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Sales

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

by The Cranky Product Manager on January 26, 2012

in Sales,The PM Profession

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.

{ 41 comments }

The Brain of a Sales Droid – A Visual Guide

by The Cranky Product Manager on December 12, 2011

in Sales

Behold, a visual guide to the inside of a SalesDroid's brain, or more specifically, an Enterprise Software SalesDroid's brain, as viewed from Product Management. 

Yes, the lack of artistic merit in this drawing is profoundly pitiful.  Thank goodness the Cranky Product Manager has a day job.

If you receive posts via email, you probably didn't see the image below.  So visit the blog http://wp.me/po3Ly-wr

inside Sales Droid Brain

{ 98 comments }

[Guest Post] Death to Funnel Hawks

by The Cranky Sales Engineer on July 2, 2009

in Guest Posts,Sales

The Cranky Sales Engineer swears that the next marketing person who flies into town and plunks himself down in the CSE’s cube and asks, “So what deals are you working on with my product?” will be boiled in his own bullshit.

The CSE does not need a marketing funnel hawk.  Funnel hawks, for those who don’t know, are a parasitic form of marketing dweeb who think that they can maintain a funnel report by badgering the sales force.  The sales force avoids talking to these people for the same reason they don’t reply to spam, because any communication will cause a sudden and annoying increase in valueless communication.

Compare this approach to another marketing person who has a 100% handle on the funnel.  When this person learned about a deal I was working on, she hooked me up with a dynamite piece of training collateral that taught the customer how to use the product while highlighting all the features.  The CSE keeps this marketing person apprised of all deals in hopes of getting help in closing the deals.

(BTW.  Do not confuse funnel hawk activity with the CPM’s gathering of pricing information by talking to the sales force.  I can’t imagine who would fire a PM for such an activity, but that person needs to try a new line of work.  Perhaps something involving a squeegee and a dirty rag.)

Do not become a funnel hawk.  If you want to know what’s happening in the field, provide useful help to your sales team and you will be welcomed with open arms.  Random calls asking  “How’s that deal coming?” will not make you anyone’s friend.  Instead, become a sales partner, and you will get all the info you want.

Oh…alcohol helps as well.

{ 10 comments }

Is There Anything as Predictable as a Sales Droid?

by The Cranky Product Manager on May 19, 2009

in Sales

For years, the Cranky Product Manager has been dealing with all those whiny Sales Droids. 

You know, those people who moan all the time about how Sales is The. Hardest. Job. Ever., as they yap on their bluetooths while driving around in their Porche 911s?   You know, those dudes/dudettes who always win deals because of their mad persistence, unequaled interpersonal aptitude, and their wicked awesome sales skills? Yet when they lose it’s always the fault of the product or the price?  

Yep.  Those Droids.  You know who the CPM is talkin’ about.

Anyway, the Droids have been bitching for YEARS to the Cranky Product Manager about the price of her product.  “It’s way too expensive.”,  “I can’t sell it at that price,”  “The competition is priced so much lower we can’t compete,” “We need to drop the price by at least 20%,”  blah, blah, blah. 

All that time the Cranky Product Manager resisted dropping the price.  Yes, her product was priced higher than the competition, but it offered way more value.  Plus, being a wicked big geek, the Cranky PM created this elaborate pricing model spreadsheet based on shitloads of historical pricing and sales data .  It showed price was relatively inelastic. 

Well, fast forward to 2009.  The economy is in the shit and the Droids all miss their numbers by a mile.  Their screaming about the “too high” price reaches 120 decibels.  Loud enough that it catches the attention of The Man, AKA The Quasi-Playboy, AKA The Dirty Semi-Old (50-65 years old) Man Who is Always Scanning the Marketing Events Planning Staff for New Blond Mistresses.  AKA  The CEO.

So, the CEO calls the Cranky Product Manager into his office.  After complimenting her hair and the way her jeans fit, asking her if she is still happily married, and trying to give her a George-W-style shoulder rub,  The Big Boss tells her to drop the price to the one the Droids are begging for. 

