What are your best practices for building a cohesive partnership with Sales and Product Management?

Answer

5 Answers

Christy Roach

AirOps CMO • 6y

My biggest advice: serve as the connection between sales and product, and you'll strengthen your relationship with both teams. These two teams should be well connected but often are operating in silos and feeling frustrated with one another - and that's where PMM can step up and provide a ton of value. Almost always, sales teams feel like they have no idea what's going on on the product side - when things are launching, if their feature requests made it on the roadmap, how to get their customer ...Read More

1,174 Views
Christine Tran

Writer Head of Solutions Marketing • 7y

Purely tactical: I have a weekly cross-functional meeting with product and enablement, present on sales all hands, conduct regular road shows on sales team meetings, and meet on a case by case but semi-regular basis with sales leaders. Facilitate great meetings, offer PMM as a service, and follow up.

650 Views
Mike Flouton

Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 8y

I would stop using words like "cohesive partnership," first off :-) Mostly kidding, but be authentic. I haven't run into many sales people in my career who use purple prose like that. Communicate simply, directly and clearly.

Apart from that, walk in their shoes. Shadow calls. Show them you care. Comiserate. Go to the bar with them at the end of the day.

515 Views
Marie Francis

Workday Senior Product Marketing Manager • 7y

Have a true desire to partner, and explictly tell them that's what you want to do. Tell them what you are working on and why. Show them how they can be involved. Be specific. Ask what the 2-3 most important things they need from you are. Learn why those are the things they want. Figure out how to give them what they need without blowing up your priorities. Tell them what you need from them, then ask how best to make that happen so it doesn't duplicate or burden. Be nice, even when it's hard or ...Read More

1,254 Views
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia

Product School CEO • 6y

Great question! The interaction with the product and sales groups requires some collaboration, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be constant. An example of this would be to envision two vertical lines that go toward the same goal, but do not necessarily interact with each other all the time. A great suggestion they made was to include an innovative cloud-based project management software to centralize all workloads under a single platform. This way, the sales team will know at what stage a prod ...Read More

443 Views