How to stop Sales from selling vaporware

Hello and welcome into another episode of Lessons in Product Management. I'm your host, John Fontenau. And on today's episode, we're going to discuss the secret to Getting sales to stop promising features. I know, I know. This sounds like crazy talk, right? get sales to stop promising features. What that that's just how it is. Vaporware.

is how sales make sales, right? Well, not anymore. This is something that I've done successfully. This is something that other product leaders that I've talked to have done successfully. And there are upstream ways to solve this and there are downstream ways to solve this. But I do want to give you hope that it is possible to work with sales, to work with your organization, to create alignment and to be able to not create a confrontational relationship, but actually

create a productive collaborative relationship with your sales team. Again, I know this sounds like a pipe dream. This sounds like pie in the sky. But before we get to the the secret of how we do this, I want to kind of unpack Some reasons why this happens. Now, if there's not collaboration, there's not alignment, things are probably happening in silos. And this this starts from very early on, where if there's a lack of vision, a lack of strategy.

You know, people are just trying to do stuff and stuff like this happens, right? So the way to go upstream and solve this. Is as a founder, you need to have a solid vision and a solid strategy. And when I say strategy, that's There's multiple pieces of a strategy. As it relates to early product development, let's talk about like product.

strategy and let's talk about go-to-market strategy. Right. So in in the product, you're trying to find product market fit. But a lot of times as product people, we forget about the market piece. Right. And so we have to be clear about who we're building this product for and what value it delivers. If we're not clear on that, how do we expect our marketing counterpart to enable sales or if we don't have a product marketing team.

How do you expect you as the product manager to help enable sales in the right way? Right. So it all kind of works together. If we know who our custom our desired customer is and the value that our product should create for them. But our marketing team and our sales team is not enabled to bring the right customers into the funnel. And our sales team doesn't know what a good prospect looks like versus a prospect that we

don't necessarily need to sell to, then how do we know what deals to say yes to and what deals to say no to? Now, I know that's also a pipe dream, sales saying no to deals, but if on a corporate level we're aligned of who's a good customer and who's not, We should incentivize sales to not sell to the wrong customer because that throws off everything, right? Then we start having to satisfy needs that we never intended to satisfy.

But life is life and it's not perfect and it's not idealized. So we're gonna have situations where whether we go upstream and solve this problem through good vision, strategy, and alignment, or even if those things don't exist, inevitably we're gonna have a deal. that our sales team wants to close because we have some quota we need to hit. We have some goals that our head of sales needs to hit. So he keeps his job, she keeps her job.

And we're gonna have this pressure. The customer's asking for a feature. And we need you to build it. Or better yet, we've already signed the contract and we promised this feature. Okay? Now, assigned contract sounds like a done deal. Sounds like it. But a contract is only enforceable or enforced. It is enforceable, but it's only enforced if somebody has a problem with what you've done. Okay, this is gonna get a little controversial, but I've I've dealt with this with really large companies.

Contracts will only be enforced if someone feels like they've been screwed over or they feel like you've breached the contract. Right. There have been features that have existed in contracts that we have not built. And we were fine. And that's gonna sound crazy, but I'm gonna tell you why. Because in my experience, if you can build a relationship with sales and start changing the relationship.

Where and you need buy-in with your your leader, your product leadership, right? Ideally with your sales leadership. But as long as you have the air cover of your product leadership, this can work. Okay. So there is a caveat. But this can work. So what you do when sales comes to you and says, hey, we sold a deal, we promised this feature, we need you to change your roadmap.

Instead of throwing up your hands and saying, okay, dev team, stop what you're doing. We need to go build this feature because sales sold another vaporware deal again and we have to go build it. Instead of doing that, With the air cover of your product leadership, this is what I want you to do. Say we could do that and we could win this one deal because of that feature.

But what I want to do is talk to the customer and find out what is the desire, what is the need, what is the problem driving their desire to have this feature. And you're gonna get pushback inevitably. Why do you wanna talk to the customer? The deal's already done. We already promised it. And you say, I get it, I get it. And we could build it. But what we might miss out on if we don't understand why they want it.

There might be opportunities for us to build something better that they didn't even know was possible. and enables you to close more deals in the future with other customers who look like them. in a way that our customers can't replicate. Because they're probably asking us for a feature that already exists in the market. But if we can do something better, how much easier does that make your life in the sales process?

So now you're you've switched the conversation from adversarial of I don't want to do this because you've sold a deal and it wasn't on my roadmap. Now it's a this is my position versus your position. You've now flipped it to say we could have an opportunity to do something better. that helps make your life easier in the sales process in the future. And I guarantee you, if you go to the customer and have that conversation, because I've done it before.

and understand the problem and come back to them and say, hey, I know you wanted this feature. But we've actually come up with something that we think might be better. Here's what we propose that we do. Nine times out of ten, it's still gonna solve the problem, which is what they care about. They're gonna appreciate the fact that you cared enough to dig into the problem.

And they're going to appreciate the fact that you went back to the drawing board and found a better way to do it. Very rarely will they say, no, we have to have this feature in this exact same way. Those are probably not the customers you want. But now you've flipped it from a transactional relationship to a partnership. You've brought them into the process. They've validated the problem statement that you uncovered with them.

They validated that they still, they like this solution, they want this solution, it's going to do well.

That gives the sales team confidence that customers who look like them are going to find value in this thing. And now you've gained their trust and respect of your sales team, and they're going to be much more likely to bring you into the process sooner. So instead of closing the deal, The operational process that you should move forward with and that you can use that success as a prompt for is to say, hey.

I love feature request. I love being able to dig into the problem that's driving the request. Can we just make that part of the process where if you're in a deal, instead of promising the the deal up front, You could say, yeah, we could do that, but actually could could we have a follow-up conversation or could I bring in somebody from my product team? Because we we really love to understand, you know, the problem behind this so we can make sure that we're we're solving this the right way. Okay.

Now, if you have a an honest ethical company and team, that shouldn't be a problem. Okay. If you have a organization and a culture and team members who tell the customer that yes, we have this stuff. Now you're getting into the realm of being unethical and lying to the customer and that can't fly. And as a product person,

I if this reasonable stance that you take can't be followed, well, maybe it's time to find something else to do. But in a good organization where ethics are valued and Doing right by the customer is valued. I've seen this work. And so I would encourage that there are productive paths you can take to start flipping things to where internally you start operating more as a partnership, you start operating as cross-functional partners. versus an adversarial type of stance.

and you become more of a partner to your customers and clients. Okay, so this this is really how you go from feeling powerless as a PM where you're just fulfilling feature requests from deals that your sales team closed to being empowered. to do your job again as a PM. So I hope this was helpful. If you try this and are successful, I'd love to hear about it.

Um, if you're not successful or struggling, I'd love to talk to you and see if we can figure it out or figure out ways we can go about it or if it's time to start looking for another opportunity. I know the market's tight and if you feel like this kind of pushback puts you in a a position to lose your job. I'm sorry. Um, but I I believe if you go for it.

push on it to the point where you feel comfortable, I think you could find some progress and some good results. So let me know how it goes. Let me know how I can help. And I'd love to see you become more empowered as a product manager.