I shared early drafts of the PandA framework with some other product development folk. One of them asked how it enabled product teams to co-ordinate with timelines required by other business processes.
If you haven't read about the PandA framework already, it's a good idea to do that before continuing here.
The reviewer's question highlights a problem, not with the framework, but with the way Sales, Marketing and Product interact in many organisations.
I have worked in organisations where feedback from Sales dictated or derailed the product backlog. “What’s the problem?”, I hear salespeople cry, “You say you want customer feedback.”
The problem is that this isn't customer feedback. It's an interpretation of what Sales think will help the customer buy the product. It's important for Sales to pass feedback to the Product team, but it shouldn't dictate product direction.
For a product to be successful, the product team needs to hear the unmediated voice of the customer. Where a sales person hears "I want feature X", a product person will hear an unmet need that requires exploration. We shouldn’t be building features without validating the underlying need. Our job isn't to give the customer what they ask for. It's to identify their problems and to test if they are willing to pay for our (or any) solution.
When Sales doesn't trust product, salespeople often feel compelled to commit to a feature for a customer. In order to make the sale, the organisation then decides to deliver that feature, disrupting planning and discovery. Product gets frustrated that it has to blow up its roadmap to service an ill-defined need that hasn’t been validated, eroding Product's trust in Sales.
In this low-trust situation, it's not unusual for Sales or another customer-facing team, e.g. Customer Success or Support, to have agreed a timeline for delivery with the customer without reference to Product. Marketing campaigns are set up around this timeline, which rarely allows the product team time for discovery. Inevitably, at some point, the product team surfaces issues that "delay" delivery. This in turn damages Marketing's faith in Product as well as further eroding Sales's trust, and the vicious circle continues.
Left to fester, this vicious circle kills innovation and the organisation’s capacity to learn.
The result, and the reality in many sales-led organisations, is that product teams turn into feature factories, where:
Focus slips from customer needs, innovation dies, and disruption and loss of market share is sure to follow.
I once worked at an organisation where one of the CEO’s stock phrases was that if you give salespeople any excuse not to sell, they will take it. That may be a controversial line, but I have seen throughout my career how feedback from customers can easily turn into "how can we sell the product without feature X?" or "you promised us ABC would be in this release and it’s only A – how can we sell or market this product when we can’t rely on you to deliver?”
A related problem arises when media buying and marketing lead times aren't set up to work alongside an agile product development process. Sometimes Marketing gets wind that the business is considering a particular option and shares it with customers as if it is definitely going to happen and when it will be delivered. If the product team pivots and become disconnected from marketing efforts, the frustration on both sides can be enormous. The last thing anyone wants to do is create customer confusion, but this happens again and again in organisations, as Product moves through the cone of uncertainty, but doesn’t keep Sales and Marketing aligned.
In large companies in particular, it’s rare for Marketing and Product to sit together and explore their joint mission. Often, the product team decide on their mission independently. The marketing team, meanwhile, puts its own spin on the product to customers, testing different messages. This can lead to out-of-date collateral, mismatches between marketing campaigns and the functionality developed, or, at worst, a marketing message that doesn't resonate with the audience that the product evolves to serve, which can lead to product failure.
Placing Sales & Marketing at odds with Product is an anti-pattern that must be addressed.
Every part of the organisation should be trained on delivering a fantastic customer experience. The idea that there are "sides" within an organisation, or that any one part of the organisation "owns" the customer relationship is seriously damaging. There should only be the customers' side, and they should know that absolutely everyone in the organisation is on it.
Sales, Marketing and Product get disconnected when the organisation doesn't bind their needs into a coherent mission or vision, or when there isn't sufficient communication on what the current and upcoming priorities are. When this happens, the different departmental needs fill the vacuum where the customer needs should be.
The PandA framework enables us to manage these apparently competing needs.
Sales and marketing campaigns should be operating hand-in-glove with product development. I see Sales and Marketing as being akin to Customer Development in Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany, the book that gave rise to the Lean Startup movement.
