Sales Tip: How to Piss Off Product Management

Before Thanksgiving, we discussed how product management can do its best to piss off engineering, customers, and sales. It wouldn’t be fair to give product management all that ammunition without giving folks some weapons to fight back with, so this week we’re going to discuss how sales and engineering can return the favor and do their best to piss off product management! Today we’ll start with time-honored techniques that sales can use to maximize the frustration and minimize the productivity of product management.

Don’t read the written materials the product manager has prepared for sales. Why read a one-page competitive summary when you can just call the product manager and ask them to tell you over the phone? After they’ve taken the time to prepare reference materials for sales, product managers like nothing better than reading each document to each sales representative one at a time. We love oral tradition! Actually, we just prepared the written version so we’d have a script to read to you over the phone.

Seriously, ignore all written materials the product manager has prepared for sales! The importance of this technique and its universal applicability cannot be overstated. Ignore wiki pages, frequently asked questions pages, “heads-up” messages, product data sheets, road map presentations, and anything in a knowledge repository. Whatever you overlook, the customer or the product manager can be relied on to point out later on.

Constantly assume. Never confirm. In the whole history of commerce since humans first traded nuts for berries, we have yet to hear a happy ending to any sentence that begins with “But I assumed that …” Don’t let that stop you. Asssume at every opportunity! Never ask. Never confirm. Just assume. Unvoiced assumptions are the spice of life. They add the risk to deals and product road maps that keeps everyone alert. Plus, they create raw material for food fights of finger pointing later on!

Forget critical constraints. Products rarely do all things for all people on all platforms in all combinations. Product managers try to keep products simple, but frequently they become complex and may have important known limitations–sometimes because sales insisted on an early delivery date for that last deal! Product managers will try to give guidance on how to avoid getting into trouble. Ignore it. Forget it. Plunge right ahead selling to a customer who insists on having a native client desktop application for the Commodore 64!

Sell to the wrong customers. There’s no faster way to create wasted effort and demands for off-strategy enhancements than to sell to the wrong customers. So disregard all lead qualification requirements and dial up your college fraternity buddies first. Your friends at McMurdo Station in Antarctica might just need an air conditioner after all!

Exaggerate the product’s capabilities to the customer. There’s nothing product managers like better than to walk into a meeting with a customer and have them complain that it’s 90 days since deployment and the product still hasn’t ended world hunger. At this point, the product manager will realize that someone got a little carried away describing the product’s capabilities during the sales process and now the product manager will have to gently reset the customer’s expectations to a more reasonable level. Meanwhile, that same someone is somewhere else whispering sweet words into the ear of another prospect …

Gloss over important distinctions. If you squint just right, “black” and “white” are really both just shades of gray.

Incorrectly position the product. This technique is a threefer. It maximizes the chance that the customer will demand off-strategy enhancements, ensures that they will be dissatisfied with the product if they do buy it, and maximizes the pressure that will be created on product management either way to agree to do unfunded, one-off, off-strategy work to salvage the situation.

Edit the standard slide deck to eliminate all qualifying statements. Disclaimers and qualifying statements are distractions. What the customer doesn’t know won’t hurt them. Until after the sale closes, anyway …

Make up your own slide deck every time instead of using the standard deck the company has prepared. Rewriting the company deck from scratch every time you present to a prospect maximizes the chance for getting incorrect or out-of-date information in front of the customer. Plus, it makes sure the company won’t be able to develop a repeatable sales model since you’ll reinvent everything from scratch every time.

Misrepresent the product road map. The difference between a possibility and a firm commitment is merely a lie told with a straight face. Sales representatives can do alchemy on the product road map and transmute possibilities into certainties. By the time product management finds out, it will be far too late for them to do anything about it.

Flat-out lie to the customer. Now we’re getting into black belt moves. Honest misunderstandings and oversights will irritate a customer, but flat-out lying to the the customer creates the opportunity to destroy the relationship completely. Even if you don’t, it guarantees a very angry customer who will be very difficult to calm down because they (understandably!) will no longer trust what the company is saying in the first place!

Refuse to let the product manager talk to the customer. Product managers are renowned for our supernatural power to divine customer needs without talking to them. Psychic powers are in the job description, and most of us make our own dowsing sticks. So there’s really no need for product managers to talk to customers.

Insist on gathering requirements yourself instead of letting the product manager do it directly. There’s no chance that a product manager, while talking to a customer, would ever think of a question the sales rep wouldn’t think of themself. There’s also no chance that a product manager responsible for the product road map might take more detailed notes about customer requirements than the sales rep would. So there’s no need for product managers to speak to the customer in order to gather requirements and determine priorities. Insist on handling that yourself. That way, you can demand the wrong thing, position it as a requirement instead of a nice to have, and overlook the two things the customer really wanted because you never asked!

Propose doing $50,000 of free customer-specific integration work for an initial demo for a lead. Hey, you’re just measured on the revenue you bring in, not the costs you incur on the engineering side in the process. So you might as well ask!

Demand a new feature in order to clinch a deal that’s guaranteed to close. Repeat quarterly, but never close. Product managers are slow learners. No matter how many times you say that a deal is guaranteed to close if we just do this one thing, we’ll never notice that the deals don’t in the end close. So keep guaranteeing deal closure if we just do this one thing …

Always assume that no deal can be closed without changes to the product. Selling the product you have is hard work. It forces you to make do with what you have (and actually sell!) instead of imagining something you want to have and then relying on its miraculous properties to close. So don’t sell the product you have. Say you can’t sell the product because of what it doesn’t have, and then blame the product for deals not closing.

Wait until the last possible minute to inform product management about possible functionality, legal, service level, or resource requirements for a deal. Advance planning is for wimps. Notifying product management about possible road map requirements at the last possible moment keeps everyone on their toes.

Demand that product work be added to the road map for your opportunities while ignoring the company’s existing commitments. All that matters is the new commitments you think are necessary to win new deals, not the existing commitments the company made to win previous deals and to satisfy existing customers.

Demand that the company keep its commitments to your accounts by breaking its commitments to other other reps’ accounts. Never mind the obvious fact that other account managers will make the same request and that the product manager can’t sacrifice both A and B to mollify both A and B. You might as well try to sacrifice the other account managers’ customers on the altar of your own ambition. It’ll still force the product manager to patiently review the reasons the other features on the road map matter too!

Insist every time you talk to product management that your current deal is the company’s highest priority. Because it is. To you.

Overstate the probability that your deal will close. Product managers have learned from long experience (and from checking the sales pipeline at the start of the quarter and the end of the quarter) that an account manager’s estimate of the probability that a deal will close in a particular time frame (or the probability it will close at all) is typically 3x the actually probability. That said, we never tire of hearing high probability estimates, especially at the start of the quarter where there’s plenty of time for people to forget that early confidence by the end of the quarter. So overestimate to your heart’s content–we’ll lap it up and stake our product road map on the precision and certainty of every estimate!

Deny that there’s any possibility that a reported problem could be anything other than a bug with the product itself. Any time a prospect or customer reports a problem with the product, the problem is 100% guaranteed to be real and the root cause is 100% guaranteed to be the product. There are no other possible explanations ever. So when there’s a riot downtown the day after deployment, demand that the product team investigate how the product is causing civil unrest.

Insist that it’s the product manager’s job to predict specific previously-unknown product bugs in advance. Given our well-known psychic powers, that’s only reasonable.

Whenever you fail to close a deal, immediately blame the product. There are no other possible explanations for a deal failing to close.

That’s not every way that an account manager can drive a product manager crazy, but it’s a good start. The rest is left as an exercise to the reader!