Real letters from one professional to another. Have you considered writing a letter to one of your associates? Just send it in and we’ll post (anonymous is OK).  Keep the bad language to a minimum and try to make it constructive. We won't edit except for typos.
 
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Dear Operations Team,

You can trust me!  You really can...we both want the same thing:  profitable, sustainable business that is based around our core products and services.  Most often during the sales process/cycle, customers get the opportunity to meet and know one person - and only one person - from our company.  That one person carries the corporate message and philosophy to the market.  In turn, they are responsible for communicating the needs and requirements of the market (customers) back to the company and help define the business rules around engagement and pricing.  That person is typically the sales professional assigned with a revenue and/or account targets.  When this is done accurately and with integrity, it sets customer relationships up for long-term success.

I recall recently bringing a six-figure deal with a Fortune 100 biotech firm, back to our operations team for review and sign-off.  After a thorough review by everyone from the deployment engineer to the COO, it was determined that the program was solid, well-defined, squarely in our competencies and had achievable deliverables.  The only comments that the team came back with was that the "pricing is too high, and do we really want a multi-year' agreement?"  I was astounded that of all the things to spend time on, the technical/product team questioned our negotiation and pricing strategy[PHH1] !  Essentially, challenging the sales person's judgment and capabilities.  Talk about crushing team spirit!

I refer to this as 'negotiating against ourselves' - professing that the terms, pricing, deliverables may be too much or too aggressive for the customer and wanting to debate this internally.  In many instances with only a cursory understanding of the client’s business, objectives and the value our solution may bring to the customer's own business.  Believing 'we' need the relationship more than the market and/or client.  [PHH2] Instead of allowing the sales professional to build the value, insulate us from competition, position as a premium solution set or take the extra time to define -and potentially increase the scope of the engagement - you too often want to jump in and 'just get the deal'.  This more times than not sabotages my and my team's credibility and ultimately our top line and bottom line revenues.  Believe me, I want the deal more than anyone else in the room.  I live for these opportunities and if I've done my job right - not skipping steps along the way - my approach of negotiating with the customer leads to larger and more profitable deals.  

By the way - we won the deal outlined above - with the 'high' pricing and 3-year terms!

Please operations professionals - you deliver and so will I!!  

Love, Your Sales Lead

One big discussion between product leaders, that often turns heated, is how to balance the direct input from customers with the longer term product vision. As anyone with bi-focals knows, you need two lenses to effectively navigate your world.  (BTW - Bi-focal lenses were invented by Benjamin Franklin around 1780.) Think about any product plan as having two guiding principles, 1) A long-term vision that is "market-guided" and a short-term vision or product plan that is "customer-driven".

A long-term vision (market-guided plan) is critical to any enduring market success. To quote hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, “A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” As a product leader, your long-term vision must see where your puck will be in three-to-five years.  Having a clear long-term vision requires great market sensing and analytical skills to understand the future of technology trends, to anticipate customer problems, track design trends, and to foresee the evolving market landscape. A clear long-term lens gives you the confidence to develop a clear market-guided plan and will always be clearer than any customers' should be. 

However, your near term vision (customer-driven plan) is also often cloudy. Your vision is filled with priority conflicts, ideas, current perceptions, and just plain noise. Customer insight clarifies your short-term vision to ground you with a deeper understanding of the customer problems you are solving and how they want to solve it relative to what they do today. Customer insight should drive your short-term roadmap and removes all the noise from your near-sighted challenges.

Quick case study – A media technology company is developing a new iPad application. Based on market data, technology trends, etc. the leadership team has developed a clear long-term vision on the top problems they want to solve. They have articulated key user scenarios, their technology architecture, and major design elements. At what point should the development team bring in customers to validate this long-term vision to be crystal clear on their V1 product (their short-term vision)? Short answer? Early and often.

Quality customer input should foster a healthy debate within the product team and provide a great forcing function to ensure that all development efforts support a clear long-term vision, but also that the short-term vision and tactics are clarified with real customer insight.

Even optometrists do a ton of short and long vision testing before getting you into the perfect bi-focal lens. Which is clearer; A or B?

How does your team balance Vision and Customer Insight?

Have you considered writing a letter to one of your associates?  Just send it in and we’ll post. Keep the bad language to a minimum and try to make it constructive.

Dear Salesperson,

I love you man… and I totally respect your challenges. I know I wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for finding business and closing deals. I know you’re busy and have a lot of crap on your plate, but I could use some help.

First of all, can you please not overpromise things to customers without consulting with me? I’m responsible for keeping the roadmap in order, clearly communicating it and trying to balance all of your needs with all of the other sales folks needs… at the same time developing a vision for our products… AND trying to work all the details with engineering.

Oh… on a related subject. Can you please not go directly to developers to ask for features without bringing me into the conversation? I obviously want you to talk to whomever you want (and you’re good at that talking thing), but if a developer (or even the VP) says they can do something, that doesn’t always mean they “should” and that it’s good for the product line.. or the company. It might be critical and I want to help you be successful with your customers, but let’s discuss the next time you have a need and be sure we get whatever you need into our product thinking. Also, if you’re looking for an understanding of which release a new feature is in, please talk with me or our program manager (we are usually in sync on what we are promising, but not always.)

I also wanted to talk with you about getting access to customers. I know they are “your” customers and you are responsible for making them happy… and continue to buy from us. But I need to talk with them too. And sometimes it’s hard to coordinate with you. You need to trust that I won’t say anything stupid, won’t overpromise what we have on the roadmap, and will always try to make you look good. I hope you agree that the more customers I actually can talk with, the better our products will be. Can we talk through how we should best coordinate my access directly to customers?

I know there’s more, but that’s all for now. The bottomline? Let’s figure out how we can BOTH be successful.

With deepest regards,

Your Product Manager

We all know how powerful the specific use of language is on communication. For example, $millions are spent finding that perfect phrase to be the tagline for our business,  contracts are bitterly disputed over the difference between "best efforts" and "reasonably best efforts", and team members are either motivated or demotivated with the twist of a phrase such as "good job" vs. "nice try."

Most companies spend a significant budget on sales and marketing activities to "tell" our current and potential customers about our products and services.  However, if you believe that it's important to "listen" to customers, then a question you have to ask yourself (and your company) is, "How much are we investing in feedback channels?"

You should, of course, include "market research" as a form of customer feedback, but if all of your "research" budget goes to focus groups, online surveys and industry reports, I'm guessing you're not as close to what your customers are thinking as you want to be, and might want to consider developing more direct ways to learn from customers.

Customer feedback channels come in many forms, such as:

Product leadership is challenging. We all want to consistently deliver successful products. However, the statistics are not good - most products fail. In fact, up to 80% of software projects fail according to Forrester (70%), Gartner (75%) and Standish (80%).  The number one reason cited? A poor understanding of real customer needs.

Given the large number of activities that product leaders are required to execute, ranging from high level market analysis to detailed specification reviews, there is no doubt why product leaders often struggle to lead development efforts using clear market and customer insight.  Also, the trend to Agile and Lean development methods require even faster and more integrated customer insight to fuel rapid, iterative development.

This blog discusses the methods, tools and issues around driving successful product development in fast-moving environments. In Jack Welch’s words, “You only have two sources of competitive advantage, 1) the ability to learn faster than your competitors, and 2) to execute on this learning faster.” We’ll focus intensely on methods to obtain “Rapid Customer Insight” and how to use this insight to drive good decisions throughout development and lead successful Agile and lean development efforts.