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.

Question

Manjeet Singh · Accepted Answer

Here is my simplified formula to protect the strategy:Product Strategy Protection = (Clear Communication + Sales Enablement + Data-Driven Decision Making + Collaboration)...

Aleks Bass · Answer

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 goin...

Kara Gillis · Answer

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 ...

Sandeep Rajan · Answer

This sounds to me like your sales team doesn't believe the target market is big enough and/or the right market. It's hard to believe in a product strategy unless you agre...

Jacqueline Porter · Answer

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 ...

Jonathan Gowins · Answer

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 t...