The Cranky Product Manager sez, “No Effing Way,  Mr. CEO (and I mean that in the most respectful way).  Behold my awesome spreadsheet!  Dropping the price will NOT lead to more units sold and will make the product unprofitable.”

“You look hot when you’re angry,” sez the CEO, “But we’re still dropping the price.  I want you to create a new forecast based on the new price.  Not your lovely theoretical spreadsheet.  Instead, do it bottoms-up and go ask each sales rep how much he’ll sell at the new price.  Oh, and let me know when you tire of that husband of yours.”

And so the Cranky PM announces the price cut to the field. She then asks each rep, one at  a time, how much product he/she was committing to sell based on the new price.

And SHOCK OF ALL SHOCKS, the Droids sandbag it.  Apparently, even with a 25% price cut they can only sell about 3% more units than the numbers they had signed up for just 3 weeks earlier. 

Guess price wasn’t the issue after all.  WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED THAT WOULD HAPPEN?   Oh wait, I know this one…. Yep.  The CRANKY PRODUCT MANAGER guessed it!

AS EXPECTED, the New and Improved bitching and moaning from the Droids began immediately .  “The price is too low”,  “You just made it 25% harder to make my number!“, “With a price like that, people will think we offer less capability than the competition”, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Will. It. Never. End.

Even the 2-year-old CrankyKid changes his mind less often.  And even the CrankyDog can remember past events  better than Sales Droids. 

There are two things you can always count on at DysfunctoSoft: 1) The Droids will never like the price, and 2) The CEO will always skeeve you out.

{ 20 comments }

Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer on how to get R-E-S-P-E-C-T

by The Cranky Sales Engineer on March 30, 2009

in Marketing,Sales

The Cranky Sales Engineer has been truly touched by the tales of abuse heaped upon his brethren in Marketing (see the Cranky Marketer Posts).  Sitting among a din of the kind of violin music that must surely accompany such tales of woe, the Cranky Sales Engineer helps in the only way he can.  So, to wit, here is The Cranky Sales Engineer’s Guide for Marketing: How to Get the Respect of Sales.

There is ONE major issue the marketing person must understand in order to gain the respect of Sales.  This understanding is easier to come by when one has actually worked in sales (hint: never use the phrase, “well I’ve never been in sales myself”  to try to influence a sales person), but a marketing person who has never carried a bag or a number can still work to intellectually understand the issue.

The marketing person must understand the massive, crushing, and depressing rate of failure that goes into every sale, especially a sale to a new account.  For a smaller product,  you typically call 100 people to find 10 who have some need for the product, but just one who will be able to negotiate the budgetary hurdles necessary to buy the product.

For larger deals (larger being B2B deals of a million dollars or more) a sales person must find at least three million dollars of potential business to guarantee one million dollars of revenue.  The other two million will be lost to budget cuts, organizational changes, and competition.

Unless you can understand, in your gut, the true and alarming rarity of a real deal with real revenue behind it, you will not be able to truly gain the respect of a sales person whose personal fortune is tied to bringing that rare real deal through to closure. Unless you truly get what the sales team is dealing with or asking for, you will be deemed irrelevant to the process of success and shunted aside.  You gain respect, by making the rare live deal happen.  Here are something things to do to gain respect:

Tell the Truth

If a product is not going to be ready in time for the deal, tell the sales person it won’t be ready.  If a feature won’t be out, tell the sales person it won’t be out.  You know what will happen if you do that?  You will probably get yelled at.  Because the sales person has sifted through three tons of dreck to find this one live deal and now you’re saying we don’t have the product the customer is asking for.

When that happens, suck it up and step back.  Let the storm pass and find out why the customer wants the feature.  See if you can get to the solution a different way.  If you can’t give a firm, real, date for when the feature will ship.  Be pessimistic, but be right.

