Part 1: The importance of collecting and understanding feature requests from your sales teams & prospects
Image credit: Thanks to Romana Klee, Flickr
Product vs sales
Unless you offer a very bespoke service (and configuration) alongside your SaaS product, managing demand (ideas, feedback, feature requests & insights) from your prospective customers can be very tricky; especially when you need to stay true to your company vision and service your existing customer base.
Demand from your prospects will usually come through your sales teams. When you are small, it’s easy to act as product and sales or you will have a close relationship with the product owner. As you scale and hire sales teams, the ability to stay close to demand from prospects can be difficult and this can easily cause internal conflict. Sales teams want to close deals, product teams want to make sure everything they build into the product really count.
Sales can feel their voice isn’t always heard and become frustrated when they need “just one feature” to close a huge deal. Product can feel they are always saying “no” and are vulnerable to shoulder tapping & pressure to add features into the product roadmap — especially in very sales-led organizations. There are simple steps you can put into place to ensure sales and product work well together and the rewards for introducing a little bit of process are huge…
The power of prospect demand
Image credit: Thanks to Bronson Abbot, Flickr
It’s in the interest of your organization to collect and understand demand from the prospect base because the data can be incredibly powerful.
It can act as the guiding light of where you could head with your product. Patterns in the data help you to see new opportunities, problems to be solved, and challenges you may have when your sales team are going after those stretchy deals.
In the last year alone, capturing prioritized demand from our prospects has had a huge influence on:
- Our integrations strategy;
- How we have adapted our product for Enterprise organizations;
- How we market and sell our product to our target customer.
Collecting & understanding demand data from prospects is not the same as building features to close deals.
Let’s explore…
What not to do
Image credit: Thanks to pidoubleg, Flickr
One of the dangerous things about sales it that you’re often told that there are missing features that need to be in the product to close the deal.
The danger is that you start building features for prospects without considering that missing features:
- Could be the stepping stone to another objection — another feature that just has to be in the product for the deal to go ahead; Probably aren’t even be important to the real decision-makers in the process;
- Are one-off, obscure demands that don’t fit with your product or company strategy;
- Don’t meet the needs of your current customer base and could even be detrimental to your existing users.
If you aren’t careful, you can end up in a situation where features are being added to your product(s) which don’t really close deals, don’t align with your strategy and waste vital resources which would have been better spent on other projects.
Stopping this happening can be easier said than done because product teams can come under huge pressure internally to deliver feature for prospects.
There are some simple steps that you can put in place in your organization to ensure that:
- Sales team have their voice heard;
- Product don’t come under pressure to deliver features for prospects;
- Prospect expectations are set & handled beautifully; and
- Data vital to the growth of the organization is captured and used to help inform a truly data-driven product roadmap that works for everyone.
How to use prospect demand effectively
I’m going to be taking a close look at the strategies and processes used by the most successful SaaS companies who achieve growth by using prospect demand in a webinar on Tuesday 11th April at 1pm EST.
If you’d like to join me, please do sign-up here: Roadmap Fuel: Market & Prospects
If you can’t make it, sign-up and I’ll send you the recording or watch out for Part 2 of this blog post which will go into this topic in detail sometime next week.
Get in touch
I’m looking to talk with more SaaS organizations who recognise the important of sales and product teams managing prospect demand well.
Send tips, tricks or comments on the above to hannah@receptive.io or tweet me @HanChaplino
If you’d like to discuss this topic on my podcast, let me know!
Related posts
When free trial = lie
Building a SaaS product — it’s not a democracy
Harnessing the power of team demand
