A Comprehensive, Cross-Functional Guide to Align Product and Field Teams
Blog HomeWhat happens when you get VPs of Sales, Product, and PreSales in a room? In an ideal world, a conversation that makes products more responsive to customer needs and market demands.
In reality, this is increasingly difficult to achieve, as innovation reaches dizzying speeds and customers get choosier. In fact, 55% of organizations lack a formal feedback cadence (State of PreSales 2024).
We gathered our in-house experts to share their hard-earned knowledge from decades of leadership in PreSales (Brett Crane), Product (Chris Bruner), and Sales (Trevor Jett) about how to establish a cross-functional partnership that works at scale.
This article summarizes key takeaways and advice to build a better process and products:
Co-Own Outcomes and Accountability
Product leadership should oversee the alignment process and own decision meetings and feature delivery. But, to achieve consistent, scalable results, the other stakeholders need to own part of the process.
Delineate clear responsibilities for each department:
Product owns the product conversation, Sales owns the revenue conversation, and PreSales owns the insights that bridge the gap.
For more information about the mechanics of establishing an operations rhythm and communication cadence, see this comprehensive Product-Field Alignment Playbook.
Co-ownership of the process and outcomes lends itself to mutual accountability. By playing an active role and having skin in the game, every leader also sees benefits for their individual functions:
- Sales leader: Gains visibility into risks and opportunities by viewing the forecast through the lens of product roadmap realities
- Product leader: Gains an understanding of the revenue impact of R&D investments for faster hypothesis generation and more targeted discovery
- PreSales leader: Gains ownership of a strategic function with a tangible business impact and c-suite visibility
There are broder positive repercussions of improved alignment. The business benefits by being able to more efficiently and effectively deliver products that are responsive to customer and market needs. Sellers are more readily enabled on new launches. Customer trust and satisfaction increase when they see their voice is heard.
Convey Insights, Not Emotions
To achieve the aforementioned outcomes, even with the best structure, the success of your process hinges on the data communicated throughout. Again, each leader owns a key piece of the puzzle:
For the Sales Leader: Data Quality
Conversations with Product must be couched in quantified evidence; otherwise cross-functional meetings become a competition for the loudest voice in the room.
The data you provide must be detailed enough to be usable:
- Specific use case involved (How are customers impacted?)
- Total revenue impacted (What will we gain by developing or lose by not developing this feature?)
- Urgency (Is this generally a deal-breaker or nice-to-have?)
- Competitive offerings (Do customers have ready alternatives?)
For the PreSales Leader: Data Integrity
Product needs to trust that the insights communicated are accurate and reliable. The PreSales leader must demonstrate that you have a consistent, thorough process for triaging and analyzing data derived from customer feedback.
For quality control, reverse engineer the “adoption metrics” that make sense. Most opportunities in complex B2B tech sales have at least one technical gap. If not, they are either not viable deals or the sellers are disengaged. Figure out the thresholds that make sense for your business – how much product feedback should you expect, on average, given the market segment, product line(s), and overall deal complexity?:
For the Product Leader: Decision Transparency
Greater transparency on how your team makes decisions yields greater buy-in and higher quality involvement from your cross-functional partners, ultimately resulting in better data for you to make more accurate investment decisions:
Invest in the Right Methods
Product needs to be able to react dynamically yet thoughtfully to AI developments and market trends. The only way to do this is with a high volume, high velocity information flow.
It’s unlikely that you will be able to sustain this via heavily manual methods, such as spreadsheets, CRM/PLM customizations, or software that requires all stakeholders to regularly leave their primary workflows and tools.
Advances in GenAI can provide a considerable lift if deployed for the correct use cases. If you invest in technology, key evaluation criteria and use cases include:
- Ability to intake, categorize, deduplicate, and aggregate feedback
- Interconnectivity between your CRM and PLM (mapping gaps to opportunities and accounts)
- Outcome-oriented analytics (linking gap data and revenue impact)
Vivun’s platform was purpose-built with these criteria in mind. Learn more here.
Conclusion
With customer switching costs lower than ever, misalignment between Product and Sales is critically costing your business:
- 22% of customers who churn cite low product roadmap confidence as the primary reason for leaving (Gartner).
- If you can reduce that churn by 5%, you can increase profits 25%+ (HBS).
The key to capitalizing on this revenue opportunity is using PreSales data to bridge the gap between Product and Sales via a formal feedback process and cadence. Product gets information they can use to give Sales the features/functionality needed to win deals. PreSales showcases their strategic impact, and the business preserves a competitive advantage.
For more detailed advice on how to operationalize this motion, watch the full discussion on-demand here.
September 18, 2024 
