18. Everyone needs to know the product

I’ve written previously about the balancing act of reaching product-market fit and selling what’s on the truck today.

“Unless you have a clear framework and understanding of where you are on your product-market fit journey, and you can reconcile that with the propensity of the market to adopt an early-stage product, you run the risk of wasting your GTM resources trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong people.

And in the process, you’ll not only fail to realise your product’s true growth potential, but you’ll also spin up needless product development cycles and slow everything down.”

Pinpointing where you are on your product-market fit journey is easier said than done and relies on your ability to make precisely the right judgement call about sufficient product-market fit to get the ball rolling, at least among the early adopters in your market.

It gets messy when there is too much ambiguity about whether the product is ready, and often a significant source of this ambiguity can stem from the fact that your early sales team doesn’t know the product or the domain well enough.

This can lead to a few problematic outcomes; first, they may oversell the capability and value of your early-stage product to unsuspecting customers. Things can quickly turn sour when these customers realise they’ve been sold a pup, reject the product, and form a negative opinion of your business, and your word-of-mouth reputation can also take a hit. Worse still, contracts get cancelled, and revenue unwinds, making the revenue growth hill climb even steeper. It’s also shitty for morale.

On the flip side, your sales team may fail to close deals because of perceived product gaps where a customer says feature X is essential, but you don’t have feature X, so the salesperson can’t close the deal. This can create tension internally where salespeople complain that their sales targets are unattainable until the product team plug more gaps (and you consider softening your sales targets unnecessarily). Your product crew begins to lose faith in the sales team because they can’t sell a feature incomplete but, in their view, decent MVP.

Third, the customer wins your sales team does manage to secure might arrive with a bunch of side orders for product features or capabilities you don’t yet have. These may be mainstream features already on your roadmap but not yet built, or they could be one-off requests for a single customer. If it’s the former, it’s not so bad, and you may be able to shuffle development timelines around. But when your sales team starts choking up your development schedule with needless and unfounded product asks, that quickly becomes a bad day at the office.

A good salesperson with good levels of product fluency and, ideally, domain knowledge will rarely oversell, and they’ll also do a decent job of managing customer expectations. They’re also better equipped to overcome or argue customer objections and may be able to conceive process workarounds for genuine product gaps while convincing potential customers to compromise a little along the way. And they’ll know when a customer feature request is valid and when it’s bogus, so they won’t jam up your development schedule or soak up the product manager’s time on spurious product asks.

Product-savvy salespeople are also more efficient in the early days since they need less technical or pre-sales specialist support. As a result, they can often fly solo until a deal opportunity reaches the later stages, where more involvement from other team members may be required. And they’re better able to accurately and quickly qualify prospects, sensing when to bow out of opportunities that are unlikely to close and preserve precious time for working on the deals that can.

While it’s critical in customer-facing roles, I believe that product fluency doesn’t just apply to sales teams, and it’s an excellent discipline for the entire company to acquire, particularly in the early days. For example, it’s one of the things we mandated at Xero where every new hire needed to pass product certification regardless of their role and maintain their knowledge and product certification status every year.

Domain expertise is harder to train objectively as you can with product, so hiring people from within the industry or category, most likely working in a competitor or adjacent business, and who have already acquired a good understanding and working knowledge of the domain and competition is an easy fix here. Just ensure you thoroughly test for other capabilities and avoid hiring people who are too rooted in old the old ways, particularly if you’re a disruptor.

Go learn the product!

GT

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