Deliver on Time

If you are the kind of person who delivers when you say you will, the Cranky Sales Engineer can build mountains with you.  But if you don’t deliver, you are just another problem to be managed or worked around.  Being a problem is not the road to respect.

Work in Field Time not Factory Time

Things happen fast in the field.  When a customer asks a question, a clock starts.  A fast clock.  A clock that wants an answer in a day.  A clock that cannot wait for everyone to get together and have a meeting to discuss the question, and that meeting will happen next week because that’s when we have that meeting, and no, Cranky Sales Engineer, you can’t tell the customer anything before that meeting, because it will probably be wrong, and yes you’ll have to stand out there, with your thumb up your ass, looking like an idiot because we can’t move any faster than getting an answer to you in a week.

The field works fast.  If you want respect, you need to work fast too.

Earning Respect

Folks in marketing have a handicap when it comes to gaining respect.  The things they do are just so damn intangible that its hard to say whether marketing has gone well or gone poorly.  This is a handicap when it comes to dealing with the Cranky Sales Engineer who is measured on hard dollars and being connected to successful deals.  The Cranky Sales Engineer doesn’t have time to figure out if marketing is really working.

Instead, the Cranky Sales Engineer has been called into an account because, after hundreds of phone calls, and dozens of meetings a sales person has found a real live wiggling deal that could actually result in some money.  And now, at this crucial point, the sales person needs the Cranky Sales Engineer to make the product hum and demonstrate to the customer that the CSE’s company is worth the money.

This is when marketing can earn the respect of the sales force, by recognizing the difficulty of finding a real deal and responding quickly and accurately when a deal presents itself.

Marketers who recognizes the difficulty of finding a real opportunity and responds to calls for help with urgency and accuracy will be respected.

The rest will be ignored.

{ 10 comments }

Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux

by The Cranky Product Manager on March 26, 2009

in Guest Posts,Marketing,Sales

The Cranky Product Manager is SUPER LAZY these days. Once again, she’s letting someone else do the work – the Cranky Marketer – the dude/dudette in charge of Marketing at a B2B tech company. This is part TWO of three (see part one here).

This post is a  longie but a goodie, so check it.

—————-

The Cranky Marketer on The Problem with Sales and Senior Management

While I really had a tough time with Engineering when I was a Product Manager, it was nothing compared to the problems I have with Sales, now that I’m in Marketing.

As individuals, most salespeople are pretty decent folk. There are a few assholes in every company who don’t give a sh*t about who they abuse en route to meeting quota, but when it’s getting late in the quarter or the economy sours, and account reps are hustling to hit their number, even the normal ones turn into the highest paid set of babies and whiners you’ve ever seen.

And while they’ll blame everyone in sight if needed, a lot of the complaints point to Marketing.

“There weren’t enough leads.

“The lead quality was sh*t.”

“I needed new success stories. The existing ones aren’t relevant to my prospects.”

And my favorite of all:

“My territory is different than other territories. The standard collateral doesn’t apply to my patch. What else have we got?”

And while this is clearly an exercise in creative excuse making, Sr. Management never fails to give in to this crap and an edict comes down from above to generate more “quality” leads, “refresh” the collateral etc. And the downward spiral continues.

There are ways to address this, but most companies don’t have the patience, skill set or culture to fix the problem. They’re too caught up in the quarterly tactical objectives than to do what is right.

First of all, even in companies where there are way too many leads – and believe it or not, I once worked in a company where even an order taker could meet quota – a number of reps complained there weren’t enough leads.

Why is it that no matter how good the lead generation programs, 98% of leads end up in the dustbin? And isn’t it such an amazing coincidence that no matter what company, no matter what product, 49 out of 50 people who are counted as leads turn out to be uninterested or unable to buy the product? What are the odds of that?

Here’s a novel idea: put some accountability on the sales people beyond simply “making their number”. I’m pretty sure some territories are better than others, but there’s no way all sales reps are doing their jobs even moderately well.

