Sales Driving Development
I never thought I’d type the words I just have in my title. But I did. Why is that?
Well, surprisingly, this still happens today - and more often than we PM’s would like to think. What’s even more surprising is how everyone thinks and knows this is a bad plan, but still lets it go on.
I’ll see how clear I can make this for everyone. Folks that are actively selling should not be responsible for driving or managing product requirements and shipping things. I’ve been there, and been bit in the ass, and boy…it hurts.
I feel as though I need to get in some theory here, because I want people - whenever they think it’s a good idea to do this - to come to this post, slap their forehead’s and say, “yes! now i remember why that’s a no-no!”
First off, why do people think this is a good plan? It’s simple, really. But even before that explanation, what causes this issue?
Everyone (well, most people anyway) agree that market-driven products with touches of internal innovation are a good idea. “Listen to the market!” is rhetoric that many people spout off and hear daily. Sadly, it very rarely means anything. Companies must commit to this, and actually make sure people know that their opinion (unless backed by verifiable customer data) counts for little to nothing at all.
Now, back to why folks think this is a good idea. Isn’t it clear? Skip the intermediary. Why have a middle man gathering feedback? Just have Sales give their feedback and work directly with Development. It’s way more efficient than having someone sit there, aggregate data into a spreadsheet / list-type format and than write requirements around it.
Ummm. Doesn’t work. Let’s examine why.
Folks in Sales should only care about 1 thing: selling. Bringing in money. Their commission checks, and the size of said checks. How does this conflict with proactive and well-planned products? Hmmmm….
If you were on the brink of closing a deal, would you care about the most effective way that the market would benefit from a feature? No, no. You’d care more about the way the customer ready to write you a check will benefit from a feature. Or maybe how the customer after that one who’s going write you a fatter check will benefit from that feature, or a different feature (or 2 or 3).
If a Sales person doesn’t care about that, they should re-think being in sales. I expect it now, and it’s why getting Sales involved in product development is typically a bad call. Because if they could just get that 1 extra feature, they could sell 1 billion dollars of product by the end of Q3! After all, they have 500 prospects all lined up, ready to buy. Barf.
This is why product management sits between what I like to call the “market faucets” (Sales, analyst reports, etc… - IE, all the points of entry for market data itself) and development / getting the product shipped. They are there to aggregate and make sense of all the incoming stuff. They are there to say “no.” In fact, I did so the other day. Got on a conference call, prospect asked for a feature at 10:03am, I said “no - don’t have it now, not on our roadmap,” prospect thanked me for my time, we were off the call at 10:05am. I had logged the request in my spreadsheet of market data by 10:06am, and I was on to other things. Hard? Not really. Beneficial? In spades.
Think about it this way. Sales-driven products tend to end-up being very un-focused and jagged. 1 person asks for something, and Sales will put it in. Why? To close their deal. That’s what they are there to do. Not to act as traffic control around all the data coming in. That’s the job of product. In essence, not directly related to closing deals and bringing in money.
If it is, every feature will appear to be proactive. Then you get products that don’t really solve anyone’s problem - they just exist (and bloat) and try to solve every problem. Before you know it, Sales has caused their own pipeline to be shut down because the thing is unusable and needs to be re-thought and re-factored. Extreme? Maybe. But I’ve seen it happen, and so have a million others out there.
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Hi Adam,
It is indeed a pretty typical situation but saying “no” to a prospect can be much more complicated. I have seen a situation when if you had said “no”, the company could have gone out of business (without that PO). The prospect was a very important strategic account but the features it asked for were quite orthoganal to the company’s direction and could benefit only few other customers.
Well, the company is still in business and got a few $$ milions from the customer over 3 years, delivering custom solutions but has been having arguments and stressful situations ever since. The customer is unhappy with the fact that after paying all those millions they are still not influencing the vendor’s roadmap :(.
Tough situation if you are in a survival mode. But that PO helped the vendor to stay alive.
May 8th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
[...] Yeah, I get it. I wrote a pretty up-front article on Sales running development. Now, I still believe that this is a bad idea, with a couple of lightweight exceptions. Those lightweight exceptions, funny enough, roll right into providing market feedback. [...]