The Engineering Manager

We don’t sell, we close

What’s your relationship with the salespeople in your organization? Do you even talk to them? Is there a culture of us and them in your company? Do you feel like they see your department as unwashed geeks and you see theirs as a herd of Patrick Batemans wearing Submariners? I hope not!

Regardless of your own relationship with the salespeople in the organization, you have to have utmost respect for them: they close the deals that bring in the money that keep us all employed. Kudos to them.

Although we as engineers may have a stereotype of salespeople as the hustlers of big deals, commission cheques and the wearers of flashy Swiss watches, the art of selling big enterprise deals requires real talent, artistry and chutzpah. These people are at the periphery of the business, often away from home at the other end of the world on puddle-jumper flights, fighting the good fight to sell the stuff you’re building.

What do salespeople do all day?

As a manager in engineering, it’s extremely useful to include some salespeople in your network inside the business. Before we look at some ways that you can work more closely with salespeople, and most importantly, make their lives much easier, let’s have a look at what they typically concern themselves with.

Now there are many different types of sales roles in the world of SaaS. Those roles can range from those who contact leads who have requested demos or who have been identified as prospects at events to qualify them as worth pursuing further, through to senior salespeople who spend multiple quarters crafting multi-million dollar deals. In the same way that your most senior engineers can have a dramatic effect on the future health of the company, the same is true with the most senior salespeople. A landmark deal can secure years of runway and growth.

So what do they concern themselves with?

• Building relationships. Software companies with sales organizations of a decent size will typically work on deals that are worth quite a lot of money. This means that they aren’t the kind of deals that close very quickly. The length of time it takes from a lead being qualified to the paper being signed is called the sales cycle and for the biggest deals the sales cycle can potentially be years. This means that your salespeople will be continually working on building the relationship with their prospect throughout the cycle, ensuring that what they are selling is what ultimately gets chosen.
• Solving problems with the technology that you are building. Every client has different problems that your software can solve. Your salesperson will think creatively about how your software can fit into their daily lives so that they can do their job better, faster and more efficiently. This can be as simple as demonstrating the power of the software through to building a compelling story of how their whole organization could change around it.
• Working on revenue targets and growth. Always be closing: this is slightly tongue-in-cheek with a reference to the quite epic monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross (warning: very strong language) but it rings very true: sales is about closing deals. It’s not about turning up and giving a pitch in the hope that someone will bite, it’s about being creative, hustling, getting on that plane or train, learning about prospects, getting their interest and then getting them to sign on the dotted line. Sales organizations hold themselves to typically quarterly targets and they have to hit them (and you thought that your deadlines were bad). They’re the frontline indicator of the health of the business. If they’re closing lots of deals, it’s probably a function of their confidence in the product and the great work you’re doing. If they’re having a bad quarter, it could quite possibly be an indicator of something else that’s wrong in the organization, but they get the flak. Remember this.
• Understanding what the market wants to buy. They are uniquely placed to see what kinds of problems clients are trying to solve and what kinds of existing tools they are using to do it (if any!). They can also use the relationships they build to see that there are entirely new, untapped areas of the market to sell to. Also, they can alert you to when there are cheap ambitious startups that are trying to undercut you. Is the market becoming more specialist and is after point solutions rather than software suites? Is the market becoming more price sensitive and as a result you need to adjust yours?

So now we’ve taken a look at what salespeople concern themselves with, how can you help them do their job even better? Let’s be honest – it’s a world away from you working on the code with your team. Or is it?

How can you help salespeople succeed?

There are a number of ways that you can help your sales staff do their job really well. Let’s take a look at some of them.

