How to foster collaboration between Sales & Engineering
How to foster collaboration between Sales & Engineering
It's overall goodness for all
A few years ago, at a previous startup, we had a change of CEO. On his first day, the new CEO had an all-hands with the entire company during which he announced that “we are all in sales now.” That comment didn’t go down well with the engineering team. Not one bit.
Over the next few days I had members of my team come to me concerned that the company would evolve to become “sales driven” and not engineering and product driven. Although those fears never materialized, the very negative reaction that this comment elicited made me ponder. Why is that selling elicits a reaction like this?
My experience with “sales” - quotations intended, I’ll elaborate in a bit - is that the skills you develop “selling” are highly transferable and ones that are applied far more pervasively than just exchanging goods for money. In fact, over the years I have encouraged many members of my engineering teams to embed themselves in sales opportunities, to shadow reps and to witness the selling process.
In this post, I will outline the methods I’ve applied to get engineering directly collaborating with sales and why I think are beneficial for the customer, the software engineer and the sales rep.
Ride-along with sales for a day
The ride-along as the name suggests, entails a member of the engineering team shadowing a sales representative for an entire day, sometimes for more than that. The engineer would attend all meetings that the sales rep has during that day. Those could be meetings with existing customers or prospecting with new ones. In my experience it is best to have a mix of both. There are many benefits to this ride-along.
First, engineers will witness the reality of selling their products. Selling is hard even if your product is amazing. You need to navigate budgets, use cases, the right timing on the customer’s end and competing products and priorities. One of the very first reactions the engineers have from these ride-alongs is realizing the difficulty of selling. The (naive) notion that great products sell themselves is very quickly shattered
Second, the sales reps benefit from interacting with a software engineer for a day or two. Sales reps (or sales engineers) need to balance the art of selling with understanding the technical nuances of the products they are selling. This is hard to do and admittedly they will not be able to understand these nuances as much as an engineer who built the product does. Having an engineer sit side by side with a rep for an entire day is a great learning opportunity. Not only is this a learning opportunity, but it can also facilitate the selling process. I’ve often witnessed how great sales reps will leverage that and have the engineers talk about the technical details about their product during a sales call. What better way to understand the product than from the person(s) who actively work on building it.
Third and perhaps the most important reason is this collaboration develops deep empathy on two levels. The engineers will witness the challenges of selling and develop empathy for their sales reps. That experience alone will shatter the myth that “products sell themselves.” Additionally, the engineers will also hear some of the objections that prospective customers have about their products. Hearing directly why a customer won’t choose your product is humbling. But it is also an opportunity to learn and ultimately develop deep customer empathy. All traits you want exhibited in your engineering team.
Unblocking deals
Another great avenue to foster collaboration between sales and engineering is in unblocking deals. In a previous post I wrote about how feature deal-making can start to occur as you move upwards into the enterprise sector.
When an opportunity like this arises, I default to having a member of the engineering team (typically from the team who will build said feature), working directly with the sales rep and the customer. This serves a few purposes.
From the customer’s perspective seeing that the engineering team is involved and actively trying to understand their use case and scoping the feature is very helpful. It sends a very strong signal that the company will make the necessary investments to enable the feature the customer wants.
Similarly, the engineering team benefits from this direct interaction. They are able to better understand the customers’ use case. They are also able to better scope and validate some key assumptions when developing the feature. There’s also a soft benefit from having this interaction. It humanizes and smoothens the interactions between both parties. The engineers know who the customer is - oftentimes by name - and vice versa. The deeper the collaboration between the customer and the engineers the better, and not just during this phase but down the road as well e.g. in an escalation scenario.
Putting guardrails in the process
I recommend that you structure the engagement process before sales and engineering before you go ahead and have your engineers engage directly with your sales rep. A key requirement is to ensure that you engineers understand that the sales rep is driving the selling relationship. This is especially true in the ride-along scenario. Sales owns the meeting. They own the agenda and are quarter-backing the relationship. It’s vital that engineers understand this dynamic, lest they kibosh a sales opportunity.
Conversely, during the unblocking deals engagement, it is product and engineering that are in the driver's seat. Sales is attempting to unblock - win - a deal and requesting that product and engineering invest to make that happen. The decision should ultimately be product driven to ensure overall alignment with the product strategy, although exceptions can arise. I wrote about that as well
The main exception is when the request comes from a critical, or high profile customer. While building this feature will only benefit this single customer, you might benefit a lot more than just winning that 1 deal. You might get tremendous market validation or perhaps a critical customer testimonial. If winning this deal can push your product and company to a higher elevation, then by all means consider going for it. Another obvious exception is the size of the deal. If the opportunity at hand is substantially larger than your typical deal size, then by all means you should entertain the idea of building it. You do need to be careful and consider the cost implications of building this feature and more generally acquiring this customer. Will they end up derailing your roadmap and your product strategy? If the answer is yes, then perhaps you pass on this opportunity.
Other reasons for why selling is important
Selling is often confused with the image depicted below. The act of pushing forward a transaction. Closing a deal.
In fairness, there’s more to selling that simply winning a transaction. Notice the second definition of the verb “selling” below. That one is overlooked, yet is arguably at the heart of what the job is. That aspect of “selling” is also far more pervasive than a sales rep selling me a car or an enterprise SaaS license.
verb
gerund or present participle: selling
give or hand over (something) in exchange for money.
"they had sold the car"persuade someone of the merits of.
"he sold the idea of making a film about Tchaikovsky"
trick or deceive (someone).
"what we want is to go out of here quiet, and talk this show up, and sell the rest of the town"
Source: Oxford Languages
The value of engaging in selling is actually the ability to develop all the soft skills needed to “persuade something of the merits of [something]”. That “something” could be a product idea. It could also be a design for a feature. It could also be trying to recruit someone to join your company. It can also be fundraising for your startup. This to me, is where the true vale of selling arises. It helps develop many critical soft skills: listening, persuasion, empathy, motivation and more. All traits you want in every member of your organization.
Perhaps after all, we are all in sales? Or at least should be.
Things I am reading or listening too
Unlocking the CyberSecurity Landscape from Contrary Research
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics: Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Quantum physics and more distilled into a very readable manner. Great book!
Earnings, Cash Flows and Free Cash Flows: A Primer. A masterpiece from Dr. Damodaran. Video version here