I’ve seen sales reps who can’t tell you what business their prospects are in, what the business issues are for some of their larger opportunities or whether any channel partners have in roads at a prospect and can help move the deal forward. Forget about channel conflict or compensation issues for while. The question here is whether or not the rep even has a clue about the dynamics of the account. But that’s rarely analyzed. It’s time consuming to actually keep on top of sales reps. It’s a lot easier to tell Marketing to do a better job.

For many reps it’s simply a numbers game. With enough leads, even a very unsophisticated approach can yield results. And instead of trying to maximize the value of the deal, they’ll discount more to close the deal sooner. But then, they’re compensated on quarterly revenue so why not take a smaller amount now right?
So it’s not their fault. It’s Sr. Management who set up the sales compensation plan that forces them to behave that way. And that compensation plan along with Management’s tacit consent of the “big baby” behavior, in turn forces Marketing to fall into line and ensure the reps are properly “fed and nurtured”.

Moving beyond the sales issues, it turns out that virtually every Sr. Executive wants to be a Marketer. Yup, absolutely true. Why else do they forward emails they receive from competitors to the Marketing department, with comments like “FYI, check out the messaging in this email I just received.” Or, “Has your team seen what X is doing lately?”

OK, thanks Mr. CFO. First, I’m glad you are taking such an interest in our competitors that you’ve decided to surreptitiously add yourself to their marketing database. But do I forward you links to our competitors’ 10K statements pointing out how much better they are doing financially than we are? Or how about this Mr. CTO? Maybe I should start forwarding the patents our competitors are filing, you know, just as an FYI.

And I hate nothing more than the Sr. Exec who decided to spend 5 minutes actually reading our website, and then starts making suggestion on how to “tweak” it. Listen, those pages on the website have been like that for the last 9 months. What took you so long to send your suggestions forward? Needed a bit of time to think about them? Thanks, but we’re way ahead of you.

By the way, we don’t “tweak” anything in Marketing. We have a plan and we’re trying to execute on it. We’re measuring our work at every stage in more detail than any other part of the business. I’ve got so many metrics and measurements I could unload on you, you’d think you’re an actuary.

And one more thing. The website isn’t simply a “website”, its a freaking web application. It’s got integrations into our CRM, bug tracking and order processing systems. The Partner and Customer portals are sitting atop a home-grown CMS (cuz the company was too cheap to let us license a real one) and both portals are tied back into our Identity Management System. There is a lot of content on the site that we have update regularly. It’s a critical part of our business operation.

And yet, we have to keep it up and running with no budget, on second rate servers and without full support from IT. Why? Because they’ve decided they’ll only support the “back end” databases etc, but the “front end” belongs to Marketing. Gee, silly me. I thought we all worked for the same company.

I could keep going but I’m sure you get the point. Somewhere between having to baby sit the sales team, let everyone think they are a marketer, and maintain a complex web application with only a minimal development staff, we still have to do our marketing jobs. And none of this includes all the crap we have to put up with from Product Management.

I’ll get to that in the next installment.

Also in The Cranky Marketer Goes Off

  1. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off (Part 1)
  2. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Goes Off – Part Deux
  3. The Cranky Product Manager bitchslaps the Cranky Marketer
  4. Guest Post: The Cranky Marketer Part 3 – The Problem with Product Management
<< Previous in series | | Next in series >>

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Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Shares Sales Secrets

by The Cranky Sales Engineer on March 17, 2009

in Customers,Guest Posts,Sales

Annual planning is nearly over and the Cranky Sales Engineer almost has his quota for the year.  In a tequila inspired fit of account-planning ecstasy, he has decided to share how he and his brethren actually sell products and what product managers can actually do to help.

