In my experience the methods for communicating with product teams varies wildly from company to company and Product Manager to Product Manager.
How do you all communicate with product teams about needed improvements, deal breaker product holes and what you are hearing from prospects? How often are you in contact and what does your product team ask of you?
Welcome all thoughts, methods, and suggestions!
Vivun has a great Product Gap module that allows for this level of tracking and reporting. I haven't fully implemented it yet, but it aligns well with the "Product Gap" concept found in larger SaaS orgs like Salesforce.
+1, I got a personal demo of Vivun and it looks really promising. Sadly in lack of Salesforce I cannot use it myself.
@Sascha Wiswedel Have you looked at preliotech.com? It is a non-Salesforce tool. Also, I came across www.mightyse.com during a Demofest session today. It looks 100% Salesforce too, but haven't looked yet.
We custom-built process in Salesforce using the case object.
Our SCs can submit Standard Feature Requests or Escalated Feature Requests (aka deal breakers, above a certain Account/Opp value threshold). Each type has a different form of required fields/information that product expects before accepting the request and/or engaging with a prospect/customer.
Escalated Feature Requests have short SLAs for review by Product, and are reviewed at least weekly by Success/Sales/Product leaders to prioritize and make decisions on whether we will commit to the work.
Standard feature requests are reviewed and analyzed on a quarterly basis as part quarterly meeting between Success/Sales/Product where they are used as input into product planning for the next quarter.
There is integration between Salesforce and JIRA that connects the records - although I'm not sure we're using it to it's potential.
Having the process is Salesforce is helpful for the following reasons:
It's where the SCs, Success, and Sales reps live making it easy for them to submit feature requests
It's critical to tie the feature request to Opps and Accounts to be able to quantify the financial impact and communicate that to Product
It allows you to go back to Accounts who were lost due to a product gap once the gap is closed.
Hope this helps. Happy to expand on any of it if you'd like me to.
We also have custom built (our own app) for tracking feature requests and the use cases and deals/opportunities associated with them. This has been really important and successful for a few reasons:
As Yuji mentioned, tying revenue to these requests helps our product team understand the bottom-line impact of building certain features and whether we are losing deals by not being able to offer them.
Including use cases (not just feature request) has also been critical to allow our PMs insight to the 'problem' so to speak, and not only the requested solution. In our product org, PMs spend a lot of time understanding the customer/market need and finding the best way to solve for it vs taking feature requests at face value, so giving them this information has really helped to translate feature requests from the sales team into a language they understand and can take action from.
Having deals tracked against these requests, especially lost deals over dealbreaker feature gaps, helps our sales team be proactive about reaching out in the future if / when we do build a feature. Having a record of the prospect's use case and account makes it much easier to know which prospects might be a fit (and a good use of time) re-connecting after new features get released.
Also happy to connect/expand on this approach if interested!
I find that stomping up and down and screaming at the top of my lungs has worked well...
JK!
I used to own this process for the team and built a "Typeform" that every rep could complete adhoc with a rating of importance (1-3--with 3 being deal breaker and 1 being nice to have). That Typeform auto-fired each request into a Slack channel that product could see, but then we would also have a monthly meeting where I would aggregate that data.
We since acquired a company that actually has a Feedback submission process and request management back end, so we have switched to using that. It allows us to have a Feature Request button in salesforce that sends that data into the product manager's feedback aggregations. Feel free to check it out if anyone is interested: https://www.pendo.io/product/feedback/.
Emily
We have an ‘Innovation Portal’ solution in place from Aha (https://www.aha.io/) where both internal individuals and customers can raise suggestions for product enhancements. All customers can see this and can vote in their favourites. The Product Management team then create business cases based on the most popular feature requests.
If SEs have a specific request it still must be posted on the Portal for customers to vote on it which helps build the business case.
We've built a revenue team Priority Framework that we prioritize for our Product managers team. We found there was so much noise in our VOC intake systems, and CRM product gap info, that we were disconnected as to what the real priorities were. Worse yet, this was driving a wedge between out product and revenue teams. By building a quick ranking framework, we combine product gap data and VOC intake with key revenue metrics around Retentions $'s and Pipeline unblocked. This gives the product team a clear view into what the revenue team feels are the most important product solutions to action, while delivering a view into the justification behind the ask. Data driven conclusions, and open communication will do wonders back and forth.
The only watch-out here, make sure it's clearly aligned that something like this isn't a roadmap! We use this as a key input to roadmap discussions, combined with necessary infrastructure work, strategic initiatives etc. The key is collaboration.