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...

Good vs Bad IT Product Managers

So what makes one IT product manger any better than another? I've spent a lot of time both working as a product manager and working with other product mangers and I think that I've got this figured out. I think that we can all agree what a good product manger looks like: they have successful products that customers want and internally everyone wants to work on their product because it is recognized as a "good place to be" from a career point-of-view. On the other hand, a bad product manage is also recognizable because their products are struggling, nobody really understands what they do or why they are any better than anyone else's products and internally nobody is excited about working on anything that touches this product.

So how do good product managers get that way? The key is that really good product managers know their product and the environment in which it operates inside and out. This is the one thing above all others that sets them apart. All too often, program managers get placed into product manager positions (I mean after all, aren't they really the same thing?) and don't make the transition that is required to fully become a product manager.

Program managers (and bad product managers) tend to focus on just the day-to-day parts of creating and launching a product. Good product managers do the same; however, this doesn't take up all of their time. Instead, good product managers spend a considerable amount of time trying to prepare customers for the new product / features and making sure that end user feedback gets back to the product developers even as the product is being created.

You would think that at least bad product managers would have projects that run more smoothly because of the extra time that they invest in program management activities. However, this is generally not the case. I believe that the extra level of motivation that the rest of the team brings to a good product manager's product development program allows him/her to spend less time managing the process and more time making sure that the product will be well received.