• Get to know them. You’ll have more in common with them than you think: you’re making the stuff that they sell! Introduce yourself, spend some time talking to them about their job and what their current challenges are. Buy them a coffee and have a chat. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, some organizations have an us and them culture between engineering and commercial. You can bridge this gap.
• Prioritize uptime, speed and stability. You might have the best features in the world, but if they’re slow, buggy and ragged around the edges then that won’t matter one bit in a demo. Keep experimental or slow features behind feature flags. Ensure you’re fixing stability issues as a priority. Remember that demos may be occurring on different continents to the one that you’re on, and consider your SLAs carefully. A simple, fast tool can make a feature rich slow tool look awful when they are pitched side-to-side.
• Deliver on time. Since the sales cycle can be a long one, especially when your software is going through lengthy procurement procedures, remember that your roadmap is a key persuader to the potential buyer. If you’ve promised to drop a feature this quarter and you don’t, then your salespeople will look like they’re overpromising or that there isn’t company-wide alignment on the story and the discipline of delivery.
• Work on cadence. In addition to delivering on time, you’ll want to work on your cadence of delivery with your team. Software that has regular updates looks cared for, alive and driven by creative people. Sequence your projects so that you can keep releasing new things regularly. If you have large pieces of architecture work that will take months to complete, try to combine them with lots of small enhancements so that your salespeople can show that you’re always shipping.
• Promise at the right granularity. This point is aimed more at product, but you can help lobby the cause as an engineering leader. Roadmaps that go into to much granularity before the unknowns have been worked out will fail to deliver. Prime your salespeople with roadmaps that provide high granularity for features very close to release, but talk in general terms about what you’re doing six months from now. Describing that the latter half of the year will concern itself with “solving our most common data export problems” is better than saying you’ll be “allowing data export from all 25 components” because it gives you more flexibility in the scope of the project. It’s hard to fail at the first promise.
• Use their expertise as stakeholders in new projects. If not already, as per your product marketers, invite key salespeople to join your team’s demo meetings and kick-offs for new projects and solicit their feedback regularly. They’re working on the periphery of the business and have some of the most up to date information from the field: key missing features, what competitors are selling, and how you stack up against them.

In summary

The sales staff in your organization have more in common with you than you might think. They’re fantastic people to have closer to your team to get a temperature check on what you’re building, and they have the most up to date information on how you’re stacking up against your competitors. Go and talk to them.

Thank you to Joakim Nilsson for the comments and feedback on my draft of this post.

Positioning, positioning, positioning

The best software doesn’t sell itself. Even if you did have the best software, it needs to be positioned, priced and pitched correctly to stand a chance amongst your competitors, and that’s where product marketing comes in. As a manager of an engineering team it’s likely that you’ll be regularly working with a product marketer to make sure that the cool stuff that you’re building is making the biggest splash possible.

Great product marketing can make the code you’re writing into something that people need to have. This is most easily demonstrated by example. To begin with, consider this: a customer messaging platform. Sounds boring. But by using Intercom, and especially when perusing through their wonderfully designed guides, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start using it sooner. Now consider this: yet another instant messaging program. Yawn. But after having a read through the beautifully written and illustrated Telegram blog I was downloading their app and I’ve been using it ever since. It makes a lot of difference. A world-class engineer, designer, product manager and product marketer can really change the world.

In the wider world beyond software, clever positioning of a product can dramatically widen its reach. For example, Cirque du Soleil are not just positioning themselves as a circus act. They are a brand that compete against theatre, movies and musicals worldwide.

So what is product marketing?

Product marketing is a really interesting role. It’s a kind of hybrid of product, sales and marketing. Small SaaS companies may have just one product marketer for their application. Large companies may have one product marketer per tool in their suite, or they may have many product marketers producing content to appeal to particular user personas.

As an engineering manager, product marketers are extremely useful to make sure that your team are iterating quickly on the most impactful features, that they are getting feedback from users quickly and therefore experiencing the true impact of their work. We’ll have a look at how we can help them help us shortly, but first let’s explore their role.

So, what do product marketers concern themselves with?

