How to: Use marketing to align your sales and product development

Use marketing to align your sales and product development

Imagine you are the general manager of your software product business unit. Your product is SaaS based – so new capabilities are being continuously introduced. These capabilities need to be marketed quickly to your customers and prospects. In addition, you are working on major new product launches, which require you to execute new go-to-market programs. How do you create a cadence to bring all of the elements of sales, marketing and product development in a successful manner every time? Perhaps, look at marketing as the glue that binds your sales and product development teams together to make it simple for your customers to understand. Below I share five pillars of good product and marketing alignment:

1. What does your brand stand for?

The first pillar in achieving alignment between product and sales is to ensure that the organisation strategy, goals, and purpose reinforce one another. This provides product and sales organisations a clearer sense of the value that new product capabilities bring to the customer and allows them to develop and execute go-to-market plans that are aligned with the product strategy. However, for many companies a marked apparent divergence exists between the core messages companies communicate about their brands and the features and functions their customers value most. Marketing should be able to help establish a clear and shared understanding of vision across your company and its market, especially in today’s era where customers are constantly being bombarded with messages and campaigns across every channel.

2. Where are you going as a company?

Marketing should have input into the vision of your company, including the products you want to launch, the markets you want to capture and the type of customers you want to win. Not only can marketing help communicate your company’s vision and strategy, it can also align your product and sales team by short-circuiting the new product introduction cycle.

3. Who is giving your customers a voice?

Interactions with sales and marketing are a great source of information about the degree to which customers are seeing your existing and recently launched capabilities in the same light as you. If you hear about pushback on pricing of a new product or an inability to articulate a compelling argument for the value of your new capability, you’ve got a problem. Often product development is constrained by multiple priorities, limited resources and the demands of the most vocal customers. Marketing needs to ensure you can take corrective action to ensure your customer voice is the paramount in prioritising the right products get in the customer hands with the right sales strategy.

4. Creating an aligned plan from inception to delivery

To bring a product to market, best-in-class B2B companies strive to achieve excellence in having a synchronised cadence of innovation. This means having a clear understanding of the timeline of product releases, clearly defining the messaging for target customers, planning for the right enablement, tools and training with the sales teams and finally the launch plans and campaigns to bring in the demand for sales to execute.

5. From awareness to advocacy

Marketing can play a key role in each stage of your customer journey. From the time your prospect or customer realises they have a need from considering your solution, trying and often buying your products online to using them and advocating on your behalf. Aligning sales and product development across this customer journey is key to providing a phenomenal customer experience and building your customers’ engagement.

Deploying marketing the right way can help your company not just have clarity of vision and alignment internally, but also make your customers more engaged and interested in paying attention to your products and services.

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