Thread by @saeedwkhan

PRO TIP.

Product managers should explicitly track all the ‘specials’ they’ve done for the Sales org, and then remind them at sales training or sales kickoff of how much revenue this generated.

Also remind Sales of what WASN’T done or what was delayed because of that work.

BTW, this is the process I used in a couple of companies to handle these requests.

To reduce adhoc requests from sales for these "specials" we had an escalation process - first up through sales management and sales engineering, then discussed with Product Management. /1

i.e. The sales team took responsibility for filtering out random requests from less "effective" reps. So we knew the quality of requests from Sales to #ProdMgmt was relatively good. /2

Even then, we had to have discussions related to the opportunity, the timing, the actual scope of the request, the impact it would have etc. /3

If PM agreed there was justification, we'd have Eng come back w/ a rough time/feasibility estimate & then decide if it was warranted, based on alignment with roadmap, future sales potential etc.

So it was a reasonable process to handle exceptions and worked fairly well. /end

Corollary to the above:

If the revenue directly associated to the "specials" for Sales, is a significant part (e.g. 40%+) of the total revenue of your product, you may be working for a #project company and not a #product company.