• Creating a compelling narrative and positioning for the product that you are building. Why does this product exist and how is it making its own ding in the marketplace? Why is it so much better than competing products? Why is it so much better value for money? They have the answers to these questions.
• Deciding the right moments in time to make big marketing pushes for big impact. Your product may have new features and functionality added weekly, but when is the right point of the year to turn the wheels of the hype machine and do a big, splashy launch? When should they spend marketing budget on creating an advertising campaign? How does that line up with what the rest of the company is doing and with competitors’ launches?
• Engaging with customers and tracking usage of features. Your product marketer will obsess over how new functionality is being picked up when it hits production and will keep a close eye on feedback, whether implicit or explicit. They’ll reach out to your biggest customers directly for feedback. They’ll worry when few people engage with your latest product feature and want to help you fix that problem.
• Steering sales enablement. Your product marketer will be the biggest champion for your software and will spend plenty of time narrating the story and purpose to the sales team. They’ll do demos for them, run sales enablement sessions, get them excited about what’s coming down the pipe, and give them hints and tips on how to sell against competing products and how to get the most out of your new features.
• Advising on pricing. It’s extremely hard to get pricing right in an ever more price sensitive economy. Your product marketer will eagerly study what your competitors are charging and what their billing models look like so that you can have the best chance of fighting them.
• Feeding back from the marketplace. Your product marketers should be sitting in on sales pitches, demos and executive business reviews with your key clients, listening to their needs and then feeding it back. As well as bringing products to market, they should bring the market to the product.

Helping them help you succeed

As you can see, product marketers do a lot! They’re invaluable resources for your team, connecting you with customers and further convincing your own engineers of the over-arching purpose of what they are building.

But this seems a world away from engineering management, which is your job. Is there anything that you can do to help them do their job better and therefore make your team’s work even more successful? Well, fortunately, there is a lot that you can do.

Let’s explore how you can help.

• Find the product marketer(s) who are working on your area of the application. Your team and department may already have strong links with those that are doing product marketing, but it’s equally possible that they sit in another department, or on another floor, or even in another office in another country. How often do you meet with them? There may be a lot of disconnect between the engineers writing the code and those weaving the narrative. Find them, introduce yourself. Take them for a coffee if they’re nearby. Ask them how they do their job. Ask how you can help. Enquire as to whether they have any frustrations. Even better, see if they can come sit with your team on a regular basis to form a closer bond.
• Include them. Open up your world to them. Invite them to your sprint demos. Get them in your Slack channels. You want to have a fluid, open conversation going at all times. See them as an integral part of your team. This gives them the chance to offer feedback (from themselves and also customers) at the earliest possible stages, creating the opportunity for them to motivate and steer the team.
• Describe the reasons you think that you product or feature is awesome. Your team will work on more than just customer facing features. They may improve uptime, speed or the number of concurrent users that your application can handle. These aren’t always clear to your product marketers, but they are great ammunition for them to further improve their message.
• Let them practice their narrative with your team. Not only does this give the chance for them to have a safe space to craft the ongoing story of your features and receive feedback, it also gives them the chance to expose the impact of the work that your team is doing. This is extremely motivational and breeds a feeling of purpose and desire for your team to do their best work: it really means something!
• Build in feature toggling. For the greatest possible market impact, your product marketer may advise batching together the unveiling of a set of new features and launching them as part of a campaign. You won’t want to hold back code changes indefinitely, as continued code changes can end up blocked behind stale code that hasn’t yet been released. Instead, build in the ability to feature toggle and keep shipping to production in secret. We’ve had great success with Launch Darkly, which allows code to be wrapped in feature flags that can be turned on and off dynamically. It can also do targeted or percentage-based rollouts; ideal for enabling features for trusted clients for early feedback, or letting your company’s employees use the most bleeding-edge features.
• Track usage. Always call upon your product marketer when designing new features so that you know what the important metrics are that should be tracked. Is it clicks or opens or conversions? Is it session length or actions performed? These tools give your product marketer greater power in investigating how well features are being received.
• Build in survey functionality. This could be as simple as a net-promoter score prompt that appears occasionally in the application, or could be a detailed survey that is delivered to users quarterly.
• Let them talk directly to customers. Again, Intercom has been an excellent tool for this. As well as telling their narrative via marketing material, we’ve been using Intercom to let our product marketers deliver product updates, targeted messaging and receive questions and feedback directly from customers through the application. Doing so requires no intervention from the engineers.

In summary

If you’re running an engineering team, then having a good relationship with your product marketers can help you make your work land with impact at the right place and the right time. There are a plethora of ways that you can help make life better for your product marketers, and it’s in your team’s best interests that you do.

Make sure that you’re getting the most from them: early feedback on product development, intelligence on your competitors, clarification of the value (to users, but also monetary) of what you are building, your messaging to the market, and help defining targets behind usage and interest. Go and use them!

Thank you to Phill Agnew for the comments and feedback on my draft of this post.