How To Work With Sales

At the end of the day, the whole purpose of any IT product is for it to be a success. In the commercial side of the house, this means that it needs to be bought by customers and therefore more often than not, you need sales people. What strange creatures they are indeed!

In order for your IT product to be a success, you need to learn how to work with the folks in sales. Despite what TV and the movies tell us, not all sales folks are like WKRP's Herb Tarlick. Instead, they are almost the complete opposite of IT staff: outgoing, people orientated, not always good with details, multitaskers, and often befuddled by technology (but quite good with anything that they need to sell with -- like cell phones). All too often, IT Product Managers are tempted to stand with the rest of the IT crowd and laugh at them. However, you really don't want to do this -- you desperately need their support for your product to be a success.

So what's an IT product manager to do? Simple: spend some time and learn to understand this beast known as sales people. One of the best ways to start is to attend a company-wide sales meeting. These are incredible events and they can be real eye openers. What you will discover is that a sales meeting is actually a recharging event for sales folks. Engineers look with amazement as sales people hand out awards to themselves and tell each other how great the company's products are and how weak the competition is. What we don't understand is just how lonely a sales job can be. IT folks get a chance to recharge every day when we interact with our peers -- we all acknowledge each other's skills and get respect for this. Sales people on the other hand spend their days being told "No" and having their products labeled as too expensive or not having the right set of features. A company sales meeting is how they recharge.

Realizing just how difficult a sales job can be means that an IT Product manager can change how you interact with sales. If you provide them with material and facts that they can just pick up and use with customers (no reformatting or rewording needed) then you've made their life easier. If you listen to what they have to say about your product and if you show them that their feedback is being worked into the product, then you'll win a friend for life.

Getting the sales team to be on your side is the first step in being the IT Product manager for your company's most successful product ever...

What The Heck Is An "IT Product"?

Good question,eh? I define an IT product as being a piece of code or a service that a firm's IT department delivers to a customer. The customer can be internal (ex: email or expense reporting tools) or external (ex: CRM, ERP, virus detection, anything that MicroSoft makes, etc.) You're IT department probably delivers a long list of products and services. This leads to the question...

Are you creating the right IT products? Does your staff have a polished and efficient product management framework with which to capture IT product requirements, develop the product, and then roll it out to your eager and waiting customers? Or is your IT product development process a mess: wrong products, missed schedules, and unhappy or (even worse) disinterested customers?

Hey, who ever took classes on this stuff? We all focused on programming languages, databases, and the odd English Lit. class. Well, they say that it's never too late to learn and it turns out that Product Management for IT products and services can be fairly easy and straightforward if you understand what you are doing. In this blog we'll share with you the good, the bad, and the really ugly things that you should both be doing and not doing.