When I was VP of Product at Twiggle, building the product from zero to one (and then one to ten and so on), I hired a technical writer freelance. Our product was an API, and we needed comprehensive technical documentation. 

No offense, but technical documentation is one of the tasks I used to hate most in product management. It’s super important, and I wanted to make sure it’s done well (from a product standpoint and not just technical accuracy), but it’s so tedious: explaining the product in detail to someone else, including its principles, the consideration behind every aspect of it, and identifying what are the things that are most important for the customer to understand is extremely hard. I have worked with great technical writers, they weren’t the problem. The problem was partly because I needed to explain things that I haven’t articulated clearly before, and partly because it was simply a lot of work to document every functionality in detail.

Throughout my product management years, I have led full rewrites of the technical documentation (in different companies and for various reasons), and although it was a huge amount of work, the result was an asset that the company could rely on for many years to come. Not only did the technical documentation serve the customers’ needs better, but it also conveyed the value that the product delivered and helped customers make the most out of the product.

Back to Twiggle. When I hired that freelance tech writer our product was already running with a few customers. The API was well-defined. I expected it to be a tedious process, but not one with many unknowns. Turned out I was wrong.

The technical writer I hired was quite experienced and had a background in marketing. When we reviewed the product, she started asking me questions that I didn’t have a ready answer for. She didn’t use these explicit terms, but what she really wanted to learn about – before diving into the technical details – was the value proposition and the context in which the product would be used. 

Answering her questions, I described what I knew and how I thought of things, but it took quite a few rounds of back and forth to crystalize my thoughts and articulate an explanation that she could work with. I didn’t quite understand back then why she insisted on these things, but since I appreciated her experience and since I am fully aware of the importance of context I took her lead and continued the discussion although it was time-consuming.

It was only later, when we started building our sales team, that I realized how important these questions were, and how deep the gaps that it exposed in our ability to (understand and) communicate the value our product delivers.

There is a perception that great salespeople can sell anything to anyone. They might, occasionally, but you can’t let your success depend on that. Great marketing people can’t always market well either. They need your help in the form of a clear value proposition and product strategy. The problem is that they don’t always know that they even need to ask.

Here is how it works and what you can do about it.

Most Salespeople Work With What They Have

An experienced salesperson comes with many assets. Their domain knowledge, their network and their trusted relationships within it, and their sales skills (different skills are needed along the sales cycle). There is one thing that they usually don’t have prior knowledge of: your product.

I’m sure that’s no news to you – of course they need to know about the product’s features and competitive advantage to be able to sell it, so for most salespeople, their product onboarding includes just that: they get a good overview of the company, the vision, the innovation, and they also get a good deep dive into the product and how it does the magic.

It usually doesn’t include a good overview of the product strategy, the value proposition, the detailed customer persona, and why it makes sense for the customer to actually buy the product.

Most people wouldn’t even know that it’s missing. They are used to going about, understanding customers’ budgets and pain points, and someone managing to convince them that it’s exactly your product that they need.

Guess what? That’s how you end up with sales that depend on specific deliverables and product commitments – because many salespeople in the tech world know that their job is to match the product to whichever customer they meet, many times simply because they haven’t seen it working otherwise.

Good Salespeople Find What Works Best

Good salespeople, though, know that there are prospects who are more likely to close a deal than others. If they are mindful of their goals, they will prefer to invest their time and effort in those profiles that work best. 

These are also usually the people who would take the sales deck that the company gave them and change it to tell the story better: In a way that works for them, in a way that helps them close more deals.

I mentioned here a sales deck that the company gives its salespeople, but in many startups, salespeople are expected to create their own decks, at least initially. Guess what? It doesn’t work, even with good people. Because this deck that sells your product should be a manifestation of your product strategy, and if you don’t have a good one, your salespeople cannot do their job.

Great Salespeople Understand That It’s Your Job

If you are lucky enough to work with a great salesperson, one that had seen how this works when it works well, they would understand that it’s your job to feed them with the essence and not just with the shell. 

They would come to you to ask the hard questions. They would challenge how you see the product – the exact problem it solves and to whom, the value your customers can expect (remember that value isn’t what you do, it’s what they get out of it), the reason to choose you over the competition (in most cases that’s not about features either). 

Great salespeople understand that there is a missing piece in the story most companies tell them, and until the core isn’t complete they know that they wouldn’t be able to sell it well. They also understand that it’s not their job to find the answers, it’s yours.

But you don’t have to wait to find a great salesperson to do it right. Instead, you can change how you work with the sales team that you have right here and now. Unless your product is a rockstar and sells like crazy, and assuming that you do see the need, it’s fair to assume that your sales team isn’t equipped to succeed. They need an end-to-end story to tell. 

Many people call that story a sales pitch, which indicates that it’s the salespeople’s responsibility to create. I prefer to call it product pitch, for two reasons: first, it tells the story of the product and not of the sales, and second – because it is your story to tell, not theirs.

Don’t wait for your sales team to come and ask for it, because many wouldn’t even know that this is the missing piece, let alone understand that it’s your job to provide it. Be a leader and share the product story clearly with everyone.

But what if you don’t have a good one to tell? Roll up your sleeves and start working, because that’s one of the most valuable things you can do for your company. Need help? Talk to us.