B2B Companies: How to work with Product Management and Influence our Product Direction
As a customer, you can have leverage on your vendors’ product direction. How? Build an ongoing relationship with their product management team. IF those Product Managers are customer-focused, it will pay off in spades.
I originally wrote this post almost 15 years ago on a now defunct blog, but some recent experiences with customers reminded me of it. I’ve updated it slightly and added some tips for Product Managers to help them build those relationships.
Some customers are really easy and great to work with, while others are quite the opposite. Guess who has more influence with Product Management?
This is an open letter to B2B (enterprise software) customers, though much of the following also applies to customers of other types of products.
Do you want to influence product direction with the vendors of the products you use?
If so, here is some information that can significantly increase your influence with the Product Management teams in the companies you deal with. And it doesn’t just depend on how much money you’ve spent or plan on spending with a given vendor. Even mid-sized and smaller companies can exert tremendous influence if they follow these rules.
Caveat Lector* — There’s no guarantee that all of these apply in all cases, just like any general advice, it’s pretty good most of the time, and the times it’s not, it probably better than nothing.
*Caveat Lector — Reader Beware
1. Build a good working relationship with Product Management
Just as you didn’t see your purchase of our product as a one-off transaction, but part of an ongoing relationship with our company, neither did we. While I can’t vouch for how your sales rep has treated you — most are pretty good but some just want to close the deal and move on — I can say that for Product Managers, we want to build strong customer relationships. It’s one of the foundations for our success.
And as we’re not trying to overtly sell you products, the conversations you have with us will be very different that those you have with your sales reps. Be open and honest with us and we will definitely reciprocate.
✅ PM Tip — Relationships are two-way and don’t be afraid to start the relationship, without any expectation of the customer giving back. e.g. As new customers are onboarded, work with your Customer Success team (or whomever does the onboarding) and contribute to that onboarding. It’s a great way to let the customer know who you are and start the relationship early.
2. Help us understand how you use our products
Although we have a good *general* sense of what you are doing with our products, unless we’ve spent a lot of time with you, and I’m talking about face-time, not just phone conversations, we’re rather hazy on the DETAILS of what you’re doing with our product. So if we visit or call you to discuss your use of our product, don’t be surprised if we ask what seem like some very basic questions about product use.
Be patient and help us understand. The more we understand exactly what you are (and — equally important — aren’t) doing with our product, AND the reasons why, the better we can advocate for your needs when we get back to the office and into product planning sessions.
✅ PM Tip — When you reach out to customers for user interviews or visits, think about the benefit you can give them. i.e. it’s not just about them helping you. Review their open cases with Support, let their Salesrep know you want to reach out to them, and see if there is anything you can do to help the customer. Have as much knowledge of what they ARE doing with your product as you can get from existing information, and if you can help them overcome some issues, even better. Give before you get.
3. Definitely help us understand your environment and processes
This is huge. Although we may have some idea of what you are doing with our product, we know very little about the processes within your company and the environment you work in. And when I say “environment”, it’s not simply the technical IT environment, but the business environment that is the context for your use of our product.
Now don’t get me wrong, we’re not completely ignorant, but every company is different. There are different roles, different processes, different objectives, different constraints, different organizational structures etc. The more you can do to enlighten us in these areas, the better picture we can build of your world and the value our products can deliver therein.
For example: We don’t necessarily know what regulatory impact various laws have on you or what new laws are coming in the near future that will impact you, and how you plan to address them. What can (or must) we do to help you implement your plan?
✅ PM Tip — A lot of Product Managers don’t realize why understanding the customer business environment is important. They are too focused on “features” and “functionality”. Don’t be one of those Product Managers. The ultimate value your product can provide is helping customers achieve better business outcomes; perhaps not always directly, but the more you can connect your product to their business goals, the more valuable it will be in their view.
4. Tell us about your (big) problems, not just the new features you want
OK, this may sound a bit counter to what you hear from us — we always seem to be talking about new releases and roadmaps and feature enhancements — but first and foremost we care about problems. Your problems.
Why? Because a big part of our jobs is to understand those problems more deeply than anyone else in the company and to use and convey that knowledge in product planning.
Yes, Customer Support hears all about your day-to-day problems and they help you address those. But they’ve got you covered there, so we’re not as interested in those kinds of problems.
We want to hear about your big problems. OK, not all of your big problems, but at least those big problems that we can potentially help address. Think big, and be (a bit) selfish.
