How do I protect our product strategy from sales pushback? Our sales team doesn’t focus, and is trying to make our product easy to sell to anyone, rather that our target market.

Over the years, I've found success through early cross-functional involvement, data-driven decision making, and empathetic enablement that helps drive better alignment and collaboration with sales Here's my approach: 1. Bring sales Into strategy development early - include sales leaders in strategy sessions from day one, making them co-creators rather than recipients. PMs can run joint customer research sessions where sales can share field insights 2. Ground decisions in shared data - partner wi ...Read More

Here is my simplified formula to protect the strategy:Product Strategy Protection = (Clear Communication + Sales Enablement + Data-Driven Decision Making + Collaboration) * Leadership AlignmentBreakdown: Clear Communication: Effectively conveying the product vision, target market, and value proposition to the sales team. Sales Enablement: Equipping the sales team with the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools to sell effectively to the target market. Data-Driven Decision Making: Using data to i ...Read More

Sales can be a tricky organization to work with, but I invite you to leverage a bit of empathy for the sales role to help solve this scenario.  Sales teams are rarely going off and selling to whomever they want. Usually they are operating within a specific book of business or working specific leads that an organization has generated for them, or that they have generated themselves using materials the organization has provided. They are also consistently enabled on the product, the process, the v ...Read More

The question I usually ask back is "How much ARR or money is that market or target worth? The target I am building for is worth $XXM and if I slow down, we won't be able to deliver on that. If you think it might be worth changing directions we can definitely to some market validation to see if the business case is there." At that point, the sales team then understands that in the end the product has to be built for the future and we can not keep reacting to every shiny object syndrome. Sometimes ...Read More

It would be pretty challenging to go against sales and try to change their mind. I recommend, Talk to them and really, really listen to understand their concerns and why they believe what they believe. There's got to be some truth in there somewhere you can use. If you need to educate them, show them video clips from user interviews to make your case. Ultimately, be ok disagreeing and make the leadership team accountable. Does someone in the C-Suite (CEO?) need to understand the fundamental delt ...Read More

The tension between product focus and sales flexibility is natural. Your sales team's desire to sell more broadly isn't necessarily wrong - they're incentivized to close deals. Your job is to create systems that channel their energy toward the right customers. I have often found the desire to go broad is a symptom of a lack of sales understanding the value proposition of the product; otherwise, they would zero in on who has the exact need your product meets to save themselves time and energy. So ...Read More