Optimize your sales process for Product Management

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hi and welcome to the three-minute product manager and our discussion on supporting a sales team so as product management groups as product managers uh you know we share a common goal with our sales teams you know we want market success through strong sales and customer satisfaction at the same time there's some natural and predictable tensions between our two groups sales teams tend to think account by account customer by customer often the biggest customers is what they're thinking about we as product management teams on the other hand often think about market segments customer segments across the full spectrum of sizes there's also deal demands versus resources so often you know sales teams will want this just this just this one feature change on our product uh so that they can win a particular deal on the other hand we often get lots of these requests and we can't support all of the requests that we've got and still keep our product evolution on track and then there's a time horizon difference so often sales teams or if we think about product management teams first you know we think in terms of this quarter maybe we get new new features out you know for the next six to nine months we might think of a product strategy you know one to three years um sales reps think this quarter they live and die by this quarter so i have to say you know we love our sales teams but sometimes we struggle to support them so what i'm going to do in this video is talk about five things that we can do to better support our sales teams we're going to start with respect so i just make a few comments here and that is the day-to-day work of product managers and sales teams it's pretty dramatically different and a lot of product managers especially those with engineering backgrounds sometimes lack sales experience so they lack natural empathy for the sales process for sales reps and i got to say you know between the two teams it's sometimes easy to miscommunicate it's easy to miss time our deliverables and sometimes we just inadvertently disrespect each other so what i'm going to tell you to do is is the following so first of all every chance you get as a product manager convey support and empathy for your sales teams you know listen carefully listen closely listen with empathy to their sales issues also join sales calls help out with tough clients and then respond to sales requests on the same day if you can don't respond at the end of this week don't respond next week and then be transparent about your product timing so if you know you're expecting to get a feature out next month but it's actually three months from now make sure the sales team knows that all right first one's respect let's go to training so sales reps i mean it's kind of obvious but sales reps need the knowledge to sell our products so do this get your sales teams trained get your sales reps trained so here we're talking about target customers needs product details benefits how to demo how to sell what's the pricing they need to know all of this okay so you might you need to you need to make sure that they get trained now you might be training them yourself if you're a smaller company or you might be training the trainer all right let's go to the third one which is sales tools so excellent sales enablement tools will help win deals and for us product managers they also help us win friends so do this so pick the right set of sales enablement tools for your products so might be a pitch deck or customer demos case studies return on investment calculators competitive selling against tools find the most impactful sales enablement tools for your product and get those developed now you may be developing them yourself or you just may be supplying the content to a product marketing group or a marketing group to finalize that content but make sure you get this stuff done all right let's go to the fourth one which is deal support so just like our sales teams we want to win key deals so go ahead and do this so provide product and subject matter expertise to reinforce your sales teams help them out with that and then also within reason and when and within bounds if you can customize and enhance your products for select clients go ahead and do that but again keep that within balance with all of the other priorities that you've got all right then we go to the fifth one which is constant feedback and so we you know as a product management team we want to understand key trends that the sales teams are seeing in the market we want to know about their sales challenges we want to hear what help they need so do this so set up regular monthly meetings with key sales reps and ask them you know what's changing in the market that we might not have seen ask them you know what help do you need all right so go ahead and do that monthly all right so that's five ways to better support a sales team so my name is todd burns i've got my contact information here i've also got two courses out on udemy uh one for product managers and another for vps and directors of product management and in both of those courses i talk more about supporting a sales team so the links to those courses are below all right that's the three minute product manager supporting a sales team