{"id":15832,"date":"2018-06-20T16:30:53","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T15:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=15832"},"modified":"2024-07-25T11:57:57","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T10:57:57","slug":"moving-sales-and-product-upmarket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/moving-sales-and-product-upmarket\/","title":{"rendered":"What we learned moving sales and product upmarket together"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Intercom’s customer base moved upmarket, it became increasingly obvious to us in sales that what worked well in our product for early-stage startups didn\u2019t for larger companies. To fix it, we had to change how we worked with our product team.<\/p>\n

We created our first sales function in 2014 and in the busyness of building out the team, we had little time to reflect on how our experiences on the frontline of sales could add value to our product roadmap<\/a>. We were laser-focused on helping everyone buy Intercom and nailing the fundamentals of SaaS sales.<\/p>\n

But we quickly realized that the job of sales at Intercom is two-fold: to drive revenue for the company and be the voice of our customers<\/a>. The reality is we have to master both if we want to expand our addressable market and retain our existing customers as they grow.<\/p>\n

In many ways, moving upmarket \u2013 even ever so slightly \u2013 forced us to go back to our building blocks. We had to look at the problems our new customers needed to solve with fresh eyes and build a healthy partnership with Product to turn these roadblocks in the sales cycle into solutions that customers would love. Here\u2019s how we did it with a few lessons we learned along the way.<\/p>\n

Trial and error: adding sales input to the product roadmap<\/h2>\n

In 2011 Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world<\/a>. Today it\u2019s no wonder that the strong majority of companies want their strategy to be driven by product, not sales and that\u2019s likely for the best. Creating one-off builds for a handful of customers puts you on the fast track to a Frankenstein product and a customer acquisition strategy<\/a> that doesn\u2019t scale.<\/p>\n

Where does sales fit in at a company driven by product strategy?<\/p>\n

But where does sales fit in at a company driven by product strategy<\/a>, not short-term revenue? How can salespeople give a voice to what\u2019s happening in the market while respecting the long-term product vision<\/a>? These are the questions that followed our first upmarket customers whose business pointed out the ways in which Intercom did and didn\u2019t work for larger teams.<\/p>\n

Our initial attempts to get sales and product teams on the same page were a start but often felt like ships passing in the night. As salespeople we were used to talking to prospects about their goals and providing concrete recommendations based on product functionality. That meant taking a prescriptive approach and going to our product team with the exact solutions our customers had requested:<\/p>\n

\"Prescriptive<\/p>\n

The problem was, being too prescriptive made it hard for our product team to see how our requests would benefit the rest of our customers and made it far more likely for Product to say no<\/a>. We didn\u2019t want to be the sales team<\/a> that made one-off requests for every customer and as a result, we switched to a thematic approach. But in doing that, our suggestions became far too broad. Making requests for things like “user permissions” left it up to our product managers to guess what we meant:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Broad<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

While we wanted to deliver value to our upmarket customers, we were actually underplaying our hand. Our magic as a company has always been our innovative approach to problem-solving<\/a> and by being too prescriptive and then too broad, we prevented Product from playing to their strengths.<\/p>\n

Our solution: aligning sales and product around “why”<\/h2>\n

After a lot of trial and error, we realized that as a sales team, we had to go back to first principles<\/a> and remove all of the assumptions we’d made about the solutions we were proposing. We had to peel back the metaphoric onion and ask, why do our prospects and customers need X or Y feature?<\/p>\n

By focusing on \u201cwhy\u201d instead of \u201cwhat,\u201d we were able to give our Product team the information they needed to solve problems for our upmarket customers without limiting how our product managers would actually go and do it. The key for us was to be more specific and less prescriptive.<\/strong> Here\u2019s an example of how we collaborated with Product by focusing on the problems to be solved:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Sales<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today we crowdsource the problems to be solved from folks on our sales and customer solutions teams. We ask the team at-large to stack rank their requests using anecdotal and quantitative data from our CRM<\/a>, e.g. number of deals blocked. Then my team of sales leaders and I curate the list and add an order of magnitude ranking. The top 25 requests are the ones we bring to our roundtable with Product where we discuss what it\u2019ll take to get a viable solution into the market and get consensus on our top priorities for the quarter.<\/p>\n

This is also our opportunity to share customer stories that bring to life the problems to be solved. In an ideal world, Product would have a direct line to every customer, but given the scale of our conversations as a growing organization, we leverage our position on the frontline of sales to add color that might otherwise be missing. Our aim is to inspire the kind of action that drives real customer impact.<\/p>\n

Three tips for making product requests<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s easy to get carried away coming up with product requests, especially when you\u2019re catering to upmarket customers with sophisticated needs. Here\u2019s a quick recap of how to keep product requests actionable and well-defined:<\/p>\n