How to Build a Winning Product: Sales and Product Teams Must Share Customer Insights

Our creative firm has been doing product design for over a decade now, and I’ve been fortunate to learn a lot (often the hard way) from working with 10 cybersecurity teams.

The two biggest challenges in building a great product are: 

1. finding product market fit. 
2. landing those first paying customers. 

In our experience, the sooner a company has recurring revenue from real customers, the more stable their business is. 

So, how can we help them get real customers sooner?

The answer is to help the product team collaborate more closely with the sales and marketing team.

Typically, the product team is focused on product-market fit while the sales/marketing team prioritizes gaining customers. Both teams have common goals and are both talking with real and potential customers. They are learning what customers want, and what customers are willing to pay for. So, why would they work separately toward the same goal?

The core activity is product discovery

My friendtor, JJ Guy, recently shared Marty Cagan's approach to Product Management. JJ challenged me to consider how we could help companies create great products, not just with UX research and UI design, but throughout the product development process.

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“You should help early-stage cybersecurity companies develop, market, and sell great products. The core activity is product discovery, and UX/UI is the most tangible output, but the customer learnings from discovery support marketing and sales efforts, too.”
- JJ Guy

What an exciting challenge! I want our initial impact to be convincing research and sales to collaborate.

Early-stage product companies should share insights between the marketing, sales, and product teams

The early-stage product companies typically have smaller teams, so you’d assume there is good communication and regular knowledge-sharing. Unfortunately, most sales pitches don't include all the deep insights the product team went through. 

If both teams shared their deep user insights, then…

• the design and development could confidently focus on building features customers actually want.
• the sales team could land their first customer sooner.
• the product could find market-fit sooner.
• future fundraising would be easier (and more favorable) with recurring revenue from real customers. 

So why are these insights often stuck in a silo?

“Often what I see at companies is you’ve got a smart product team and they know a lot about the stuff they're building and why it's important and what the value is to the customer, and they did all this work on that when they were building it, but that information never made the jump to sales, because sales isn't even trying to pitch value.”
– April Dunford on Lenny’s Podcast 

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It’s often a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

• The product team thinks of sales and marketing as a separate part of the company
• The sales team is too busy trying to “make sales”
• The two teams don’t realize how much their insights could benefit each other

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Three ways teams can share customer insights‍

1. Work together
   The sales team should present their pitch deck and demos to the research team and ask for insights.
   The research team should include sales and marketing members in customer interviews and testing sessions to get direct exposure to customer conversations.
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2. Schedule regular times to sync up.
   A weekly standing meeting focused on customer insights can create a stronger product development process.
   Discover what works and how customers are currently solving the problem your product addresses.
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3. Share what you are learning asynchronously.
   Don’t rely on real-time involvement in every pitch or testing session. Asynchronous methods like sharing recordings of the user testing sessions and interviews will keep everyone in the loop. Be sure to share your key insights between teams and then share your findings via email, Slack, or a tool like Basecamp.
   

The key is frequent, two-way sharing of insights

Insights are best shared through standing meetings, collaboration platforms, and cross-team participation in customer engagements. This builds a mutual understanding of customer perspectives that will create success for your team.

Already a rockstar

If your security product team is already practicing some of these methods, then I’d love to hear about what has worked and what needs… iteration. Let’s chat.

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Not quite there yet?

If your security product team is not currently doing these things, but believes they can land customers sooner, let’s learn together.

One cautionary note: Understand that user testing and pitching have very different purposes, so be sure of what you are trying to accomplish in each scenario. Testing is about learning and not selling.