The Product Leader’s Cheat Sheet for Alignment: The Sales Engineering Edition

What’s the top challenge most product leaders face? Setting expectations with cross-functional stakeholders, according to the most recent Product Excellence Report.

One of the things that makes stakeholder communication and expectation setting so difficult is that you can’t simply do it once and call it a day — each set of stakeholders has their own interests and priorities. This means if you really want to excel at stakeholder management, you need to develop a deep understanding of each group and how you can best meet their needs.

But even if you agree with these points, you might still feel a bit overwhelmed. You’ve already got a to-do list that seems to expand infinitely, so it’s easy to relegate stakeholder communication to sometime between “later” and “never” — even if this procrastination ultimately comes back to bite you. 

That’s why we’ve put together a series of cheat sheets to help you achieve alignment with each group of stakeholders. In this edition, we’ll explore how you can best work with your sales team, especially the sales engineers who close deals with prospective customers and help them understand all the technical details. According to Kantata, “Great sales engineers not only act as a trusted pre-sales advisor, they also ensure that clients maximize the potential of the product they are purchasing, guiding them from interest through adoption to using the product to its fullest potential.”

“Sales may be the team that gets deals over the line, but there wouldn’t be a product or service worth paying for without the product team. Likewise, it’s the product team’s job to bring ideas to life, but without the valuable insight and requests that the sales team provides, they might not build a product that customers need. Really, we should take a more holistic view and recognize everyone for their input at all stages of the process.” –  Conor Dragomanovich, former VP of Commercial Sales, Productboard

3 tips for partnering with sales engineering

Product managers can play a critical role in supporting sales engineers by establishing a close working relationship. This helps ensure sales engineers accurately portray the product and communicate its technical capabilities to prospective customers. Here are three ways to achieve alignment.

1. Provide timely, detailed information on upcoming product releases, features, and enhancements, as well as product roadmaps. Sales engineers need to know about these developments to be able to effectively communicate the value of the product to prospects and customers.

Only 31% of survey respondents said roadmaps can be easily shared and accessed by cross-functional partners. – Product Excellence Report

2. Promote feedback from sales engineers on the product’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Sales engineers interact directly with prospects and customers, and their insights can be invaluable in identifying customer pain points and identifying new opportunities for product innovation.

54% of respondents note that they don’t have an effective system in place for providing customers with status updates about product requests they’ve made in the past. – Product Excellence Report

3. Arm sales engineers with documentation and training resources to unblock deals when there are technical hurdles. This will help sales engineers become experts on the product and be able to quickly and effectively address prospects’ or customers’ technical questions or concerns.

“To be able to consistently make effective sales, however, your reps may also need additional training with each update and each new product launch.” – UserVoice

Remember, product teams aren’t the only ones who benefit from building a strong relationship with sales engineering. When sales engineering and product teams collaborate closely, it can result in a thorough comprehension of the product and its potential, better communication and teamwork, and ultimately, elevated sales and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Never fear your next encounter with a stakeholder again. Download the cheat sheet to help you handle every interaction with your sales engineers with confidence, or our guide on uniting the business for tips on how to work with other stakeholders. You can also check out the below video for tips on how product can build stronger cross-departmental relationships.