Lessons In Product Management

Stop Avoiding Sales and Start Engaging Deeper With Them! w/ Tommi Forsstrom - VP of Product @ Teachable

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On today's episode, I sat down with Tommi Forsstrom, VP of Product @ Teachable. While working in Venture Capital with growth-stage companies, Tommi discovered the power of having a strong sales organization and the need for product management to collaborate closer with sales

Some of the topics we cover include:

  • Why PMs need to take ownership and proactive steps toward deeper engagements with sales
  • In B2B, it's hard to be good at your product role, unless you have a deep understanding of your customer. 
  • As PMs, we stress the need for empathy with our customers, but we also need to have empathy with other departments in our orgs
  • To start working more closely with sales, we need to learn how to speak the sales language and empathize with their needs and their concerns. 
  • We can help our sales teams by clarifying our product's value prop and where the value lies in the various segmentations of our market
  • Our sales teams can help us get closer to our customers, but they won't take you on sales calls if they don't trust you or they don't know what is in it for them
  • And we can help Sales avoid over-promising by clarifying what is in-bounds to talk about for our short-term roadmap and what they should not be talking about with customers to be realistic
  • If you're struggling to engage with sales, working with your product marketing team to develop great sales enablement tools will go a long way in building relationships with sales

    • To find Tommi's article and to follow him on Medium: https://medium.com/@forssto/product-folk-love-you-sales-buddies-b034a1967f49


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