Product Management & Sales – Building a Pipeline

TL;DR: If you’re a product manager at an early-stage company that’s about to hire for sales, and you end up temporarily supporting the entire process ahead of these hires, you may need to get ahead of things. If this is where you are, skip the following intro bits and head down to the Sales Stage Forecasting Process template below.

Sales Pipelines for Early Stage Product Managers

At an early-stage company, it’s likely your interdepartmental coordination consists of talking to a handful of your colleagues, most often in engineering. (This could be software development, product engineering, etc.) There might not be any marketing department yet. Or sales. Maybe not even HR. (The CEO might be doing all of that.) And that CEO was likely handling Product until you were hired as well.

Many of these roles don’t come until the company evolves and perhaps is close to launching a product, or recently launched a first version. It would be nice if more folks were on board earlier, but startup finance reality often doesn’t allow this. At some point, there’s likely going to be – at the very least – marketing. And for a variety of products, also Sales.

In cases where direct sales is necessary, should you even be doing things like setting up sales pipelines? Maybe not. Your comfort zone is likely more in the problem space with customer discovery and the solution space with your internal teams. So you’re perhaps now asking, why would a Product Manager have to help set up anything to do with sales? Shouldn’t this be done by sales leadership? Or Marketing? Or the IT department onboarding a selected tool of some sort? Probably. Well… Yes. But it might be you. Because you’re likely a Swiss Army Knife. A utility player. You may have come from dev, or design, or any of the many places from which product managers emerge. And you have all your original Individual Contributor specialties. Meanwhile, you’re trying to grow into more strategic thinking with a holistic view of the business. Still, you may have to climb back down that ladder into tactical to fill in gaps until the right roles can be filled. Whether you’re doing a lot of IC work or operating at a strategic level, if this is what you’re company needs right now and there’s no one else to do it, chances are it’s going to fall to product, at least initially. Even if it should be sales leadership or marketing.

If it does fall to you, you’re whom this write-up is for. I don’t know how often this happens, however, I’ve been involved with helping in this area in several different startups. So perhaps it’s more common than I’d thought; hence this sharing.

Who Should be Doing This?

In a perfect world, a COO, CMO or VP level sales would figure out where in the org this lives, which is probably not the product department. While your CEO and your new HR person, (and possibly you), start prospecting to hire sales team members, you may need to build out internal tools and processes to support them. At some point, you’ll have sales leadership and additional team members. Your first hires may range from senior level with powerful contact lists to entry level “phone bangers.” Either way, their primary tactics should be reaching out to others; not struggling with tooling. Marketing will be getting them some air cover in the marketplace, but getting their tooling online and structured is an in-the-weeds task that should be done asap.

Sales Stage Forecasting Process Template

The following template is for a Sales Stage Forecasting process. It may not be tailored enough to be used for any particular business. But is generic for you can adapt it to your needs. There are two general sections in the slide deck:

• Simple overview chart.
• Definitions and Tasks chart

This is in a single shared Google Slides Doc you can access and make your own copy.
(NOTE: Please do NOT request Edit access. For some reason, people seem to click that request, perhaps not realizing all you have to do is go to File on the menu bar to make your own copy.)

Here is the link to the Sales Forecasting Template Google Doc

Copy the template. Adjust as you see fit. Create the stages in whatever Sales Pipeline Tool you choose.

Sales Pipeline Tools

There is an entire industry devoted to such tools. You will need to run your own requirements list and check the boxes as needed for your situation. The 10,000 lb Gorilla is of course Salesforce. Then we have “everyone else” which includes the popular HubSpot; which is great for getting something up and running quickly. (Or Pipedrive is fairly simple as well, among many others.) I can tell you the following from experience. I’ve stood up Salesforce at two different companies to handle rather complex needs. By the time we got done with consultants, number of seats, etc., it took 2 – 4 months and several hundred thousand dollars each time. It’s important to understand these were not simple pipeline efforts and you might be fine with their entry level offerings. In my cases, we had custom workflows, integrations with other systems and more. The tool worked great once set up, but it was non-trivial to do. At two other startups, I’ve used HubSpot. Simple to get the basics up and running in a couple of hours. Tuning takes longer of course. And if you want to integrate other tools, there are apps in their marketplace or web hooks you can use. (For example, to integrate a prospecting tool, and so on.)

