In this video, we're going to talk about how to create
a strong interface with your sales and marketing team.
Just like your number one job with development is to bring them strong inputs, here,
your number one job is to bring the sales and marketing team
a nice clear tested view of product market fit.
That's the input to them.
Product, market, fit.
And their input back to the customer is to go and to amplify that product market fit.
Can they help you find product market fit?
They could, but that's really your job.
Sales and marketing is about scaling product market fit, not creating it.
Because it's very hard to create it from a product that's
not designed with product market fit in mind.
Traditionally, a failure mode is that,
you know, you ask, well, why is the marketing not working?
And they say, well we did it.
I don't know, it must be the product.
And it's like nobody gets why things aren't working.
So, how do you make sure that you're bringing to marketing
tested view of this product market fit and that
they are communicating back to you something that is testable?
Because, there is the saying,
half of all advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know what half.
Those days are winding down.
Media is highly testable,
and there are a lot of techniques
that allow marketers and product managers to understand what's really working.
What is marketing? Well, you know it's conceivably all this stuff here.
And, but one thing that I think is particularly important is growth.
So just specific activities that lead to
measurable incremental growth usually in the area of digital and
that's what this discipline of growth hacking is about.
It's a Silicon Valley take on what marketing is.
And this canvas here,
is a useful way to collaborate
with your marketing team and maybe your sales team on that.
The real independent variable here is the relationship
between segments and personas and value propositions.
For example, with Enable quiz,
the product manager may have gone out and found what,
we tried this product out on a lot of people and what we
found is that corporations that have
100 to 500 engineers and use a lot of
international talent and have a dedicated recruiter for that,
they really like the product because it allows them to
screen all the different international talent that they might want to use
and it makes it easier for the hiring manage to
understand where and how they might want to deploy international teams.
So that's a relatively identifiable, specific segment.
And then the personas within those you want to make sure that you understand,
you can articulate to the sales and marketing team how you've thought about them
and what you've learned by doing pilots and trials with them.
So, the tool that is the best thing for that is this personas and problems scenarios.
This testable view, humanized view of who the user is,
and then these ideas about what problems are we solving for them,
what are they doing about those now?
That is the best thing.
That is one of the most useful things for a product manager and
a marketing team to collaborate around especially for
a really creative empathic marketing.
And I think that what's nice about it,
is that in a high functioning organization,
you can answer the question of,
you know, what does the user want when you're making stuff?
And then you watch what does the user do and you keep making this more durable,
and then you're able to use that also as an input and the learning vehicle,
or a learning receptacle of what you're finding out and
promotion over on the sales and marketing side when you're selling stuff.
And so, this is an extremely important activity.
These value propositions and this testing,
this lean startups out testing around them
is the other part here of these value proposition.
So if we offer the service to this type of customer in such a way then they will buy it.
It is this a sort of basic proposition, and that's testable.
So we move from a successful pairing that you've
validated of these over to these brand experiences.
So how does the customer buy the product?
How do they find out about it before that?
How do they use it? Those are all brand experiences.
Your marketing team will have a view of the brand's personality,
how it looks, how it feels,
and then that will translate over into a set of
marketing activities that's their area of expertise.
They'll test things, they'll figure them out,
your job is to create a strong interchange with them where you guys
are both measuring what activity is working and why,
and you're continuing to learn more and more about the customer.
The interaction with a sales team,
it really parallels this,
hey salespeople, why can't you sell more?
Well, product manager, I don't know.
They don't want to buy the product,
or they don't want to be the first person to buy that product because you
haven't gone out and tested the product with people.
Well this deserves, it doesn't work very well,
and you want to avoid this.
One of the most common failure modes of
this type of interaction is what David Bland calls the Product Death Cycle.
When nobody uses the product,
or no one buys the product,
we ask the customers what features they would want,
they tell us something,
we go build that, they still don't buy it.
Well, customers will always tell you something if you ask them
but it takes a product manager who takes that expanded view of who the customer is,
who grinds out a disciplined view of product market fit
to break out of this cycle and take proactive activity on this stuff.
And that's how you create a successful interface with your sales team.
So, you bring them product market fit and they say, great, let's,
you found one customer, we'll find 10,
and then we'll find 100 and then we'll find a thousand to go out and sell it.
And that's how you get from a bad situation to a good situation.
And that idea that,
we shouldn't build our product for this big scalability,
we should find a few customers that really like it,
and then once we validate that,
then that's the time to scale.
That's really the essence of a successful interface with a salesperson.
Other examples of how to do that,
or if you use a CRM system, sometimes the salesperson,
sometimes the product manager maybe in conjunction with
marketing will actually go and load the target addressable market,
all the companies of the right size or characteristic into the CRM.
That's even more proactive example of defining product market fit for your sales team.
And this growth hacking canvas is a good place,
I think as well with the sales team,
to go and talk about that.
We'll close with this idea of why do these things fail?
And I think they, why do interfaces with sales and marketing go wrong,
why do products not sell?
I think a lot of it tends to parallel this scale friendly
versus this innovation friendly way of approaching things,
and we want to be here.
One of the biggest failures is that the sales team,
the marketing team, the product management team,
the engineering team, they're all siloed.
They're all out doing their own thing measuring their efficiency locally.
Whereas, really in a high functioning environment
with strong innovation and good product management,
you have interdisciplinary teams often practicing agile.
I would consider that and you may not have the prerogative
to organize the teams outside your area in areas like sales and marketing,
but what you can do is make it feel like you guys are part of the same team and create
these interfaces where you're bringing them
a nice strong view product market fit which I'm sure they'll appreciate,
and you're working with them on measurable, specific progress.
So we're not saying to each other,
you better do this, you better do that.
We're saying, hey, this is what we think.
Let's try this out together and see if it works,
if it doesn't work, we'll try out something else.
So, those are some thoughts on how you create a nice strong interface with your sales
and marketing team to scale up product market fit and drive revenue.
Alex CowanFaculty & Batten Fellow
