How do you get Sales Teams on board with product direction?

Sales teams drive revenue for a company. It is a very important team that gets measured everyday on their performance. The pressure to sell and sell more can be intense and stressful, so guess where some of that stress goes from time to time. That stress goes to the product team to implement features that have been asked for in some cases over a year.

Will that magic feature help sell more product? Maybe, or it might get an existing customer to stop complaining to the sales team.

Features and Products must be developed to support existing strategies or drive new business. That is it. Yes, "nice to have" features should be implemented as well as problem fixes. A customer usually is not going to buy more of a product based on nice to have features. A feature that drives more usage (if that is the model to drive revenue) is great. A feature that makes an operation one click simpler does not offer to much value and will not result in more sales.

The best way to get Sales Teams on board is to let them into the development planning process. What? I know, this is not their domain, how could we let the fox in the henhouse? There will chaos and feature development that does not make sense.

They key is to bring in one or maybe a few sales pros into the process. These must be key and influential sales people, not usually the VP or CRO. Sometime it is good to get geographical leads and perhaps the lead of technical sales. These people will know what the team wants and expects feedback about product direction to come back to them. They expect good news from their teammates.

It turns out that Sales people are super smart. When the company strategy and all the data and research about product direction (This is your job, you better be good at this or they will rip it apart) is laid out, 99 times out of 100 they will agree with the feature cost and priority and understand that there is only so many features that can be implemented. The list doesn't just get done over a long time, it gets re-prioritized again and again. Your key product planning teammates from Sales now will evangelize the features being worked on to the entire Sales Team. You now have sales in alignment and they will trust you more and more over time.