The Product-Field Rosetta Stone

By Chris Bruner , VP of Product, Vivun

This is the first article in a three-part series exploring how product and field teams can transform their organizations by working together more closely.

As a CPO, one of your central tasks is aligning the executive team around a product direction. But, in a high-performing, opinionated team, how do you achieve that? How do you sustain that as new information comes to light in a dynamic business environment?

Maybe your CRO wants to shift the roadmap around to close a deal everyone is sure will be life changing? Or they are frustrated that a product issue derailed a big deal at the eleventh hour and want to make sure that does not happen again? Or your C-suite peers keep asking how much revenue the roadmap will drive? Or your CEO is wondering whether product plans are focused enough on business impact? 

Like many peers and mentors I have spoken with over the years, I long wrestled with questions like those. I joined Vivun because, there, I found some of the best answers to these questions.

What I loved was the emphasis on partnership across product and field teams. This is the fulcrum on which modern technology organizations turn. Yet, in many organizations where product and engineering leaders are peas in a pod, that is not true of CROs and CPOs. But it can be, and I have now had the good fortune of seeing the magic that happens when it’s true. In organizations where this is working well, three things stand out to me. 

• There is a trusted method, linking product feedback to revenue data
• The field is a true partner and a source of insight, not a source of data
• There is a vehicle for making decisions together

I am writing a series of posts, covering each of these. In this post, I will start with the first one, a trusted method for linking feedback to revenue because this forms the foundation for the rest of the relationship.

There are also so many ways that this one can go awry. 

• There is not a good source of specific product feedback, perhaps because sales team members decided it was not worth the time and effort. 
• Product collects feedback, but sales does not trust the method. This can happen, for example, when feature voting systems favor not the most important ideas but those whose creators have the most time on their hands to campaign internally for their ideas.
• Product collects feedback, but it’s not linked to revenue. Product says, X has come up the most with customers, and sales says, yes, but that does not hold us back in deals while Y does.
• Sales gathers feedback, but product sees it as too anecdotal. When feedback is collected inconsistently or only anecdotally, product leaders find they have difficulty trusting what is shared, believing, sometimes rightly, that it is biased in favor of large deals, deals with the most vocal sales team members, or deals that have more executive visibility. 
• Sales gathers feedback, but product sees it as too high level to be actionable. Prospect feedback that a product is not, for example, “enterprise ready” is a good starting point for investigation, but tells you little about what you can do by itself.

So what have we seen work well? You need a method that is agreed upon and trusted across both product and sales. That means four things in my experience: 

• It’s consistent - it is collected on each deal and for each customer, allowing you to quantify the impact of improvements.
• It’s tied to revenue - the ranking mechanism should not be based on internal votes but rather the amount of prospect or existing customer revenue tied to each piece of feedback.
• It captures the level of impact - we all know some feedback is nice-to-have whereas some product issues will derail a deal all on their own, and the feedback mechanism should capture sales team judgment on this, which is often a sound leading indicator. In addition, it should be linked to actual behavior. For example, you should know how much lower or higher than average the win rate is on deals with product gap X.
• It’s use case focused - the feedback should focus on the specific thing the customer is trying to accomplish and is not able to.

If you have this, it becomes an incredibly powerful shared language for product and sales. It’s easy for sales to point out where product is missing big opportunities because they are focused on what customers are saying and not what is actually killing new deals. It’s easy for product to surface where the sales organization might be overpivoting on feedback from a large prospect that is not representative of the rest of the target segment.

And both groups can focus on the relative merits of product choices instead of the extent to which they trust the data.

Of course, ensuring consistent feedback is no small feat. Product and sales leaders need to partner to emphasize to their teams the importance of both capturing and leveraging this feedback. In addition, it needs to be wildly easy not only to log feedback but also to do it in a way that is clean, de-duped, and well-structured. This is where having an AI-powered solution for capturing and structuring feedback is so valuable. By using LLMs to gather and structure feedback, teams can now dramatically reduce the effort and cost required.

Tying feedback to revenue also means making connections outside of your PLM system. An article of feedback needs to connect to the right Account and, if relevant, Opportunity in your CRM system. That’s what lets you tie feedback to the correct revenue numbers and understand how feedback relates to outcomes, like the decision to buy or not buy. Since we are all familiar with how quickly CRM data becomes messy, it’s important for field users to be the ones linking feedback to the correct Account and Opportunity. 

Lastly, it is valuable to train users on how to gather feedback appropriately. Defining severity leads to much greater clarity for decision-making. E.g., all people involved in logging should know that ‘deal breaker’ means this issue alone was enough to derail the deal by itself, no matter what else was done. Capturing things as use cases also ensures that the focus is on the problem and not on the assumed solution. Achieving alignment on that usually involves some upfront training and occasional reinforcement, but is eminently possible with a little focus.

If you do these things, the lens you have on product opportunities is so much more useful. You can understand prospect as well as customer impact. You can leverage field judgment about severity as a leading indicator of revenue impact, and you can leverage actual customer and prospect behavior (buy or don’t buy, renew or don’t renew) as the ultimate arbiter. 

The next step is to make it sustainable. For that, I believe you need true field partnership, and that will be the subject of my next post.