26/10/2016
Vice President, Products
Karl Rumelhart
Tri-lignment is the KeyGet Product, Marketing and Sales Aligned for Business Success
Sound Familiar...
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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
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