Dr. Mark, I am a product manager and salespeople are constantly hounding me for new features saying that they need them for their prospects to close business. Meanwhile I’m up to my eyeballs in features that needed to be implemented “yesterday” for irrate customers, and I’m busy putting in new processes that tie our requirements more closely to engineering’s bug tracking system. What do I do?
Thanks,
Dodge DaQuota
Thanks for your e-mail Dodge.
Curiously, I received an email last month from a salesperson Sir WantsToSellAlot, describing his frustration with PM. Perhaps I should get the two of you together? 🙂
But seriously, turn about is fair play and just as I advised Sir WantsToSellAlot to consider the pain of the PM, it’s time for you to do some soul searching and ask yourself, how much you know of the sales pipeline, deal flow and requirements related to imminent deals and revenue. Rather than saying you need to fend off the salespeople, you should be turning around and running full speed in their direction. Let’s do a little test:
How would you answer the following questions?
- Do you know what the financial sales targets for your company are each quarter?
- Do you have a login to your company’s CRM system? (e.g. Salesforce.com, RightNow) If so do you examine the detailed info on important deals on a periodic basis?
- Do you have a login to your company’s support system? (often just an extension module of your CRM system) to review the requirements captured by your support team on behalf or customers and aggregate that information together with the prospect requirements entered by sales, as part of their deal concerns?
- Do you sit in on weekly sales meetings and listen to get a sense of critical deal flow, competitive concerns and emerging prospect requirements?
- Are you and your fellow PMs “buddied-up” with a few sales people to offer them a personal conduit into PM?
- Is your relationship with them good enough such that they trust you to support them on deals, or even invite you to go on sales calls with them?
If you flinched or shuddered at any of those questions, and your mind drifted back to interactions with Engineer, MRDs, PRDs, integration with the development bug tracking system, you are MISSING THE BIG PICTURE!
The reality is that while the “PM Backoffice” as I call it is important. The “Frontoffice” is where the action is, and merits much more focus that you may be affording it. If you are focused on sitting behind your desk and just building relationships with your dev team and getting reviews of MRDs, PRDs and only popping your head above your cubicle to verify a prioritized list of features for the next release, you need a gut check … and for the sake of your company, do it quickly.
Get out of your trenches, put yourself in the shoes of your salespeople. Use the CRM system to run reports to get valuable data regularly. Feel free to become an expert in the CRM system (like salesforce), it will benefit your career and skills.
Christine Crandell, SVP Marketing at Accept Software blogs about the important topic of sales and marketing alignment. Assuming you the PM are in marketing, and not in engineering (BTW if you are a PM in an engineering department … get out, and get out NOW!), you should read and apply those concepts to your PM and requirements gathering process.
Additionally, many of the CRM systems like salesforce.com and RightNow technologies are starting to add capabilities that support requirements and idea gathering. You should also check out Accept Software who have an excellent product for helping you organize, collaborate and prioritize all points of the PPM (Product Planning and Management) process. But make sure you connect everything with the “top of the funnel”. i.e. the CRM system because that’s where it all begins. AcceptSoftware mentions integration briefly here.
Think of your PM feature important relative to a sales pipeline. Here is a sales terminology to PM features association:
- suspects=suggested features, off the top of someones head or a passing casual mention, no associated prospect/customer identified
- leads=features that are related to specific prospect or customer that have been uncovered
- prospects=features that relate to potential deal revenue or a significant customer (or group of customers) demand
- deal=locked and loaded features for the next release
If you didn’t understand those terms, then definitely you need to get stuck in with your sales team and familarity with your company’s CRM system becomes even more important. What are you waiting for, get going!
P.S. If you didn’t know your company’s quarterly rev targets, that’s a whole other issue which we need to talk about later and how you should be best friends with your VP Finance and CFO. Send me another email on the subject and we’ll talk.
If you are interested, here are the other posts in my Dr. Mark Eteer series. Thank you for reading and keep the questions coming.
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About Dr. Mark Eteer
Mark Eteer was born in the UK in 1966. He studied computer science at the University of Essex and after 8 years as a programmer, moved into marketing. He obtained his PhD entirely online. His success marketing for major corporations and minor startups, combined with his no nonsense straight forward guidance on all matters marketing, has led him to be sought out by some of the most well known marketing stars in Mollywood. Although unsubstantiated, he claims that he was the marketing/PR mind behind Tom Cruise’s behavior on Oprah, although he admits that Tom took it a bit too far. He currently lives in an exclusive suburb of Mollywood.
As a leading provider of scalable, enterprise-wide, high ROI marketing ideas, Dr. Mark uses his cloud-based, next-generation approach and solar-powered, game changing methodology which leverages social media to answer paradigm shifting questions about marketing and product management.
Dr. Mark would like to thank Ramon Chen for allowing him to be a guest blogger here on Cloud ‘N Clear and understands that Ramon disavows any knowledge of any bad advice he might offer.