The Cranky Sales Engineer and the rest of the sales force look for a mystical confluence of three features to make any deal happen:

  • A Technical Problem—Nobody buys anything because its “cool” or “neat” unless they are penniless early adopters.  The rest of the market needs a problem to solve or they aren’t interested.  We need to find a real problem.  Not a “my back bothers me sometimes” problem but a “I’m going to knock my own septic molar out with an ice skate” kind of problem.
  • A Relationship—The Cranky Sales Engineers spends an inordinate amount of time at sporting events, dinners, lunches, and, yes, pub crawls, with customers.  Why?  Because customers will only buy if there is a relationship. Without it, they don’t trust us to actually solve the problem.
  • A Business Proposition—There needs to be a business deal on the table that makes economic sense.  Without it, the problem remains unsolved, and the relationship is just another excuse to go to the ball game.  The business numbers must add up.

The Cranky Sales Engineer is constantly astounded by product managers who manage to be completely irrelvent to this process.  These managers talk about features with no problems.  In fact, that’s all they talk about.  Features they have, features they will have, features they don’t have, and the Cranky SE’s favorite: features that don’t work.

What can you do to help your SE’s sell your product?

  • Tie features to technical problems—You should know what gawd-awful problem you’re solving before you invest in new features.  It’s true, that sometimes the problem being solved is that the customer is tired of five mouse-clicks when there could be three. But that’s a problem if you have to do it 100 times a day.  Show us a technical problem to solve.
  • Make sure the features work—Trust is one of the keys to a sale, and the Cranky Sales Engineer loses trust and credibility every time a feature isn’t fully tested.  Here is a clue to when your sales engineers have lost the customer’s trust: the customer asks, “Don’t you guys test your programs?  Why do I have to do it?”
  • Ask the sales team about pricing—You can screw up pricing two ways.  If you make it too high, we can’t sell the product.  But worse, if you make it too low, we can’t make any money selling the product.  Here’s a thought.  Ask us.  Ask the good account managers and good sales engineers.  The good ones don’t want to sell cheap products, and they especially don’t sell on price.  Make it worth our while.

It’s hard to make all three parts of a deal line up.  Customers have no money.  They are retrenching.  Help us find toothaches and give your sales team the tools to pull the the deals together.

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Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Reports from the Front … of the Room

by The Cranky Sales Engineer on February 23, 2009

in Guest Posts,Marketing,Sales,The PM Profession

Despite the Cranky Sales Engineer’s best efforts to educate product managers in the proper way to train a Sales Engineer, he is now sitting towards the front of a large room being pummeled by wordy slides.  He has written this dispatch from the front, in hopes that product managers will understand the nature of the immense pain they inflict on their captive audiences.

Some highlights of this death march of a presentation:

  • One hour into the presentation the marketing guy put up a slide called “Agenda”.  It is ten items long. He has promised us that he will talk about each one in detail, this has given the Cranky Sales Engineer the time to write this dispatch.
  • The presenter insists on using slides that the sales force has been presenting for the past year.  The Cranky Sales Engineer thinks he presents them better.
  • The Cranky Sales Engineer has suggested a murder/suicide pact to the SE next to him. The suggestion was met with enthusiasm.
  • After hearing the presenter say “But, you already know this” for the third time, the Cranky Sales Engineer knows why he drinks.

Only an hour and twenty minutes have passed … The Cranky Sales Engineer observes that he must be reaping the wages of sin.

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Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Weighs in on Career Change

February 20, 2009

The Cranky Sales Engineer has been reading Paco’s musings on moving into sales with some interest.  Having been laid off four times, and having made the transition between marketing and sales and back and back again, and having been a manager of sales engineers, he offers the following suggestions: Numbers, Numbers, Numbers—The Cranky Sales Engineer [...]

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Please Welcome the Cranky Sales Engineer

February 11, 2009

Remember the Cranky Sales Engineer? He did such a WICKED AWESOME job of bringing the CRANK (plus a dose of BITCH, MOAN, and don’t forget WHINE) to this blog, that going forward he’s gonna be a semi-regular feature on this here blog. Yippee! This is WICKED AWESOME because the Cranky Product Manager is finding it [...]

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