Matt Barcomb (Twitter: @mattbarcomb) has over 18 years of experience as a product development leader that takes a pragmatic, systems approach to change. He partners with organizations to help leadership teams develop and deploy strategy, optimize product management and development, and evolve traditional HR functions into modern talent development practices. Matt will be presenting this week at the COE Summit at the Fisher School of Business at Ohio State. Matt can also be found at his own website, http://Odbox.com.
An excerpt from next week’s podcast:
Joe: Do you see sales and product development playing a different role together now? Is it something that is, I’m not selling as much as maybe there’s more collaboration between the two or sales bringing ideas to product development?
Matt: Oh definitely. I mean well, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think there was an upside. I’d grow vegetables in my backyard or something. From a house sales benefits product perspective, I mean those are the people that are out in the field. I mean hopefully we’ve got product managers also out on the field. If product managers are just sitting in their office, maybe they should do something else. But these sales guys that are out there, they’re the ones that are talking and having the relationships with the customers. Now that’s a gold mine of data and information, to be able to leverage those relationships to do user research and market research and they’re absolutely — they’re just like a golden pipeline that can feed product development, product management.
The flipside of that is that the developers, the product managers – they need to understand how to actually use that. A golden shovel doesn’t do you any good if it’s just digging you a deeper hole. But sales needs to learn how to not just sell the road map and that’s a challenge because as an industry, we’ve definitely sort of set this expectation with both sales departments but so buyers of enterprise software. So this idea that sales should just go out and sell whatever isn’t kosher; they shouldn’t just be selling the road map. This idea that sales need to know what’s on the roadmap, sales needs to be able to sell the future, to be a little provocative — when I get to talk to sales departments and I’m like, come on guys, even used car salesmen don’t sell the future so you should be at least as good as a used car salesmen who can sell the car that’s in front of them now.
There’s a little bit of — I’m not going to say that all products should be able to sell themselves, but I would say that sales needs to be able to tell the product that they have today. If they truly can’t, there’s a very different problem to solve I think which is how do we make the product something that’s a sellable product. It might be that maybe the product needs enhancement, it might be that maybe the product has a low quality, it might be that there’s not actually a market for the product and those are some hard questions to answer for some companies. If they can learn how to sell first the product they have in front of them, then they can start leveraging some of these good technical practices. They don’t need to become engineers or even sales engineers, but they can understand concepts like continuous delivery, continuous deployment and they can understand that what product management does from a strategic fit. Like sales can learn to sell the fact that we’re sensing the market, sensing the direction that we’re doing it, that we’re getting it right, that we do care about customers, they can sell our support, they can sell our services, they can sell the fact that when we do sense the market that we do release things quickly, and they can sell the history.
Now, of course, a lot of places don’t have this history yet of being able to deliver frequently, deliver in small batches, so it’s going to take a whole team effort, like a whole organizational team effort to get better at market research, user research, fast, frequent deployment development, good support staff, good sales staff. They all have to work together, and they all have to swim in the same direction.
Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do