It’s a shame that the field and corp are so disconnected that they only interact once a year at kickoff, but that’s how many corps run things. Routine updates from to PM to the SE’s, and better yet, get the SE’s into the lab with the PM’s to learn new features.

Finally, I think I’m a better AE (Sales Rep) when I know how the product works; and I’m a better SE (pre-sales) resource when I understand the benefits and how to convey those in a compelling way to the prospect; and I’m a better PM (prod mgmt/prod mktg) when I spend time in the field with the AE’s and SE’s and customers to understand what works/sells.

Prepare a handout with the bullet points and keep to 7 words a slide.

On the slides, use those six words to sell the SEs on listening to the heavy technical talk to come.

On the confidential, insert some disinformation that you want your competitors to have. Insert different disinformation in each presentation. Eventually, you will know who the source is. If this sounds nuts, I used to use a product where the marcom said it supported MS Project, hardly, just barely, and only if you could see all the reporting, exporting, cleaning, and importing involved–tasks that were not automated. We paid for a subscription, so they had to give us something–a marcom release!

In another company, we had a market leading competitor that read all our marcom and beat us to market. Competitors don’t really need your presentations. If you listen to the same customers you will converge unless you actively change your vector of differentiation on some dimension in each release.

Great spot. 3 years ago, I started adopting the no talk to the sales team before 90 days prior to FCS. That went over like a fart in church. The senior managers kept talking about the upcoming developments to make it look like we were doing things.

In the last case, letting the cat out of the bag a whole year early, we essentially sent a quite profitable product to 0 bookings for 12 months until its replacement was available. The sales team was waiting for the futures.

Grrrrrrr.

Geoff

3. Do not tell the Cranky Sales Engineer how excited you are about the future—The Cranky Sales Engineer makes money selling real things that exist today…

Tell you what, let’s agree that we won’t get excited about upcoming features, if you stop trying to sell them before they get released.

Great point. I know that we (my company) often get our competitors “freshest” presentation material within 48 hours of first presenting, so I have to assume the flow goes the other way. I have tried distributing slideware as encrypted PDF, encrypted PPT (what a joke either of these are), or as hard copy only, but the sale management leans mightily on me to releast it in native format.

I would love for there to be a secure vehicle to get the goods into the hands of our sales engineers, and not worry that I am feeding the competitive analysis by my competition.

Of course, my boss is super trusting, and insists that We (my team) give the sales team any and everything, including the weak points.

CPM,

Great rebuttal. I look forward to the second post. I share much of your pains. I have one guy who gripes like the CSE, yet when he was exposed to the sausage making innards of the product management world, he ran screaming. He still has unrealistic expectations (Give away all the good features free, sell nothing, help the sales team by just discounting to the lowest level, yada yada yada).

Geoff