PRODUCTHEAD: When Sales ask for stuff
PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
product (mistreated) #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
Knowing what kinds of customer you want and don’t want help you to prioritise ‘one-off’ feature requests from sales
“Enterprise customers look at our roadmaps as the starting point for negotiations”
Are feature requests a deliberate strategy or a reactive wild goose chase?
hello
If you’ve ever worked as a product person in a company with a sales team, you’ll inevitably have been asked at some point for that one feature which is needed to close a massive deal.
Inevitably the feature is going to be highly customer-specific and of minimal value to the broader market. If you say yes, you will almost certainly derail your entire roadmap and incur the wrath of your development team as you set in motion the mother of all context switches.
These are notoriously difficult to deflect. Even if you initially succeed in doing so, it won’t be long before somebody very senior enquires why you’re standing in the way of new revenue. (As if the deal was a dead certainty.)
Months later, when the sales person has moved on to the next shiny thing, you’ll be stood amongst the smouldering wreckage of your product strategy, holding a new feature that is 98% technical debt and not actually wanted or needed by the one customer it was designed for. Yay!
It happens to the best of us. And they’ve had the good grace to write about how they handle those hot potatoes. Read the articles from Mirela Mus, Leah Tharin, Rich Mironov and John Cutler below.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
Other customer profiles to create
Whenever you define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), create 3 more:
1. Strategic Customer Profile (SCP)
2. Acceptable Customer Profile (ACP)
3. Non-Customer Profile (NCP)
A way to prioritise incoming sales feature requests
[Mirela Mus / LinkedIn]
More on Ideal Customer Profile
Let’s say you’re confident you’ve found your product market fit and are ready to move on to distribution. Now it’s time to decide where to put your chips and think about scaling.
Foremost in your consideration at this point should be your ICP (ideal customer profile).
What kind of customer retains best?
[Leah Tharin / Leah’s ProducTea]
The slippery slope of sales-led development
Most product companies have a few things in their roadmaps that are specifically for single customers – I call these sales one-offs. But it’s easy for B2B/enterprise companies to fall into a sales-led development model where the majority of work is for individual customers – starving the core product of innovation, new features, quality improvements and technical resilience. I’ve talked with dozens of software companies that don’t know how they got here, or don’t yet recognize the problem they have, so this post takes us stepwise from best intentions to “we’re too busy to improve our base product or take on new customers.”
More than a sprinkling of one-offs gets expensive and corrosive
[Rich Mironov]
Are we just handling it the wrong way?
It is easy to focus too much on the dynamics of sales requesting features to close deals, etc. The reality is once you get to that point, you’ve already lost the product strategy plot…
Some businesses have done amazingly well with a strategy that relies on sales surfacing needs related to individual deals, and closing those deals by building said features.
How do sales and product collaborate to qualify deals?
[John Cutler / LinkedIn]
recent posts
How to stop common B2B dysfunctions in the product team
For those of you who work in business-to-business (B2B) companies, how many of these sound familiar?
“Our product team is always called in to fight customer fires post-sale.”
“Sales people bring product managers along to answer customers’ techie questions.”
“The product team isn’t allowed to speak to customers unless they’re in a sales meeting.”
“Our sales team will often sell something that doesn’t exist, then make it the product team’s problem to make it happen.”
“Our product backlog is full of priority feature requests that the sales person says the customer needs before they’ll purchase.”
[I Manage Products]
3 ways to build a better sales team
The sales team: one of the topics about which product managers seem to vent most. The relationship between product management and the sales team can work well, but more often than not it’s a source of frustration for both sides. And if your company is in the business of selling products, it’s in your best interests to fix this problem. Here are three ways companies can build a better sales team.
[I Manage Products]
What to expect from your face-to-face product manager interview
Your product manager interview is as much about you getting to know your interviewers as it is the other way around. Here’s what you can expect along with my tips for standing out from the crowd.
Go a bit meta and challenge the premise of the exercise
[I Manage Products]
can we help you?
Product People is a product management services company. We can help you through consultancy, training and coaching. Just contact us if you need our help!
Helping people build better products, more successfully, since 2012.
PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from several hours in a traffic jam.
Read more from Jock
The Practitioner's Guide To Product Management
by Jock Busuttil
“I wish this book was published when I started out in product management. It gives a really wonderful overview of what product management is and involves on a day to day basis.”
— Keji Adedeji, product leader & coach
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals. In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS). Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK. He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.