4 Steps to Building an Effective Product Marketing & Sales Relationship
This was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Subscribe here.
Product marketing is an organization's most collaborative role. To be effective, product marketers must collaborate with and influence Product, Design, Marketing, and Sales, to name a few. Most PMMs spend ample time building a great relationship with Product, yet often completely neglect Sales. That's a huge mistake.
The sales team relationship is particularly important as one of the main channels to gather insights from the market. A sales team is like scaled, always-on market research giving you insights on the customer, how messaging is landing, and what the competitors are up to lately. Plus, without Sales, most of your work won't see the light of day. The sales team is a primary channel for rolling out messaging, positioning, pricing, and product launches to customers and prospects. So, ensuring you build a good relationship with your sales counterparts is key to being a successful product marketer.
First Step: Understand your audience
One of the keys to success when developing positioning, messaging, pricing, etc., is to fully understand your audience first: including their goals, challenges, incentives, and influencers. You need to do similar research when it comes to Sales so that you can collaborate to drive revenue.
Through formal 1:1s and casual lunch or coffee chats, get to know the leaders and individual contributors on the team. Ask them about their goals. Their overarching goal will always be a revenue target, but are they focused on increasing the top of the funnel, expanding current accounts, improving the close rates, growing the average order value, or something else? These goals will also differ depending on their role, even between account executives and sales development reps (SDRs). For instance, SDRs usually have a quote for the number of meetings they set, while an account executive is purely tracked on their closed revenue.
Then, ask them what they believe is keeping them from reaching that goal or what would make it easier.
They'll often default to how they think product marketing can help, but digging deeper and finding what they feel is the root of the problem is more helpful. They may say they need a new one-pager to explain a feature, but you might find out it's because prospects don't understand it from the pitch.
A new one-pager could be helpful, but creating new messaging for Sales would likely be more beneficial.
Over time, you'll learn the tendencies of different sales reps, but generally, take everything with a grain of salt. I've found a lot of account executives who believe they could win every deal if certain things were updated in the product or if they only had the right sales enablement. That's rarely the case. Also, you'll find some reps will over-report the size of their deals, so when reviewing why the team lost or won deals, make sure you look more for trends across the sales team and multiple deals.
One of the best ways to understand the sales team's day-to-day is to shadow them in their prospect meetings. You'll get to experience the sales calls, the objections from prospects, and how they handle them. Plus, you'll get to ask them questions after the call to improve your understanding. If you cannot shadow them, the next best thing is to review recordings of their calls and then follow up with your questions later.
Another key to collaborating with sales is understanding their busy times. Most sales teams work on a quarterly quota, but some are monthly or even a combination of the two. Make sure you know how your team is set up because they'll be much more giving of their time at the beginning of their cycle than at the end. You also won't want to implement new pricing or messaging in the last couple of weeks of their cycle. That is a surefire recipe for pissing off sales and botching your rollout.
Second Step: Explain your role & show value
Product marketing is a relatively new role that many of your partners are likely still trying to understand, especially since it can differ across companies and stages. So, as part of those discussions with the sales team, make sure you take the time to explain your role at your company and how you foresee working together. This is your time to set initial expectations, let them know your current projects, and share how you prioritize. Salespeople are extrinsically motivated and focused on surpassing their quota, so as you'd expect, they will be most interested in how you're going to help them make more money.
Make sure you share specifically how you'll bring value to their day-to-day. Share what projects you're currently working on or have planned that will answer some of their concerns. Then, make sure you deliver on those. An essential part of building any relationship is showing that you're dependable, and that's just as true with Sales. Also, look for a few quick wins right out of the gate. Bigger projects are obviously more meaningful, but smaller, faster projects let you speed up the process of showing value and building trust.
However, (especially for the earlier PMMs) ensure Sales also realizes you’re not a servant organization to them. At the end of the day, we’re all working together and helping each other to reach common business goals. Product Marketing doesn’t exist purely to create sales collateral or run sales trainings. There are many other things you need to do in terms of market research, go-to-market plans, messaging development, and pricing strategy. Sales enablement is just one piece of your overall purview.
Third Step: Get alignment at the leadership level
Building relationships with the individual contributors on the sales team is essential. Still, it's most important to build that relationship at the leadership level, especially if you're on a small product marketing team without a dedicated product marketing leader or, of course, if you are the PMM leader. Ensure you have alignment initially and work with them when making significant changes. Introducing changes to the rest of the sales team will be much easier if you're aligned at the leadership level first because it ensures they'll back you up, and they'll be able to assist in answering questions from the individual sales reps.
Meeting with sales leadership also gives you the ability to be a bridge between Sales and your other partners, especially Product. You can gather sales insights to share with Product and share product priorities with Sales. Another great way to build your relationship with both partners is to spearhead setting up quarterly strategy sessions. It also helps to keep you from always being the go-between.
Fourth Step: Nurture the relationship
As with every relationship, nurturing your relationship with Sales will be an ongoing process. The initial conversations are essential, but they are just the beginning. Have regular, at least informal check-ins with the individual contributors on the sales team, and schedule more formal 1:1s with the sales leadership so that everyone understands what's going on in the other's world.
A critical piece is getting insights from the sales team when creating new messaging, pricing, and sales enablement and then getting feedback from them once it launches. Sales is your eyes and ears on the "front lines," so gathering their feedback is critical to judging the success of your launch. Of course, take each individual's input with a grain of salt, but use it to look for trends across the organization or to inform your 1:1 interviews with customers and prospects.
Treat the sales team similarly to how you might treat a group of trusted customers and nurture the relationship over time. Another pro tip: "soft launch" your trainings, messaging updates, pricing tweaks, and other changes to a subset of the sales team just like you would beta test an important feature before launching it to your whole customer base. That way, you can get initial feedback you can incorporate before the rest of the team sees it. Look for those sales reps who are more experimental and more excited about what's going on with Marketing and Product. There's always at least one, and if you're lucky, you might have a couple.
I know some marketers have contentious relationships with their sales counterparts, but it doesn't have to be. It just takes effort, like any other professional or personal relationship. Put in the work, and you'll reap the benefits with better insights from the "front lines" and smoother product, pricing, and messaging launches.
You have more work to do if they're "going rogue" and updating one-pagers or sales decks without you. Neither of you wants that to be happening, so if it is, then it means there is a lack of trust, so that's your sign to dig in and figure out where you need to improve the relationship.
