Selling your products
Selling your products
A vital and most underrated engineering skill!
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Selling is one of the activities that I often find engineers shy away the most from. Yet, it is likely one of the most under-rating and important activities an engineering leader can do. Historically, I have attempted to spend 20% of my time working with my sales teams to help sell our products. There are many reasons why I think this activity is vital to any engineering leader, which is the topic of today’s post.
Image source: https://unsplash.com/@markusspiske
Selling is where the rubber meets the road
As an engineer working on various products, I had the (naive) impression that whatever I build will be magically sold. I mean, the product is so good it will naturally sell itself. There’s a definite sense of pride behind this assumption as well as a tad of naïveté. Sadly, that’s not how the world works.
Most products, especially enterprise software ones, do not sell themselves. It actually takes a village to sell them. Case in point, the tweet below highlighting the 3x size of Snowflake’s sales and marketing team relative to the R&D team, in-spite of Snowflake having a self-service cloud product.
Actively engaging with your sales team help you understand why and how your products are sold. As an engineering leader these learnings will also develop your customer empathy. You will get a much better understanding of why customers buy your product and how they use it. Equally important you will learn about why they choose not to buy your products. Losing deals offers its own set of valuable lessons. It helps you understand and see your product's gaps and rough edges. The data and insight you get from trying to sell your product is invaluable, especially when you relay it all back to your engineering teams.
But wait, isn’t what I just described what Product Management ought to be doing? That’s correct, however, my view is customer empathy is a skill that has to permeate throughout every function in a company. Knowing what matters to your customers and how to make them more successful should never be just confined to the PM org - it’s everybody’s job to know and enable that.
Bridging the gap between engineering and sales
Have you ever wondered how your product is sold? Or how your sales team finds customers? What a sales quota is? Or the length of your sales cycle? The world of selling is oftentimes shrouded in mystery to most engineers - myself included. I now know enough that it isn’t anything like Alec Baldwin’s depiction below 👇🏽(warning: explicit language)
Selling is a hard job. Your sales and marketing teams have to find customers (lead generation), they have to qualify these leads and then your sales teams have to prosecute these qualified leads in order to try and sell them your product. That will typically require pitching the product, demo-ing, a free trial, finding out how your product fits into the customers IT environment (especially for enterprise products), RFPs, conditional purchase orders and much more. Seeing that selling motion in person is eye opening. It will help you appreciate what it takes to sell your product.
Conversely, your sales team might learn from you how the product that they sell is built. Design, refactoring, testing, resourcing, prioritization, CI/CD, UI/UX and more are likely topics your sales team has little knowledge about.
By collaborating with your sales team you will both learn from one another, demystify how each function operates and help bridge gaps between sales and engineering. Having a healthy relationship between sales and engineering is critical to your company’s success.
I have also experienced the benefits of having your sales teams understand your software development process, from prioritization to delivery. Your sales team will come with feature requests, especially if they are needed to help win a size-able deal. It’s important for them to understand how those get prioritized and ultimately delivered.
It’s a great development opportunity
When I go out on sales calls, I am not there just to listen to what prospective customers have to say about the product, I am also there to try and sell it. That might require demoing the product, pitching it to customers, understanding how it fits with their business requirements and use cases and answering technical questions about it. The soft skills - public speaking, storytelling and thinking fast on your feet - are ones that will help you in many other aspects of your career.
One area I benefited from immensely from interacting with my sales team is in recruiting. Recruiting is selling someone a job vs a product. As a hiring manager you are trying to assess if their is a match between a candidate’s skillset, the position you are hiring her for and ultimately getting her to accept your offer versus the others she might have.
So go out there on a sales ride with your sales team and learn how your product is sold. You will learn a lot and hopefully make a few sales along the way!
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