Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

The Role of a VP of Sales: Balancing Feature Requests and Building for the Future

19 Feb 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:51

Jason M. Lemkin advises on the role of a VP of Sales in prioritizing customer feature requests while preserving product vision. Key points: a VP of Sales should balance short-term deal-driven asks (often within ~12 months) with longer-term product plans (2+ years), load-balance feature requests across the year, favor features with multiple requests over single-customer demands, and communicate weekly with product teams about budgets, story points, and near-term roadmaps (current work and plans for the next two quarters).

Chapters

They will do it. They will listen and they'll say, maybe I don't need that HubSpot integration after all. Maybe. Right? Because what a VPSL should be doing is taking look. A vpsl. You can't. The product has to look like cos look 5 years into the future. Product has to look about 2 years into the future. And you really can't ask a VPS sale to look more than 12 months into the future because that's, that's where they're next on the line. But a good one will load balance feature requests across the year and they will listen to all that because they'll actually be in sales, they'll actually be in deals and they'll be listening. They'll realize, look, even though going to lose this deal to HubSpot, I've gotten four SAP requests. The last. I'm, I'll, I'm going to take that bet. Even if I'm wrong, I'm going to take that bet. You've got to give them that and, and you got to talk about it every week and say, look, here's your budget, Jane, here's your story points, your whatever, your 10%. This is what we're currently, this is what we're building now for you objectively and this is what we're currently planning for the next two quarters.