Reducing your time to revenue.

Sales vs Product Marketing; not a post I thought I would ever write, and yet here we are.

In response to my previous post, https://loom.ly/x37IXVI some commented that in their organisations The Sales Team, perform the majority of the Product Marketing tasks.

Needs must I guess!

I have said before, in smaller organisations other roles rally round to fill in the role of Product Marketing, but we must be careful when engaging the sales team to do this.

In many ways these two roles and the people who do well in them are polar opposites. Which is not a bad thing. In fact, It is just what fast growing organisations need.

Let me explain:

In most tech organisations Sales people make the worst product marketers and vice versa. This stems from the fact that while they work toward the same goal, their contributions are exact opposites in focus. The same way an Estate Agent would not also be the one laying the foundations of the property.

The best sales people focus on selling what is on the shelf today. And that’s what they’re good at. Furthermore, the best sales people see some success with or without the help of Product Marketing.

However, If sales are spending all their time (doing what #ProductMarketers should be doing post launch) analysing whether the problems each early adopter is having are red herrings or one-offs, needing further investigation or a bit more market research to best inform or sanity check #roadmap considerations … then they are not selling?

Can sales feed into the #ProductMarketing process? Most definitely, they are an important source in informing the developing GTM, along with support, field engineers, integration partners (if any), and many other stakeholders. But first and foremost sales exist to sell.

Amongst other things Product Marketing exist to ensure Sales are best equipped at every turn, to do nothing else but sell.

Hopefully, that clear that!

What else are sales folk being ask to do that eats into time they could be making money for the business?