3 ways to build a better sales team
More often than not the relationship between product management and the sales team frustrates both sides. Here are three ways to build a better sales team.
More often than not the relationship between product management and the sales team frustrates both sides. Here are three ways to build a better sales team.
After yet another day of outage from my business bank, I found myself thinking: “I could do this better. I should start a bank.”
This is the story of why I’m going to be disappointed with 99% of all airlines for the foreseeable future. A guide to the Kano model.
Like doing the washing-up, vacuuming under the sofa or cleaning your windows, housekeeping tasks with your product can get neglected because they’re tedious, not as interesting as new features and so on. However, if you’ve ever found yourself eating breakfast cereal out of an oven tray with a serving spoon because every single item of cutlery and crockery is festering in a pile in your sink, it should be apparent there is inherent value in tackling housekeeping tasks bit by bit over time.
Despite relying on each other for the success of their products, the Sales and Product teams often have a jarring relationship. This is far from ideal. By looking at where things go wrong we can identify a better way of working with each other. The prizes on offer: shorter sales cycles, more easily achieved targets and customers who are always happy to hear from you.
By failing to grasp the demographics of their customer base, Demon Internet appears to have scored a convincing customer service own-goal with their email upgrade.
People value something most when they’ve just lost it or come close to doing so. If your product prevents this happening, take some advice from Joni Mitchell: you need to save your client the heartache of loss by helping them remember how much they value what they have now so that they don’t take it for granted.
How much would you invest to prevent a mass customer exodus? Everything Everywhere, the merged T-Mobile / Orange behemoth, was happy to spend £150 per customer to shore up its customer base following the post-merger restructuring.
What did it gain? A reduction in monthly churn from 1.7% to 1.3%, significant given their customers number well into the millions, plus an additional 300,000 customers locked into long-term contracts in place of short-term pre-pay contracts.
A product manager who thinks they’ve got an easy ride because their product is a cash cow is probably missing the point. While failing or unpopular products have a more obvious set of problems to tackle, successful ones have a different set of arguably trickier problems
A few months ago, I co-presented a short speaking slot at this year’s SatMetrix Net Promoter European Conference. I’ve reproduced an excerpt from their official blog of the event for posterity.
You can see the full article in its original form at Net Promoter – Blogs – European Conference Blog 2010.