Having carried a bag for a long time, I understand how nice it would be if product management was on-demand, ready to commit new features at a moment’s notice. Certainly would help close deals. But it’s not the way the product gets built.

I agree with you about using Sales for input into win/loss. Real bad idea if you want objective data.

@Fiz – you’re wasting your time talking to sales first about win/loss. They will always say price is too high, product sucks when they lose. And despite all the shortcomings I am a masterful salesman when they win. Go straight to the source.

@Gander – Sales would want nothing more than to live without Marketing. They could finally get to use the stuff they make up but can’t get away with now. Don’t expect SEs to make cold calls. Their sales guys would have a cow. I’ve dreamed of being a greeter at Walmart.

While I am not strictly marketing, we really have no dedicated marketing role in our organization, so I am the one stop shop (I do have a shared marketing communication team to help with lead generation and collateral production, but I have to do all of the setup for them).

Just like Fiz, when I do a win/loss analysis, I get huge ego stroking herioics of the sales engineer in the wins column (usually a “Superior Sales” category), and all sorts of “missing feature”, “Can’t meet spec”, “Preferred to stay with a familiar brand” or “poor relationship”.

I also see that we win > 80% of the cases that we are in. That tells me that my field organization is gaming the system. We finally took away their ability to cull the opps that they wanted to hide (they had a good ride with THAT vector), but now it appears that people are holding their opps off-sheet.

I have not doubt that sales engineers work hard. I travel with enough of them to know what a life it is, and how hard it can be to make their plan. I truly know what it is like to do 6 countries in Europe in 4 days, eating at gas stations and living out of a suitcase at crappy Mercure hotels (where non-smoking rooms mean that nobody has smoked in them since last week).

You talk about earning the respect of the sales team, but that respect is a two way street, and while I never ever badmouth sales, I listen to a constant barrage of sales team abuse targeted at me both directly (when they call to ream me a new one) and indirectly via feed back on performance reviews and through the regional sales directors. You SAY you want the truth, but what you really want is the truth that makes your life easier, not what makes the product stronger and will bring the competitor to its knees

If sales really has such little respect for marketing and product management, they should try to live without it. In my world, I have a sales engineer that can go make a pitch at a solar cell company in an industrial park. While driving into this industrial park, we literally drove by 3 other solar cell makers. Do you think the sales engineer would stop and check in? Maybe you would, but in my world, the answer was an emphatic no. Is it too much to ask a sales engineer to open their eyes, and do some cold calling? 5 months later, and not a single follow up with any of the other companies we drove by…

Sadly, as one person is trying in the previous blog, I too have been trying to escape the PM role for about 3 years, but it seems that spending 12 years in this role, pretty much paints you into a corner. I think driving a Schwann’s truck might be a better long term career. Certainly would lead to lower blood pressure.

Marketing can craft incredible collateral, drive demand like nobody’s business and build a strategy around what product/engineering tells us will be ready.

Problem is, we can only go so far in actually delivering a feature or fix, even though we know it’s needed as much as you do. We probably got where we are without ever crafting a “hello world,” and while we understand the product in and out, we can’t build it. Oh we want to, but it’s not where our expertise lies.

I would hope that my marketing brethren would tell the Cranky SE the truth as often as we can (regular sales, maybe not, but the SE are a special breed, and we generally love you), and I hope that the Cranky SE realizes that engineering and product don’t always tell *us* the truth. Don’t shoot the messenger, man!