- Are there business or technical issues that keep you up at night? If so, tell us.
- Is there something that might prevent you from getting your bonus? We want to know.
- If you could use our product to help your business meet some critical goals, please share.
It’s not that we won’t listen to feature requests — we will — but when you ask for a feature, the first words out of our mouth will almost certainly be “Why? Why do you need that?” We need to understand the problems because deep down, we aggregate information and pattern match. If we see many customers having similar problems, we can justify pushing those problems to the top of the list to be addressed in upcoming releases.
✅ PM Tip — Customers aren’t going to just talk to you about their problems, particularly their big problems. You’re going to have to build a trusting relationship with them over time. The relationship will start with more transactional conversations, and once they see results from those conversations, they’ll be more open to deeper and more impactful conversations.
To a certain extent, this is a numbers game. Of all the customers you start building relationships with, only a few will develop into deeper, longer lasting ones open to sharing the kinds of big problems that keep them up at night.
I personally had customer relationships that spanned several different companies. i.e. the individual changed jobs to another company that also used our product and we reconnected at their new company where we left off at their previous company. It doesn’t get better than that.
5. Don’t underestimate the amount of political $#!% we have to deal with in product planning
We don’t talk about it much externally, but our company is about as political as yours, possibly more so. There are the usual power structures, political agendas, internal fiefdoms and random insanity that exist when any group of people are put together and have jobs to do.
Product planning is a very political process. Why? Creating product takes resources — people, money, time. And these are all precious commodities that people want to influence. As much as every company will talk about being on the same team — and while that is generally true in well run companies — not all companies are well run and not everyone is a team player. Also not all customer or market problems are treated equally. It’s very Darwinian to be honest.
But the upside is, the more information we have about the problems, the value and the business impact/benefit, the better we can advocate for and defend our requests for resources. That’s how the game works.
✅ PM Tip — Sometimes, with some customers, it helps to share the reality of the challenges you face as a PM in your company. Many people in your company probably don’t understand the challenges you face, so it’s almost certain your customers don’t.
Now, your challenges aren’t your customer’s concern. So I’m not advocating you do this with everyone, but sometimes, once you’ve built up a good relationship with them, you may want, or need to share some of your challenges, to help them understand why some work is taking a long time, or why some new capability seems incomplete, not addressing the real use case etc.
They’ve probably shared a lot of their challenges with you, so they would be open to you sharing some of your challenges with them. It’s a two-way relationship.
6. The more accessible you are to us, the more influence you’ll have with us
You’re busy, we understand that. But we are too. And if you don’t return emails, or we have to hound you to get a phone call or you only call us when you have a problem, we’re not going to put as much focus in what you have to say. If other companies are more responsive, guess who we’re going to talk to?
You may have spent a boatload of money with us last year, and your salesrep may be very attentive because she went to Club and bought a new BMW with the commission, but we didn’t see any of that commission and we didn’t get an exotic vacation because of your purchase, even though we flew out twice to your site during the sales process; once during a critical part of the POC and later to give a roadmap presentation to your executives.
Our currency is access. If you are accessible to us, even if you’re not a F500 company, we will value that. And while those large, loud companies with big wallets will have influence with our leaders, you can have greater influence with us simply by being responsive to our emails, returning our phone calls, updating us on your progress etc. It all goes back to the relationship we have with you and that you want to have with us.
✅ PM Tip — Going back to previous statements, this relationship is a two-way street, and you need to understand their capacity to speak with you. The priorities of their job comes first. You are probably not the only vendor they deal with. So you may be in competition with other Product Managers from other companies all vying for their attention. Be accessible to these customers, help them where possible. It’s an investment of your time to for future return. It may not always work out with every customer, but when it does work out, it’s worth 10x or more of the effort you put in.
Conclusion
So there it is. There may be one or two other ways to influence our product direction — like having your CEO befriend our CEO and get your message across that way. Yes, that can work, but our CEO is not a patsy and I’m sure the things your CEO cares about are not exactly the same things that you care about.
You use our product regularly. You see it’s strengths and shortcomings. You know better than anyone what it can and can’t do for you; which of your problems it can and can’t address. That’s incredibly valuable knowledge. Share it with us. You’ll be doing both of us a big favour.
A Little Feedback Please
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’d like some feedback on the article to make it better. It should take just 1 minute, but will really be valuable to me. Thanks in advance.
===> Click Here <===
