Product and Market Accountability

Very well said excerpt in the middle of this blog entry from Erick Krock

"Creating Accountability Between the Product Development Team and Sales

In dysfunctional companies, lack of product functionality is used as a convenient excuse for failing to close deals. The DysfunctionalCo product manager will say “We don’t know what the customer’s requirements are” instead of proactively engaging to find out. The DysfunctionalCo account manager will say “We can’t close business because the product doesn’t do X,” when in fact the real problem is that the product doesn’t do X, Y, and Z and the customer has no budget anyway, but the account manager doesn’t know that because they’re just looking for an excuse to cover their backside for the current quarter’s revenue shortfall and they haven’t gotten deep enough into the account to know where the deal really stands.

Defining customer-specific product release success criteria creates a healthy relationship of mutual accountability between the product development team and the sales force. At functional companies, the agreement becomes “If the product development team delivers this functionality on time to specification, the sales force commits that it will be able to obtain a renewal or close a specific new deal within a specified timeframe.” That creates healthy pressure on the product development team to make sure they correctly understand the customer’s requirements so they can obtain acceptance and healthy pressure on the sales force to ensure that they fully understand and have articulated ALL the things the company must do to gain the new customer so they will indeed close the business as promised once the new functionality is delivered. The company transitions from excuses to commitments."

If we can make 1. strong commitments and 2. fewer excuses, we can expect others to work harder and align our efforts.  Harmony.

Go. Blame less and Make something happen.