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?

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 ...Read More

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 con ...Read More

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% co ...Read More

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 (somet ...Read More