managers. Sales won’t sell an existing product without some feature that is nowhere near the roadmap. At the same time, salespeople can get product managers access to companies for customer site visits and other customer research. They can be a source of earlier indications of a new trend forming or an old trend changing. To understand how product management and sales can work better together, Chad McAliister spoke with Ian Moyse. In this podcast episode, the two discuss what sales wants from product management and how the two functions can work well together.

(via @ChadMcAllister)

Sales enablement for launching a new product.  You often create new products in response to competitive pressures, gaps in the marketplace, or new technologies that enable greater innovation. Most businesses support the launch of new products with training, demo scripts, pricing, competitive positioning, marketing collateral, and more. That’s all good stuff, but it’s not enough. Tanner Mezel describes some good and bad sales enablement practices for launching a new product.

(via @JustAddDSG)

If your sales process looks like this, you’re blowing deals. As a product manager who is interested in aiding your organization’s sales process, you might find it helpful to know what a good sales process looks like. Buyers are more in the driver’s seat of the sales process than they ever have been so you have to make sure that your buyer’s experience at each touchpoint is seamless and pain-free. Amy Volas explains how to ensure your sales process truly is seamless.

(via @OpenViewVenture)

You don't need an entire research team or a big budget and a long timeline to conduct effective, impactful product research. But you do need to have a plan. In this conversation with Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice, we'll dig into how product people can conduct high-impact product research without a massive amount of effort.

Customer feedback is priceless when it comes to building a great product. But it can be a daunting task for product managers to focus and keep out the surrounding noise.

As feedback should be a cornerstone of product management, we gathered 4 common customer feedback mistakes you should avoid to get real value out of it.

In this webinar, you'll learn how to:

• Avoid bias when managing feedback
• Find problems to solve and not become a feature factory
• Gather customer feedback in one place and create real customer conversations
• Create insights to inform discovery and product strategy

This webinar is sponsored by our friends at airfocus