Why Sales Bitches About Product Management & What to Do About It

You’ve heard that old chestnut. You’ve seen it in a million articles. The big advice Sales Droids offer to Product Managers is “Don’t just talk about features.  Tie the features to problems.”

And whenever the Cranky Product Manager sees Yet Another Article offering this advice, she thinks, “Doesn’t every product manager already know this stuff? Duh? How is the Cranky Product Manager going to create a blog post from this nugget of obvious non-wisdom?”

But then the Cranky Product Manager thought about it.  Then she had a nice glass of Chardonnay. Then more thinking. And then mentally watching the game film from all the customer presentations she’s ever given or watched another PM give, and from her years of observing SEs and SalesDroids interact with the customers.

And here’s what the CPM came up with.

When It’s Good (with a sex analogy on the side)

There are times when the SalesDroid-PM-Customer interaction is, well, orgasmic: everyone is in sync, everyone is providing what the others need at exactly the time they need it, and everyone leaves satisified and revved up to do it again.

It does happen sometimes. About as often as the Detroit Lions winning a game, but it does happen.

When It’s Bad (with yet another sex analogy)

But more often, it is a clumsy, inept dance, with everyone thinking he’s/she’s giving what the others need but completely missing the mark. Kind of like the Cranky Product Manager’s freshman year boyfriend. (oooh! badump dum.)

In these cases, the Cranky Product Manager will bet ONE MILLION DOLLARS that the product manager in question truly believes she is tying each feature to customer benefits, all while the SE/Account Rep thinks the PM is just blathering on and on about features.

The Disconnect

How can this happen?  Because there are several steps between  the “we added Warp Drive in release 2.0″  PM-ish statement and the “Warp Drive increases your revenues AND decreases your costs”  Sales-ish statement.

Using this example, the PM would probably say “We added Warp Drive in release 2.0.  That makes our rocket ships now go faster than the speed of light, which means space travel will take one bajillionith of the time it currently does”. And the PM often leaves it there, believing she successfully tied feature to customer benefit.

Meanwhile, the Droids think the PM left out the business benefit.  After all, she did not tie the warp drive feature to either “saving money” or “making more money” (the only two customer benefits some Droids can understand).

Thus the schism.

To most PMs, it is OBVIOUS that faster space travel means people will spend more time working instead traveling, and will thus become more efficient, saving money.  And that with Warp Drive we’ll be able to reach more of the galaxy and thereby increase the number of customers we can reach, increasing revenue.  blah, blah, blah.

In fact, it seems SO obvious that many PMs worry they’ll insult the customers’ intelligence or annoy them if the Product Manager explains how each and every feature ultimately saves money or increases revenue.

Truth is, the customers probably need a bit more hand-holding.  As Product Managers we are genetically engineered for our superior feature-X-yields-benefit-Y perception. We forget that not everyone thinks like that.

But on the OTHER hand, the SalesDroid who can only talk about “saving money” or “making more money,” (aka “lower TCO” and “increased ROI”), often seems like a huge dumbass to the customer. Trust the Cranky Product Manager on this, she once was a customer.

An Obvious Tactic That Often Works

So, for Product Managers, here’s a technique that sometimes works:

1. Before demo-ing or presenting the roadmap or whatever, ask the customer about his/her problems and the benefits that he/she is seeking from your software.  
2. NOTE THE EXACT WORDING THE CUSTOMER USES TO DESCRIBE THE SOUGHT-AFTER BENEFITS.  
3. During your demo/presentation, tie the features back to the specific benefits the customer seeks, using EXACTLY the same wording.

Of course, this technique only works if you are able to talk to this customer one-on-one beforehand; it works less well if you are presenting to a huge crowd at a conference.  Also, this technique does not guarantee that the SalesDroid will be happy, only the customer.  After all, the SalesDroid might not understand the benefits the customer seeks – they might be too  ”low level” for a Droid to possibly comprehend.

This concludes the Cranky Product Manager’s “Obvious Lesson of the Day.”  

No doubt, huge swaths of PMs are out there saying “Isn’t this advice obvious?  Doesn’t every product manager already know this?”  Hopefully, most of you do.  But for those who don’t, or who occasionally forget, hopefully this advise is more specific and more actionable than that “Tie features to benefits” platitude.

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Tagged as: business+benefits, customers, product+features, product+management, Sales