How do you balance feature updates that dev wants to get pushed out vs. trying to hold their launch due needing to do sales training?

In enterprise software, you can usually let the product and engineering team push new features when they are ready, as long as sales training is coming soon. Adoption of new features tends to be slower in enterprise software, particularly if using those new features depends on getting through a sales cycle. So, this is another area where it's ok to let go of a little control, and focus on the things you can control as a product marketer. 

The other thing to note here is that feature flags (something we offer for free here at Optimizely :) can help you by letting developers deploy new features into your product behind a switch, so that customers can't see the feature, and then marketing can turn it on for specific customers as you're ready. 

This is a great question and one that unfortunately can happen quite often. Whether it’s sales training or another aspect of the GTM plan, it can be challenging to get all the timelines to sync up -- especially if the PMM hasn’t been looped in early enough to prepare the GTM plan and deliverables.

In this type of situation, I first like to remind the product/eng team that if Sales doesn’t understand the features they build, they can’t sell them and/or help ensure that customers are educated and trained on how to use them. No developer wants to see their work go unused by the intended audience, so it is usually in everyone’s interest to make sure all aspects of the GTM plan (including Sales training) can take place. Help build an understanding of why it’s important for training to take place, and seek to understand the downside on their end of waiting, in the hopes of coming to a timing compromise.

There may be instances where you can also re-assess how critical sales training is to an initial rollout. Is this a feature that’s really critical to new customer adoption? If yes, then you’d want them trained ASAP for the launch. If it’s a nice addition but not the top value prop, perhaps Sales Training can come post-launch. Even in the best situations it’s very common for a PMM to have to adjust their ‘ideal’ GTM Plan as launch gets close, so flexibility and problem solving at this stage is also key.

Impact. If you dont do the training, will the feature be used? Will it create more bugs? I think of this as a cost benefit equation--What is the cost of holding a launch to do a training vs what is the cost of launching without the training? Being able to articulate that potential downside to doing the launch "wrong" will help your XFNs understand why youre making a specific recommendation. 

For example, if you can quantify that launching a feature without a sales training will equate to a X% conversion rate vs launching the feature with a training will equate to a 2X% conversion rate, then you can make the statement internally that the that it will take to train the sales team will yield double the return, so its a slight cost of waiting a little for a larger benefit. 

At a previous company I worked at, our PM team was excited about the speed at which they would innovate, so it was a big deal to them that we were launching new features at every sprint. The downside was that nobody was using them. So we had to create a monthly webinar series where PMM and CS had to manage (build, practice, present + create campaigns, emails, segmentation lists, etc.) to recap the highlights from the recent releases. I later worked at another company that did 3 large launches a year but it became so programmatic that it lost its value and the company actually generateed more MQLs off of highly relevant highly targeted singular feature campaigns than it did off the big release moment. So there's no set answer on how to do the launch, but more so what nuanced approach will work for your org to drive the most impact? 

I love this question because it reflects the reality of working between a sales organization and a technical team of product managers and engineers! This is a situation where you have to start with the success metrics for the launch, try to find alignment in the goals between sales and dev, and then find some creativity in the execution.

Here's a rough framework I use:

• What does success look like for the feature updates?

  • There are infinite flavors of this answer but if the feature success is connected to revenue attainment, there could be an opportunity to help dev understand that a delay to train could ultimately lead to more success.

• Is the feature update release urgency driven by customer need or by developer preference?

  • There are many dev teams that are incentivized to ship quickly to achieve team or individual goals. This isn't a very good reason to rush. If, however, the launch timing is accelerated because it unlocks a major, urgent, customer pain point it may make sense to figure out how to execute sales awareness with a fast follow of more in depth sales training after launch.

• Would a customer be able to discover and implement the feature update intuitively without deep education or training?

  • While sales should be aware of everything shipping, they may not be crucial to achieving the success of the launch itself. I have far fewer concerns about launching minor feature updates without in depth sales training because the relative importance of that information for sales is nominal and the success of the product can be achieved without the training.

• Are the features tied to any other major marketing launch moments?

  • This wasn't mentioned but this would be a major priority for me to complete a comprehensive launch training if we were executing marketing campaigns and motions around it.

As you can see, this is a classic case where you need to work with a philosophy (customer first, success metrics first) and then adapt it to the realities of the organization. Be committed to your philosophy, flexible in your execution, and overly transparent in your communications.