How do you deliver sales feedback to the product team to inform the current roadmap and make changes?

These four things have helped me influence the roadmap: Quantify the impact of feedback and even better, have an understanding of PM/eng lift required to implement. If you have a strong case for the impact (doing this will generate $$$ in revenue or resolve pain points for XX% of customers… which will generate $$$ in revenue) and a sense of how much eng work it’ll take, it becomes easier for PM allocate additional points for the work.  Tie feedback to company or product vision. Sales is focused ...Read More

On the surface this question is simple. How do you take sales feedback to product? But as product marketer your goal is not just to take sales feedback but to use it as one of your sources to make a case for roadmap additions or changes. Here is how I'd approach this: step 0 - build strong relationships with your sellers. step 1 - remove sales bias by aggregating feedback from individual sellers. They tend to have a bias towards the most recent or largest opporunity they have on hand or one that ...Read More

Before delivering any feedback, it can be helpful to take a minute and empathize with your product managers. Most are constantly bombarded with product feedback and things people think they should build: customer support, your biggest customers, CSMs, executives, their own boss, and even friends and family members! What’s more, they often shoulder a lot of the responsibility of the business outcomes — both good and bad — of roadmap decisions. PMs have an incredibly challenging job! With that sai ...Read More

“Develop a number of direct and in-direct forums to pass feedback to the product team”.   In the course of my experience, I have seen a combination of the following specifically for roadmap feedback and chatter from the field: Setup Weekly PM-PMM roundtables and 1:1 - Focus on sharing feature feedback, product gaps based on customer conversations, compete for notes. Offer Office hours: Develop the idea of office hours in conjunction with the sales enablement team to provide PMs with direct feedb ...Read More

There are a few touchpoints here: Our sales team posts a report after meeting with a prospective client that gets shared with all revenue stakeholders including marketing and product. So we're all seeing feedback on a per client basis although admittedly that can be a lot to consume.  We have someone in sales ops who aggregates that feedback and shares trends and that gets shared on a weekly basis. That could also be done in PMM but it works as is. There's a periodic discussion between sales/mar ...Read More

We have a few processes for this at Optimizely. First, the sales team provides feedback directly, primarily through our sales engineering team who document feature requests and gaps in sales cycles within a Salesforce workflow that connects to Jira tickets. PMM isn’t too involved in this (we don’t have to be involved in everything! Hard lesson to learn). Second, win/loss analysis is a powerful tool, whether you conduct it at a point in time, on a regular basis, with your reps internally or with ...Read More

@Devang Sachdev: Your "step 1" is so, so, so important! The worst thing you could do is bring every single piece of feedback from sales to the PM team individually. However, this feedback, in aggregate, has A LOT to offer. However, it's your job (because you asked the question...) to collect as much sales feeback as possible and organize/analyze it to find meaningful information.  In general, it is paramount to discern between: 1. What's loudest 2. What's most recent 3. What's most common Filter ...Read More