Understanding sales is important for PMs in enterprise

Sales plays a crucial role in enterprise SW. The sales process is also complex. PMs need to have the understanding of that role and the process.

Sales can hold valuable information about customers and market on multiple levels:

• SalesOps might have market-level data about customers' willingness to pay, perceived value etc. (which demonstrate itself in the data that SalesOps gather such as how long it takes to close a deal, how hard customers negotiate etc.)
• Sales engineers (solution architects) can have insight into customer needs/pain points and customer problems
• Sales reps will have feedback from customers' execs they deal with.
  • However, they might make the feedback quite urgent to help them close a deal, or the feedback might be more about messaging (how the product is communicated) rather than produt itself.

The most common demand from sales is usually the roadmap: Sales need to sell not only the current product but also the future vision.

Tags: product management

ID: 2021-0511-0700

References:

• Reeves, Gaines – Building Products for the Enterprise