How do you close the gap between sales and product when sales "sells" what they want to sell?

This is a very common scenario and an amazing opportunity for product marketing. The first thing you want to do is understand what is (or isn't) resonating with customers. Riding along with sales or customer success is the best way to get first hand information. But, conducting and analyzing win/loss data is a close second. Having data, both quantitative and qualitative, will help you: Identify the gap between what is happening in the field and assumptions being made in product development Provi ...Read More

Sales will always sell what they want to sell, i.e. what brings them a bigger deal faster. The trick is to educate sales on how the product (or a new product feature) will help them win those big deals and not become a blocker. Part of this is proper enablement training and materials that address: Why the product is better than the alternatives in the market What problem does the product solve for the customer (what is the JTBD that is impacted) How the customer's way of working (JTBD) will be b ...Read More

This kind of behavior is actually a gift. If my sellers have picked up on something that they think makes a meaningful difference in their sales cycle time, I want to know about it! If they're positioning something differently than I asked them to, there's a reason for it, and it's rarely because they just don't want to change their habits. The positioning is either too complex, or it doesn't resonate, or it's not easy to deliver. All of these problems point back to PMM. In my experience, if the ...Read More

This sounds like a situation where the product and sales organizations are working in silos and not collaborating. There should be conversations from early days to review product offerings so sales can validate the commercial viability of a new product. If sales doesn't think it will sell, you should re-evaluate the product. Is there a key feature missing? Create messaging for objection handling and work with sales to provide new feature timeline. Is the pricing model wrong? Recommend changes. I ...Read More

I am a huge advocate of doing everything you can to get PMM out in the field. This way you have the ability to influence what gets talked about, and can see first hand what reps are saying, and how customers are responding. But this can take time, and requires the Sales team to pull PMM in...typically after PMM can gain the trust of Sales. So, leadership should be aligned in that THIS is the message that the company is moving forward with. There should be clear guidelines and agreement on how fa ...Read More