This article is based on Matt’s brilliant talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Denver. PMA members can watch the talk in its full glory here!
I have some bad news for you: you're a salesperson. Yup, even if you have “product marketing” in your job title, you’re a salesperson in your work.
Now, there’s no need to have an identity crisis. I'm not asking you to pick up a quota or change your comp model. What I'm here to talk about is how you can use a salesperson's lens to build better relationships with your sales team, create a more effective go-to-market strategy, and ultimately win together.
Before we get into that, let me introduce myself. I’m Matt Heng and I’m a native Nebraskan. I'm also a former Oscar Mayer Wienermobile pilot, so if you want to learn what it's like to have to smile and wave eight hours a day every day for an entire year of your life, come find me. Today, I’m the Head of Product Marketing at Omnipresent, a global employment solutions solutions provider.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked for a lot of different companies, and looking back over my résumé, it’s clear that I am a glutton for punishment when it comes to working with sales teams. I've worked in annual SaaS, I've worked in monthly SaaS, I've worked in consumption-based models, I've worked with SMB sales teams, and I've worked with eight-figure enterprise sales teams.
So, I like to think that I know a thing or two about what it takes to get a sales team on board with you as a product marketer, and I want to talk you through that today.
We’ll dive into how product marketing is from Mars and sales is from Venus, we’ll get into how to approach product marketing from a sales point of view, and then we’ll look at some options for how you can bring this to life within your organization.
Let’s do this!
Product marketing is from Mars and sales is from Venus
How many times have you asked yourself the following questions?
- How can I get sales selling new features, not just our tried and true core product?
- How can I get them to engage with my messaging materials?
- How can I get my sales leaders engaged in product launches?
- How do I get quality feedback from my teams to inform messaging and roadmap decisions?
It often seems like product marketing and sales are working from completely different scripts. While that may seem like a challenge, it’s actually a strength. After all, we’re trying to solve the same problem – just from different perspectives.
Now, let's have a little empathy moment. As a product marketer, it's easy to feel like a lonely island without resources, controlling only outputs, not outcomes. We focus on scalability and systematization. We’re the castle builders, always looking towards the horizon.
But let's take a moment to step into the shoes of our sales teams. They’re all about personalizing our systematic approach – every day, every minute, every deal cycle, every month. That's a tall order, to say the least.
In product marketing, we have the luxury of testing and iterating internally, with insiders who understand our products, markets, and daily struggles (and even know that we don't like tomatoes on our sandwiches). Salespeople, on the other hand, have to test and iterate live, in real-time with outsiders, every day, week, and month. That's a seriously tough gig.
We might make mistakes that cost us a bit of pride or internal buy-in, but generally, they don’t cost us money. However, salespeople’s mistakes can cost them money, every day, every week, with every deal, and every month. It's rough.
So, it's easy to fall into the mindset of, "My salespeople don't like me, they don't want to engage with me." But I think it's essential for us as product marketers to remember that salespeople, at their core, embrace a higher level of uncertainty in their lives for potentially greater rewards.
When we're considering how to work with sales and bring them into our world, fundamentally, our job is to sell them certainty. Whether we’re asking them to engage with our product marketing efforts through enablement, a new product launch, or a new process, we need to consider how we can make our sales teams’ lives slightly more certain.
How can we bring some structure into their wonderfully chaotic world? If we make this the aim of all our interactions with sales, we'll surely find more success.
How to approach product marketing like a salesperson
So, what does this look like in practice? I’m as big a fan of frameworks as anyone else, but I also believe that we can have too many of them. So, let's not think of this as another framework, but rather as a lens. If we approach our interactions with sales through this lens, we'll undoubtedly find more success.
Whether your organization uses MEDDIC, Challenger Sale, Solution Selling or another sales methodology, at the end of the day, your salespeople are always engaged in four key activities:
- Discovery
- Qualification
- Pitching
- Handling objections
If we structure our engagement around these four activities, we'll hit the mark much more often. Let’s delve into how we can use these activities to our advantage as product marketers.
Discovery
During the discovery phase, whether it's a product launch or new enablement, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- What can I learn about my sales team's operations?
- What are their qualification criteria?
- What are their reporting structures?
- What questions or concerns might they have?
- How are they incentivized?
That last question is crucial. If you don't know where your salespeople are making their money, you're going to struggle. Salespeople are motivated by money – while that might not sound great, it is because it tells you where you can find success.
Qualification
After the discovery phase, it’s time to qualify. Before launching a project or engagement with the sales team, you need to understand who exactly should be involved. Is it individual contributors? Sales leadership? The sales ops team? And what are their needs? Knowing this will streamline your efforts and make your engagements with sales more effective.
More importantly, you need to ask yourself if what you’re bringing to the table is actually a major pain for your sales org. For instance, if you want to refresh your messaging but they think the current messaging works brilliantly, your new initiative is not going to fly.
Pitching
Next, let's delve into pitching. How can you tailor your deliverable to resonate with your audience? Salespeople are masters at this. They know their audience, understand their pain points, and tailor their message on the fly, every single day.
While I, personally, couldn't tailor my messaging on the fly every day, it’s certainly possible to develop a structured approach to connect with sales teams effectively. As a product marketer, this should be something you’re good at already.
Are you leading with benefits, not just features? And importantly, are you considering the benefits to your sales team, not just to you as a product marketer? Ever started a presentation with the reasons why a particular initiative benefits you and the rest of your organization? I know I have, and maybe that's not the best approach. Instead, we should always be considering what we bring to the table for our sales teams.
Social proof is another key piece to consider. This isn't just about customer testimonials, quotes, or analyst reviews. Have salespeople been involved in the beta testing of the products? Can they provide social proof for you? Are there other teams within your company that regularly engage with sales and have their trust? Can they offer social proof?
