How to Bridge the Gap Between Product and Sales Teams: Lenny & Jason

We just need this one feature. Can we just get this on the roadmap? What's the best way to help that salesperson understand why it's not happening? Help them feel like, okay, I get it. Is it exactly what you said, like, okay, we could change everything. Here's the story points you have this quarter.

Well, are you assuming, are you assuming that PM is the header product or empowered enough to make the decisions?

I'd say yeah, that PM could put something on the roadmap if they think it's important.

The reason I'm a little confused just because I want to get it right is I'm hearing what I'm hearing, which maybe isn't what, what you said. What I'm hearing is a junior, a junior IC rep is talking to kind of a more mid level product person about the roadmap. That's a bro as and that's. You want to have that. That's like one of the reasons we actually go to the office. Because those discussions don't happen on Zoom Lenny. They don't happen. And you want those discussions to happen, but you don't actually want them empowered. You want them to say, listen, I will talk to my boss. That's the right answer. It's too confusing. This stress between product and sales is a good thing. It's a, it's a sign of a well run B2B company when there is stress between product and sales. It's a good sign. It is a good. If there's no stress, you're not, you're not in enough deals. You're not in enough deals if there's no stress. But the stress has to have enough process even in a startup that it doesn't break. Because as your question loses the fact it can break organizations again and again. Right? People get people resented on either side. Right? And so you, this is one thing where the answer has to be, look, we, we can chat about it over lunch. We can chat about this and, and, and, and actually you've got a good idea. You, you individual contributor. I'm going to tell my boss on Monday that I think we should do that. I'm going to, I'm going to use a little social capital, say we should do this, but you got to push the decisions up. That's as far as you can go. Make recommendations. Otherwise instead of that one, one stressful conversation at the VP of you've got a hundred, you've got ten times, ten times a hundred. And again, they're fun lunch conversations but they, they wreck you.

So the advice there is basically talk to your manager. I'll talk to my manager. They need to hash this out. It's not my call.

I think you gotta push it up. And I think you gotta force the VP of sales and the VP of product to have this weekly meeting about the budget. And that will force them to have enough, just enough organization on their team so that it can all be surfaced up. Cause that means they each have to have a meeting with their team for 30 minutes each week and say, I'm gonna put it up on the whiteboard guys to my sales team. I'm gonna put up on the white, like the sales team's gonna say. And I've been in many of these meetings where you force the sales team to force rank what they want. And you, you end up, I can tell you, Lenny, a hundred percent of the time in a sales meeting when you force do a whiteboard force rank, you end up walking out with very different outputs than when you start the meeting and sales, a hundred percent of the time on the product side, you need to do the converse. You need to say, we owe sales 10% of our points. So we're going to put in a weekly in our team meeting. We're going to put in 15 minutes of our team meeting and we're going to make sure we have the priorities right from the sales team. Let's go over what I got from Linda. This is what she says, Is she wrong? Should we do something? How can we help the sales team be even more successful? And what inputs is the team hearing? And they can raise their hand and they say, look, I just had this hallway conversation with Bobby. But honestly, Lenny, I can build the subspot integration in a day. What? I thought it, I thought it was really hard. No, I did it my last company. And listen, actually, we can actually outsource it to Bob and Linda at this agency. I know for 20 grand they'll build it next week. I'm like, that's a magical moment, right? That's a magical moment. But you got to each have these parallel meetings or it's just, it's just, it just that the good thing, that tension can become a, can become debilitating, right? We've all seen those fights, those almost fights that break out. And they come from a place of passion, right? But you gotta have structure.

Great advice. Another trend I've been noticing is that product teams are taking on P and L responsibilities and revenue goals. What's your sense of is that good, is that bad? How do you think about that?

For product teams, you want everyone to be aligned on the big picture with revenue goal for the end of the year is the question. You mean having financial bonus bonuses and stuff tied to hitting the plan more.

That their KPIs and their OKRs are essentially like this much revenue. You need to drive this much revenue from your experiments, from your product launches.

As you can see, I have a lot of opinions on. On things here that are data driven. They're live experience. This one, I don't. I need another year in the oven. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. What happened the last 18 months is in customer success, which is a. Which is, you know, in the old days it was related to product. Now it's. It's less so, which is I think is unfortunate in customers in the last 18 months. This happened all across the industry. 24 months ago. Customer success's goal was happy customers measured in retention. Sometimes nrr like net retention with upsells, sometimes with grr like just logos. How many logos say that was your only job? Happy customers, happy customers. Then things got harder in many areas of B2B and every customer success team last year their goal was revenue. You need to bring in more revenue from existing base. And it destroyed customer relationships. It had. There is a leading public company. I will not name them. I'm a positive guy. I will tell you. A company we all have used for years and loved, okay? And they did this to their customer success team and they came to us last year. We paid $299 a month for this product for our team. They asked us for $50,000 up front or said they would turn it off that day, that week me was that week $50,000. That's what happens when you weaponize. And so customer success, I know this is going to trigger some people, but it is true. When I talk to leaders, customer success got weaponized and I don't like it, okay? I don't like it as a product. As a. All founders are product people. I think I don't like it as a product because I think it's bad for customers. That experience I got was horrific, wasn't it? That 50,000 being told and it got walked back and.