How can I use external experience (sales for example) to bring different opinions to the table to gain influence and persuade other teams?

Leveraging external-facing teams like sales, account management, and CX is one of the best ways to bring diverse opinions to the table and gain influence with other teams. For example, I’ve worked with sales leadership to build a win/loss analysis program that identifies the biggest product gaps and assesses the potential TAM or revenue opportunity tied to each gap. This isn’t just a one-time exercise—it’s an ongoing voice-of-customer program where insights are presented to product teams on a qu ...Read More

Getting a variety of feedback from a variety of people is the best thing you can do to influence and persuade teams. I always like to poll multiple teams and different levels of people to ensure that I have as many examples as possible. Make sure you ask internal teams - sales (including pre-sales and SDRs if you have them), post-sales like customer success and account management, other marketers even - for their input. Even better try to gather external feedback too if possible. Reach out to fr ...Read More

I think you need a mix of experiences AND data to transform what might seem like different opinions into persuasive arguments with impact.  Experiences provide the context and detail, relatable quotes or example customer pain points, etc., and Data provides the measurement - how big of a problem is this? How easily can we quantify it? What impact might it have? That way it can be prioritized. In your example, perhaps a sales team says "Customers tell us they want this feature / benefit we don't ...Read More

Having worked well with Product Marketing in the past (and as a sales leader) sales can be admittedly tough to generate buy-in. However, sales is needy and tends to make an overwhelming number of asks from marketing. The problem I've seen is that sales is not educated on the role of product marketing and therefore less supportive. I would start with educating sales on their role/responsibilites, goals & how impactful product marketing "is" or "could be" if they have a strong line of communic ...Read More

The best example I can think of is actually with analyst relations. Most product-led B2B SaaS companies make the same mistake. They build what THEY want to build, or what a few friendly customers want to build. all the conversations/ideas stems from those two input areas usually. You introduce a third input. You represent with the broader marketplace is seeing and hearing. This actually gives you more power and clout as far as getting your ideas across. I call this the Tri-Input system (Product ...Read More