Note that while many of these pipeline tools will have varying degrees of integration with email, they might not have good document management capabilities. You’ll likely need some means to manage such things; from NDAs to proposals and so on. You can do this manually to start and later consider more formal contract management tools. Also, pipeline tools most often end at the close. Project Management or ongoing Customer Relationship Management will likely need to be managed elsewhere.

About Customer Success & Support

Is customer success and support part of sales? Probably; at least to a degree. Contemporary thought on the issue seems to be increasingly that it’s potentially a critical component. It will depend on your situation and company structure. It’s likely the sales relationship will be ongoing. Where those touch points are will vary. In terms of customer management and how to handle these touch points there are of course even more tools. Yes, behemoths like SalesForce can cover all the needs. But if you used something simple for onboarding, you may need something more mid-tier, (maybe in the ZenDesk type category), for ongoing needs. Such tools will have all the usual contact management features, and increasingly, (beyond simple FAQs and knowledge base articles), will include AI chatbots, possibly also integrating with live customer representative support.

This whole area of Customer Success and Support can be a bit tricky. It’s likely a great place to destroy your Customer Lifetime Value KPI through churn if you fail on customer success and support.

Let’s also clarify a difference between success and support.

“Customer Success” and “Customer Support” are two roles that focus on customer satisfaction but have different objectives and approaches. When considered at a high level, both have unique bodies of knowledge and expertise. The following brief definitions will not do them justice, but should serve well enough as a differentiating overview:

1. Customer Success:
   
   • Objective: Customer success is generally proactive and focuses on helping customers achieve their long-term goals using the product or service. The aim is to ensure customer satisfaction and retention, and to encourage loyalty and growth. This should be a long term effort.
     
   • Activities: This role involves regular check-ins with customers, onboarding and training, and providing insights and advice on how to better use the product. Customer success managers often help with strategic planning and may assist with upselling or cross-selling.
     
   • Focus: The focus is on relationship-building and maximizing customer value over the lifetime of the relationship. This often involves understanding the customer’s business and tailoring interactions to their specific needs and outcomes. There is no endpoint resolution to customer success. The touch points and aspects of the ongoing relationship will vary, but this is an ongoing role, not a simple transaction.
     
2. Customer Support:
   
   • Objective: The primary goal of customer support is to solve specific customer issues or problems related to a product or service. It’s generally reactive, addressing customer needs as they arise. It should be a short term event with a quick and decisive resolution.
     
   • Activities: Includes answering questions, resolving problems, and helping customers navigate products or services. Support is typically delivered through channels like email, phone, or chat.
     
   • Focus: The focus is on efficiency and resolution speed, ensuring customers can use the product or service without obstacles. Support usually has an endpoint of a resolved issue.

While customer support handles immediate issues, customer success is more about strategic engagement to ensure ongoing beneficial use of a product or service. Both are crucial for success, with support ensuring day-to-day satisfaction and success driving long-term loyalty and growth. In both cases, these areas do impact Product. Both areas should be considered valuable feedback sources for ongoing feature and roadmap considerations.

Conclusion

At startup companies, role definitions and responsibilities can vary wildly as compared to businesses that are scaling or well-established. Often, anything that’s in the “we don’t really have anyone to do this yet” category will just fall to Product as that function is generally at the center of all stakeholders. It might not be optimal, but is often the way of it. You may have to step up and just get these things done until you’ve grown your organization to the point where these tasks can handed off to more appropriate team leads.