5 Basics of Scalable Growth That No One Taught You In Business School
Sales: Your Company’s Voice of the Market
Your sales team may be your company's best source of product intelligence—and you may be treating them primarily as a revenue-generating department.
Ask anyone about sales and the conversation generally starts with lead generation, pipeline, solution selling, quotas, getting the newest “logo” on the books and beating the competition. And now, how you can use AI to reach more people.
The truth is, Sales isn't just responsible for selling what you have. Sales is responsible for telling the rest of the company what the market is telling you.
Market Intelligence — What are competitors doing?
Buyer Intelligence — What are customers willing to buy now?
Product Intelligence — Where does our product win, lose, or fall short?
Sales is typically measured by year-over-year growth in new revenue, but misalignment between Sales and Product can stifle growth.
“Wait. We're paying our salespeople to have hundreds of conversations with the market every month, and we're not systematically getting that intelligence back to Product.”
This is where collaboration drag starts.
It isn't necessarily a lack of communication. Sales and Product may be talking regularly. The problem is that the information isn't moving through the organization in a way that changes decisions.
Product manages the scarce resources available for delivering the short-term roadmap, long-term vision, maintenance and innovation. Using sales intelligence to inform product decisions helps align the roadmap with what the market needs today—and what customers are willing to buy. The right knowledge ensures that they are solving the right problems.
While Product Advisory councils are useful in building stronger relationships with existing clients and some prospects, they aren’t continuous nor timely.
Gartner found that 44% of sales leaders identified limited cross-functional collaboration as a major barrier to getting value from sales analytics.
Without a continuous feedback loop with Sales, your roadmap can become a reflection of what the company believes the market needs rather than what the market is truly asking for.
A regular cadence gives Product timely insight into emerging trends in the marketplace. Sales should be regularly answering three questions for Product:
What are prospects trying to solve now?
Where are we losing deals because of a product gap?
Why are prospects choosing the competition?
Final Thought
Ask yourself if you are asking your sales team to sell or are you asking them to be the voice of the industry to your product team.
Your company doesn’t scale because someone works harder. It scales because everyone works together.