Customer Development is a parallel process to Product Development. For existing products, it is geared toward delivering functionality to customers at a price “that maximises market share and profitability.” For new products, the "goal of Customer Development is to find a market for the product as spec’d."
In the PandA framework, there’s a strong emphasis on alignment, both strategic and with customer’s interests. The focus of all parties is on the customer, which ensures consistency in the messaging and prioritisation of customer needs.
The above view of the PandA framework shows how Sales, Marketing and Product activities are aligned in each phase, leveraging the full power of the organisation to serve customers, enabling:
Since they are involved in the product decision-making process, Sales don't need to make unfounded commitments to customers. Likewise, Marketing understand the product process and the likelihood of particular solutions being implemented, so there is no reason for conflicting messages to reach customers or prospects. Customers understand where the organisation is going and how it plans to address their problems, building trust inside and outside the company.
By sharing what customers are asking for, Sales makes a vital contribution to the ‘Possible’ phase of work, and can influence what experiments are run for testing Potential ideas.
As the results from experiments on Potental work are shared with Sales and Marketing, campaigns can be tested and developed around the work that will be Prioritised and eventually Promised. The Appraised phase offers the opportunity to learn how market messaging could have been more effective in helping the organisation achieve its goals.
Click on the sections below for a discussion of what happens at each phase of the framework. There's a short fictional example for each phase to help illustrate the synchronisation of activities the business needs to facilitate.
Looking into the far future, say more than 9 - 12 months away, the cone of uncertainty widens to the extent that planning work in detail is worthless. This applies to Sales and Marketing as much as it does to Product. In an established company, Marketing can be considering campaigns around the company's mission and brand-building. In a startup, marketing shouldn't be focused on the 'possible' as it's more important for the company to establish an audience for the product being built.
Customer feedback, whether product-led or sales-led, is recorded and input as possibilities for the product. Salespeople are invited to regular brainstorming meetings so they can raise feedback and concerns. Viewing the possibilities, Marketing can consider how it would formulate messaging and how it would test some of these messages.
Consistent customer requests allied with market research tells us where the market is going or what underserved needs customers have. This should inform the work that the team decides to investigate further (the Potential phase).
P&A Utilities have a successful energy management B2B SaaS product. Sales, Marketing and Product hold regular brainstorming sessions where market research, industry trends and customer feedback are shared. Representatives of each function can interrogate the data, and they jointly synthesise these into possibilities and record them.
Sales shares that customer feedback has been strongly focused on integrations recently. Marketing shares market research that shows competitors are offering greater levels of integration with other products.
While the cone of uncertainty is narrower here than in the 'Possible' phase, there are still large amounts of uncertainty and risk.
The product team formulates hypotheses for problems they can solve. Sales and Marketing provide feedback on these. Marketing test and consider alternative campaigns that might resonate with custoemrs. Sales share the hypotheses and offer customers the opportunity to participate in testing.
Product, Sales and Marketing meet regularly to review the results of experiments alongside customer feedback as shared by Sales and Product Research. The teams jointly review the hypotheses being tested in light of these data. Leadership clarifies strategic direction where required. The organisation demonstrates thought leadership by writing articles or sharing media around the areas for which hypotheses are being tested.
Hypotheses and test results are recorded where they will be visible across the organisation, and used to inform further development and conversations with customers.
As the team at P&A Utilities continue to deliver value, they start to consider upcoming work for prioritisation. Examining the possibilities they have listed, they decide to look into developing further integrations with software in use by their customers.
The team confirms that the organisation strategy is aligned with more integrations into customers' business. They run a set of workshops internally to create hypotheses. Sales and Product work together to identify the most likely clients with whom they can run experiments. When some clients show a lack of interest when the idea is first shared by Sales, a joint meeting is arranged where both Sales and Product attend so that the customer feedback is properly understood.
