Why Your Sales Team Might Be Killing Your Company

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”

W. Edwards Deming

When your product and engineering team is struggling to deliver consistently, it is tempting to go looking for answers in those two functional areas. You might start asking for more reporting and metrics, or ratchet up the pressure and ask people to work more. And there may well be issues that need to be addressed within those areas.

What’s far more common than you might think, however, is that your organization’s delivery problems actually originate in your sales function. If your sales team is selling the wrong product to the wrong customer, it creates tremendous organizational churn downstream, which results invariably in missed deadlines, frustrated customers and eventually customer churn.

This may sound obvious, but it is remarkable how easy it is to miss this fundamental truth. The assumption in most companies is that all revenue is created equal, and therefore if we’re selling more we must be doing the right things. However, it is possible that you’re burying the organization in a hole from which you’ll eventually have to dig yourselves out, nearly always to great expense in both time and dollars.

How do you diagnose and then avoid this problem?

Diagnosing Potential Sales Issues

Here are some questions to ask / things to look for:

  • Are your salespeople frequently asking for new features to win new business?
  • Do you experience long onboarding and implementation cycles that are tied to commitments for new features/functionality?
  • Do the deals you win have little resemblance to each other in terms of customer profile?
  • Is your product roadmap largely driven by customer-specific work rather than being product-led? (e.g. “We’re building this feature for ABC Company”)
  • Are you constantly shifting priorities based on won deals?

If any or all of this sounds familiar, it’s time to take a hard look at your sales process and its contribution to the organizational chaos downstream.

Changing Your Sales Process

Here are a few initial steps to consider as you review your sales process:

  • Ensure you’ve defined your Ideal Customer Profiles / Personas clearly and that your marketing and outbound sales efforts target these prospects.
  • Sell what you have rather than what you don’t have. There is a time and a place for making commitments to build new features to win business, but in a mature product company these should be very few and far between and should be for outsized, company-changing opportunities. If you’re constantly making promises, it’s a very clear signal that you’re selling to the wrong customer.
  • When new features are requested, have a process for handing these off to your product management team to be further researched and prioritized.
  • If you’re going to commit to new work for a customer, every single part of the delivery chain must be brought into the conversation: Sales, Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Success.
  • Bring product management and engineering into the sales process. Often there are workarounds or different approaches that will meet the customer need and don’t require net new development.

The most expensive activity your company undertakes every day is building new software. The less you build, the less you have to support, maintain, operate and refresh over time. If you find yourself constantly building to support sales, rather than selling the product you’ve built, it’s quite possible that your sales process is contributing heavily to the problem.