Dealing With Hostile Sales Teams
As product managers, we need to work with other teams to achieve our goals. This isn’t always an easy thing to do. There are often frictions when trying to get everyone to be on the same page with us. Opposition by teams to what we are trying to do can exhibit itself in different ways. If not verbally, it could be in lack of enthusiasm or unfriendly comments behind our back.
The sales team is arguably the toughest to deal with. It is also often the most vocal opposition. Salespeople have close relationships with customers. They often assume that they know better what the product should be like because of this. Hence, they can become hostile toward us if we thought otherwise.
Here are a few useful tips on how to work well with a hostile sales team.
Explain Decisions
The other teams, including Sales, might not really understand what we do, particularly when Product makes the most significant decisions. This can be a major reason for frictions because there’s a lack of shared understanding. We need to make it clear to everyone why we are doing certain work. Even if the reasons are already known or clear to all teams, we need to help everyone not lose sight of them.
This is an area where the product roadmap can be quite helpful. It puts right before everyone what we are working toward. We can use it to explain to Sales why we are making certain decisions and how our plan links to a bigger vision. A roadmap helps to visualize the vision and the strategic steps we’re taking to achieve it. The document shows how planned work contributes to the overall business goals. This can help to make Sales more amenable.
Discern Sales Team’s Motivations
People don’t just act a certain way. They usually have an underlying reason. Sales have reasons for their seeming hostility, so we should seek to know and understand such. We should not forget that the primary goal of Sales is to close deals. They are, therefore, usually not all that interested in what we are planning to do. What matters most to sales team members is how to sell more – after all, that’s what brings the money. It will, for that reason, help to acknowledge those motivations.
Perhaps, Sales want us to do some things because they feel those will help them to close more sales. We would do well, therefore, to give attention to their motivations and challenges. This will enable us to see or show how we can help. For instance, we may be able to let sales reps know planned work (if any) that somewhat addresses identified customer needs.
It will also help if we can find a way to convince Sales on how planned work or features will help them close more deals. We’d need to be creative to frame what we want to do in this light.
Provide Information and Tools
We may also have a more friendly relationship with Sales when they feel equipped for success. This means providing them with information and tools that can make their work easier.
As already stated and as is well known, closed deals are all that Sales is interested in. Reps might do things that are not ideal in certain instances to achieve this goal. For instance, Sales may tell customers what they’d love to hear about the product, even if it’s not true. This is not necessarily because they are liars; they may simply not have the right information.
Product can help by ensuring that sales reps have adequate information about what we are offering. We should provide them with enough, quality collateral that can help them to be better-informed and more convincing when talking to prospects.
Talk to Customers
Salespeople tend to have a strong relationship with customers and prospects. This can make them useful for knowing customer needs. However, we shouldn’t just rely on Sales to know everything that would satisfy our target audience. We should go further to interact with customers.
Sales will mostly only let us know what customers or prospects want that could enable them to close more deals. But, as we know, customers tend to frame their problems as solutions – what reps often bring back to us.
We need to identify the real problems and we can only do that by interacting directly with customers. This doesn’t simply mean talking with our target audience but also observing them. What customers tell us often doesn’t capture the whole picture; we need to look deeper. We need to make out the common pain points.
After interacting with customers, we can share with Sales the patterns we have observed – the common problems. We may proceed to show how we are planning (using the roadmap) to solve it.
Give Reasons for Rejected Requests
For us to be successful and deliver the right solutions, we will have to reject some feature requests that come through Sales. And it is natural for salespeople to feel disgruntled when we turned down requests they think would help to close more deals.
We can reduce the hostility that may arise from refusals by taking the time to make clear our reasons. This will be useful to show that we still have the customer’s best interest at heart in all of this. We should bring the attention of Sales back to the product vision. How well do those requests align with it? If not very well, they might not make much difference for product success.
Are features requested relevant to or demanded by the majority of customers or is it by just a few? We could do comparisons between features requested and planned features, based on value vs. effort/cost or other feature scoring criteria.
