How to Sell Internally and Externally, You Know, and That's What I Learned From Johnny

In this episode of the Revenue Builders podcast, John Kaplan and John McMahon talk to Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer of MongoDB. Sahir shares his insight gained working in the intersection of product and go-to-market teams. Sahir also touches on creating synergy between pre-sales and sales teams, and the need to balance innovation and solving actual customer problems. 

Additional Resources:

• Connect With Sahir Azam on LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahirazam
• Donate to The Jed Foundation | https://jedfoundation.org/
• Quoted in this episode | https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-saas-marketing-is-different/ 
• More about Force Management | https://forc.mx/3waMDDS
• Aligning Your Sales Engine With Product Development | https://forc.mx/3Hd1QYv
• Product-Led Growth: Driving Cross-Functional Support to Evolve Your Go-to-Market Strategy | https://forc.mx/3mE2iW8

HIGHLIGHTS

• The focus of a Chief Product Officer
• Aligning with your customer's buying behavior
• Encourage synergy between sales and pre-sales teams
• Sitting in the seat in the moment of the customer's pain
• How to balance innovation with solving a need
• Take the time to do a proper discovery call
• Selling internally can be harder than selling externally

QUOTES

Sahir: "Product marketing and product management, there's sort of a Venn diagram of overlap of skillset there and different organizations align slightly different on how those things are defined. But we think it's really important, regardless of how they report organizationally, but for those two functions to be paired up really closely to have a successful outcome." 

Sahir: "If you don't have a very seamless way for your end-customers to try and use a product, you're many times never gonna get in the door." 

Sahir: "Great product people can really articulate and translate that pain from the way that it's articulated by the customer, which isn't always like, here's my pain point, here's the business value but extracting that, qualifying that, documenting that in a way that's crisp and concise." 

Sahir: "The most cohesive team is where everyone knows the role, but there's a natural overlap of trust built here and everyone knows what you're solving for." 

Check out John McMahon’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064