Presales Best Practices: Capturing Feature Requests and Product Gaps
Here’s the dirty secret in product management… and how presales teams can help. (Hint: Presales teams are the eyes and ears of the market; share what you know!)
At my last company, I spent some time in a hybrid role as both a presales manager and a product manager.
I’m gonna tell you something as a former product manager… but don’t tell anyone else… 😉
We are ‘guessing’ at the revenue potential of the features that we put in our product roadmaps. Shhh… 🤫
Don’t get me wrong… it’s well-research, educated guessing. Formally we call it ‘estimation’. But... it’s guessing.
And when we decide to include a feature in the roadmap… we know that we are committing:
➡ Dev resources to build it
➡ Product marketing resources to market it
➡ Sales resources to sell it
➡ Presales resources to demo/POC it
➡ Post-sales/CS resources to implement
➡ Support resources to support it.
As product managers…
😰 We worry about these decisions.
😬 They are stressful.
😳 They keep us up at night.
HOW CAN PRESALES HELP?
As sales engineers / solutions consultants / solutions architects, bring your product managers a list of the Deals and Dollars associated with the product gaps that you identify when engaging with your prospects.
When you do…
➡ You are bringing REAL data.
➡ REAL Dollars.
➡ REAL companies that need a feature.
You are removing the guesswork.
You are giving your product managers exactly what they need to confidently decide to include those missing features because companies have said that they need them. This is far better than them hemming and hawing about other features that the market may or may not actually want.
BONUS: By helping your product managers... you are actually helping yourself! You get the features that you need to close deals now and reduce customer churn risk in the future.
Want to see how your SEs/SCs/SAs can capture product gaps without the admin burden and easily share them with your product team? Talk to one of our presales experts about about how Homerun can help. Click here to get started!
