Akhil's Notes

SE 101: Supporting Product Development, Part 1

This is part of a series on Sales Engineering. This post is about on Product development.

Here's a practical guide on how to record prospect requests during a sales cycle. I'm working on another post about responsibilities during product or feature releases.

Sales engineers are the voice of the market in product development. The R&D team is (hopefully) already in tune with the voice of your customers. They are usually less involved in conversations with with prospective customers, which is where Sales Engineers come in.

Your Sales Engineering team should be documenting and feeding back requests from sales cycles with prospects and customers to the R&D team. These requests are extra data points that can influence what gets built.

First off, what do you sell?

To be successful, the R&D and GTM teams need a consistent understanding of your solution and value-proposition. These areas should be clearly defined and consistent between teams. This should sound obvious to you. Nailing this down can be surprisingly difficult, especially for complex products.

It is useful to have classifications that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE).

An example hierarchy of classifications can include:

On a tangent, there's likely other classifications used by either team for specific purposes. For example, a Marketing team may highlight subsets of functionality in campaigns targeting a certain customer segment.

But for the purpose of building and planning the product, common language between R&D and GTM is important.

For Sales Engineering, this lingua franca allows the team to clearly communicate missing functionality or product gaps. For the Product team, it allows for the voice of the market to be accounted for in prioritization.

Next, how do you track gaps?

With a consistent framework to classify your product, you can, additional information is needed to help understand the impact, relative importance, and to appropriately influence prioritization.

Below are the minimum recommended items to track against specific product gaps. This should be relatively easy in any modern CRM.

These gaps should be tracked throughout a sales cycle. Requests may come up in emails, sales calls, or in a procurement process (e.g. RFP documents).

It's important to group the same request from multiple customers or prospects together. Some feedback tools will do this aggregation automatically. Whether automated or manual, grouping is critical, since it helps understand what is most commonly requested.

There may be some requests which appear to be important early on, but turn out to be a 'nice to have'. Others will will be deal breakers if not available or may require a commitment to develop. The same framework can be used by post-sales teams to track requests from existing customers.

Finally, what do you do with these gaps?

Track, prioritise, and implement!

Product team should already have a way of gathering, prioritising, and tracking feedback requests from users at existing customers. The above attributes may enrich those requests by adding data from prospects to influence prioritisation. There are many user-facing tools available to gather this type of data.

Effective product teams will have a defined process to regularly review and evaluate external market feedback, which includes these prospect raised gaps.

The product team should evaluate whether these gaps align with the overall product vision. It's likely prospects will request a bunch of things that aren't aligned to your vision. That's expected. But it's still worth recording so your team can build a picture of what the market actually wants. Those that do align to your vision should be prioritised into the roadmap. This gives the GTM teams a rough idea of when gaps will be met.

In some cases, it may be useful to facilitate conversations between prospects and the product team to give a better understanding of specific gaps. This hands-on approach is useful tool for important gaps in critical accounts; it shows the prospect that your team is invested in making a product that will solve their needs.

Finally, as capabilities are released, your sales team should be notified of the requested accounts. This helps reignite conversations using these new capabilities.

And close

In summary, it's sales engineers's responsibility to be the voice of the market in product development.

This is one of the more strategic tasks the team is responsible for. Top performing sales engineering teams understand this and will invest their time in making sure market demands are heard by R&D.

Product and Sales Engineering teams that compliment one another are a beautiful thing to see. It allows for rapid development by focusing on capabilities that meet the needs of the market.

#sales-engineering