“Tri-lignment” is the Key - Get your Product, Marketing and Sales teams aligned to achieve your...

26/10/2016

Vice President, Products

Karl Rumelhart

Tri-lignment is the KeyGet Product, Marketing and Sales Aligned for Business Success

Sound Familiar...

DILBERT © 2016 Scott Adams. Used By permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights Reserved.

Not aligned...

The purpose of business is to create and keep a

customer – Peter F. Drucker

Same Purpose, Different Timeframes

CustomerMarketingProduct Sales

Intrinsically different time horizons makes tension

between Sales, Marketing and Product inevitable

Management’s goal should be to make the tension productive by

refocusing on the shared purpose: Customers

Typical Cross-Functional Discussion

“The leads are terrible.”

“The leads are fine. You just aren’t working them.”

“Let’s see how closely these leads resemble our existing

customers.”

“Let’s use the customers we find as references.”

Focus on Customers

Typical Cross-Functional Discussion

“The competition has a better product than we do.”

“No they don’t. You just aren’t positioning our advantages

correctly.”

“How much value do customers place on our

feature differentiators? Are they using them?”

“Let’s find high adoption customers for case studies.”

Focus on Customers

Typical Cross-Functional Discussion

“We need to commit to building X in order to close

this deal.”

“That is a one-off and a bad use of resources.”

“Would our other customers benefit from X ? How about

we ask them.”

“Could we upsell other customers if we had X ?”

Focus on Customers

Zone of Unproductive

Tension

Zone of Healthy Dialog

MarketingProduct Sales

MarketingProduct Sales

Customer

Focus on departmental perspectives

Refocus to shared context: Customers

But Wait...There’s More

The purpose of business is to create and keep a

customer – Peter F. Drucker

Yet Another Perspective

Customer Success / Account Management

Typical Cross-Functional Discussion

“Why aren’t they renewing? Your job is to make them

successful.”

“You sold to the wrong customer. Our product is not

a fit for them.”

“Do we have similar customers that have been

successful?”

“What factors have led them to be unhealthy?”

Focus on Customers

Typical Cross-Functional Discussion

“Customers aren’t using our fancy new feature. They want

the bugs fixed.”

“Sales said that the new feature was critical to closing

deals.”

“Are we getting enough product input from our existing

customers?”

“How can we use customer satisfaction as a sales

weapon?”

Focus on Customers

Practical Guidance: Steps for Each TeamSales Marketing

Product Executives

• Identify similar customers for all prospects

• Develop existing customer adoption & satisfaction as selling weapon

• Set adoption goals for new features and measure outcome & satisfaction

• Invest in existing customer feedback (e.g. online community, advisory board) and engage CSMs

• Equal time to adoption / health as new pipeline

• Start every executive meeting with a customer story

• Reframe departmental conflict in terms of customers

• Score leads based on similarity to existing customers, not just activity

• Invest in reference & advocacy programs

Practical Guidance: Systems and Metrics

Repository of customer information that whole company has access to

Customer health and satisfaction (e.g. NPS) as top level company metrics

Assign a team to engage customers proactively post-sales

1

2

3

Sales, Marketing and Product operate on different time horizons

resulting in inevitable tensions

Framework

Summary

Practical Guidance

To make the tension productive, refocus discussion to center on

customers

Hold all teams accountable for framing their work in terms of

customer adoption, satisfaction and health

Set up a system and organization for tracking, nurturing and engaging with

your customers

Thank YouThank You