Objection handling
Once you pitch, it’s time to move on to handling objections. Have you addressed the needs of your audience in an approachable way? Does your pitch connect to their motivations?
Salespeople want to close deals and hit their quotas, so it's not too hard to anticipate their objections: "This will take too much time," "I don't have the capacity for these changes," or "This won't resonate with my particular niche, region, or vertical."
By proactively considering these concerns, we can prepare to address objections during product launches, process rollouts, or new messaging campaigns.
Five strategies for collaborating more effectively with sales teams
So, how do we bring all of this to life? I'm not suggesting that you toss out your go-to-market process or all the work that you've done. Instead, I'm advocating for a new perspective. Through my experience of working with sales teams plus the wisdom of my network, I’ve identified five strategies you can implement to speak to sales in a language they’ll understand.
Strategy #1: Lead with 'what's in it for me'
The first strategy comes from my friend McKenzie Pedersen, a fantastic product marketer who now focuses on sales enablement. This strategy is all about qualification, pitching, and objection handling. You've got to lead with 'what's in it for me'. For salespeople, this is usually about money. For better or worse, they're motivated by it.
So when we're launching new products, features, processes, or enablement tools, we need to clearly show the monetary outcome for our sales team.
Pro-level tip: If your organization is predictable enough – if you've got enough lead time, and if you've built strong relationships with your sales ops team and compensation team – you might want to directly incentivize the adoption of your product, feature, or process.
This could be through bonuses, contests, or quota relief. It doesn't really matter how you do it, but if you can point a salesperson towards something and say, "If you do X, I will pay you $50," they're going to do it, and keep doing it until the cows come home.
So, remember to lead with 'what's in it for me'. While you can certainly expand this beyond money, I've found that money talks the loudest.
Strategy #2: Find and leverage leaders by circumstance
We all know the organizational leaders who make decisions – the sales VPs, the ops managers, the heads of support, the finance bosses – the folks who get to say 'yes' or 'no' to what we want to do. It’s absolutely crucial to involve them in this process.
However, I'd argue that 'leaders by circumstance' are even more important. These are the people who, when you ask for their opinion, are surprised, saying, "Wait, me? You want my input? I can lead here?"
A great example of this is me back when I worked in customer success (CS). For some reason, I was the go-to person for our Google Analytics integration. It wasn't documented anywhere, nor was it an actual product - it was something we'd cobbled together, and all the info about it lived in my head. So, even though I wasn’t a manager, director, or leader, I was the leader for that integration.
My advice to you is to find these leaders by circumstance in your organization. They are the people others turn to when they're lost. It could be a salesperson with a magic touch for handling pricing objections or a CS person who can talk a client down from canceling. Find these people in your organization, and leverage their influence.
Pro-level tip: Have your leaders by circumstance present your messaging and positioning for you.
We often treat new messaging and positioning as our precious babies, and it can feel scary to hand them off to someone else. However, a salesperson who has consistently hit their quotas over the last few quarters will be more successful in promoting new messaging and positioning to their team than you will be if you’ve never carried a quota.
Using these 'leaders by circumstance brings certainty to the process and helps build social validation within your organization.
Strategy #3: Steal what’s good and scale it
This strategy comes from my friend Kevin Zentmeyer, Global Product Marketing Lead at Square. His suggestion for how to think like a salesperson is to steal what's good and scale it.
In essence, we should identify the successful strategies used by our top-performing salespeople and then adopt, validate, and scale those strategies for the rest of the team. This could apply to anything from how pricing is explained to how discovery is conducted or how a product is demoed.
There's no need to conduct numerous user interviews or come up with new strategies on your own. It's often best to find someone who's already doing it exceptionally well, give them credit, and structure their approach in a way that less successful reps can replicate to achieve success.
Strategy #4: Position feedback as a growth opportunity
Have you ever asked your sales teams for input on a messaging framework or a product launch, only to get nothing back from them? I'm experiencing this right now as I'm trying to build a messaging framework for my new organization and I cannot for the life of me get a salesperson to engage with it.
One strategy that I’ve found to be effective is to integrate product, enablement, or messaging feedback into your sales team's growth framework. If you can collaborate with your sales leadership team to make it an expectation that, once per quarter or half, everyone within their team should participate in a client call or give feedback on a piece of collateral, it can do wonders.
One key insight I learned from a VP of Sales at a previous company was that every sales leader, consciously or not, has their sales reps stack-ranked – and at the bottom of that stack are reps who may not be suited for a career in sales.
Offering to proactively help these individuals find new opportunities – for instance, by involving them as core stakeholders in the messaging process – brings huge benefits to both sides. It takes the onus off the sales leader to keep these individuals engaged and provides you with a built-in feedback channel.
Strategy #5: Create approved autonomy
This last strategy comes from my friend Jeff Meeter, the founder of a product marketing consultancy. This idea centers around the fact that one size does not fit all when it comes to enablement.
All you need to do is break down your enablement materials into separate components so your salespeople and other stakeholders can assemble what they need for the deal they’re working on. This helps them feel like they have autonomy, but at the end of the day, they're still delivering a consistent message to the client.
For instance, I've found success in simply offering the same datasheet in a horizontal orientation rather than vertical. It's incredible how even a small amount of choice can empower a salesperson.
Now, don't get me wrong, it's not going to prevent them from dashing in at the eleventh hour, breathlessly requesting an entirely new pitch deck within 24 hours. However, it can go a long way in helping them feel capable and self-reliant, rather than shoehorning them into a rigid interpretation of what we believe is the right approach.