Based on the feedback from customers, the teams decide to abandon some integrations, and focus on an integration with Microsoft Teams. They review the results of their recent Slack integration and the profile of customers that are interested in this next integration. They form a hypothesis that alerting customers on MS Teams will result in a 10% uplift in users taking recommended actions, resulting in a bottom line impact of $1 million cost savings for their customers on their energy bills.
The work that is to be prioritised is pulled from the Potential phase, based on strategic alignment and the confidence of the team.
Designs for marketing collateral and for the product are finalised and shared with customers. Sales confirm to customers that the work is prioritised. If Product is comfortable doing so, it can give some guidance on an expected delivery window.
Product teams work with Sales and Marketing to finalise their priorities, which can be shared openly with customers on the Sales Roadmap. Product marketing kicks off more detailed campaigns, oriented around the coming functionality, while Sales inform customers with confidence of what will be included in upcoming releases.
As the team at P&A Utilities looks to define its next set of priorities, it looks at the results of the testing done on further integrations. They are confident that they can leverage the architecture created for their recently-completed Slack integration. Design creates collateral for Sales and Marketing to share with customers and prospacts about the new functionaity.
The product team builds the agreed functionality. Sales and marketing materials have been deployed and customers are signing up. Everyone is aligned and working toward a well-defined user outcome.
The product team meets daily to track progress. Work is visualised and moved across a board as it proceeds from Ready for Development to Done. Regular updates are provided to Sales and Marketing as the team closes in on a release date.
The product team at P&A Utilities break down the user stories for the Teams integration into tasks. They prepare their analytics software to track usage of the new integrations so that they can confirm the outcomes of their hypotheses with Sales, Marketing, and other stakeholders.
Once an increment of software has been released, the team confirms and measures the value of released work to the customer. Data on usage is shared with Sales and Marketing. Marketing share data about their campaigns, examining conversion funnels. Sales review the success of their attempts to sign up new customers.
Because the framework is driven by hypotheses, the teams know what they expected to accomplish. They observe the results of customer interaction with the software, gathering usage data and/or completing user interviews. They review the marketing campaigns and data gathered from Sales. They then measure whether they achieved the objectives they set out when creating their hypotheses.
Success is celebrated jointly and outcomes are examined. Whatever is learned from these data is then applied to devising further Potential work and Possibilities for the product.
Once the MS Teams integration is delivered, the team measures its impact. Their hypothesis was that this would result in a 10% uplift in users taking action in response to alerts, and that customers would see $1 million cost savings in the following six months.
Observing user behaviour, the team sees that there is a 10% uplift in users taking action and the cost savings amount to $1.5 million. THis is cause for celebration on a job well done.
Reviewing the collateral from the campaigns, the teams observe that more companies signed up through a campaign directed via customer surveys than expected. Going forward, they agree to invest more heavily in marketing services via this route to see if this could be a successful pattern for extending their footprint with customers.
By rebranding the phases in the PandA framework for external consumption, we can easily and quickly provide Sales and Marketing with a roadmap we can sell to our customers.
In order to make the roadmap sharable, we remove some of the internal measures of success and state each of the elements we are building in terms of customer value. This results in a view of the future that Sales can share with customers, inviting feedback, while removing any pressure to commit to certain features.
Customers can make their voices heard on upcoming work or choices, and this can be fed back internally, creating virtuous circles for product development.
The PandA framework forces repeated feedback to flow between customers, Sales, Marketing and Product, Communication is consistent and two-way, creating virtuous circles of communication. Knoweledge gained from customer communication can be shared with leadership to inform strategy, which in turn ensures regular communication with leadership, avoiding strategy drift.
The framework enables the entire organisation and customers to have a consistent view of the product being developed, the problems being solved, and the scenarios being considered. The Sales Roadmap encourages customer interaction with the problems being considered and shows the organisation's commitment to solving customer problems. Having this coherent view keeps different parts of the organisation in lockstep and ensures everyone shares in the company's successes. All parties are aligned on solving the most important problems - the ones that really matter to the customer.