Episode 117 – Project Manager: How to Get Along With The Sales Team

The podcast for project managers by project managers. The sales team and the project manager - how to improve that complex relationship.  Advice for the project teams who have to deliver what sales has sold and why sales professionals should be kept engaged in the project from start to finish. Table of Contents 01:56 … Meet James 03:06 … BrandMuscle 04:17 … The Sales Guy’s Perspective 08:56 … The Pressure on the Sales Team 11:37 … How to Deliver what Sales has Sold 15:17 … Project Handoff 17:20 … Scrutinize the Contract 18:48 … Advice for the Sales Team 21:33 … The Project Kickoff 23:57 … Sales and Identifying Risks 25:13 … The Project Handoff 26:56 … Leadership Influencers 28:07 … Career Advice 29:42 … Connect with James 30:23 … Closing JAMES MORSE:  ...as you balance that relationship with sales, you naturally develop a trusting relationship between the project team and the sales team.  And that’s so helpful because then I trust the salesperson to deliver something correctly, and they trust me to actually deliver on that and make sure that that project gets in time, is in budget, is in scope, and it delivers a happy customer. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our opportunity to meet with you and talk about issues that project managers are facing today.  We hope you’ll continue to tell us what you like and offer your suggestions.  You can leave a comment on Google, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or whatever podcast listening app you use.  You can also leave comments on the Velociteach.com website or on our social media pages.  I am Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates. BILL YATES:  Wendy, we’re going to have a fun conversation today.  We’ve got a great topic. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, we have.  And we have a great guest, too.  So his name is James Morse, and he serves as the Vice President and Head of Product for BrandMuscle.  He’ll tell us a little bit more about BrandMuscle coming up. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And James is unique in that he served the project manager role and also the sales role, project manager first in his career and then later in sales, and so really what we’re going to talk about is the hatred between project managers and sales. WENDY GROUNDS:  I’d say a particularly strong dislike. BILL YATES:  Yeah, there’s so many project managers who have discovered that their sales team has made some promises or overcommitments that now the project manager and the team have to deliver.  So we’re going to talk about that. WENDY GROUNDS:  I think so, we’re going to boil it down to communication. BILL YATES:  Yes, we are. WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s talk with James. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  James, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for being our guest today. JAMES MORSE:  Thanks for having me. Meet James WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you tell us how you started your career, and how you ended up in the role that you’re in today? JAMES MORSE:  Yeah, absolutely. So I think I’m very lucky to, right out of school, have gotten an opportunity within project management, which I think a lot of my peers didn’t necessarily do.  They started with other careers and kind of paced into that, so I really hit the ground running.  I was doing new client onboardings and implementations, which has really just been a lot of the breadth of my career when it comes to project management.  And then I’ve slowly just transitioned into different opportunities, typically in SaaS and software, which has taken me to where I am currently with BrandMuscle. So I’ve been with BrandMuscle for a little over seven years, similar background even within the organization.  I started with new client onboardings and implementations in the project lead role and just slowly grew within that to project manager, to senior project manager, leading our team of project managers within implementation, and then transitioning to more of that pre-sales role, the sales engineer, solutions consultant, however we want to think about that.  And then ultimately I actually just moved into our product team, leading up our entire product strategy space. BrandMuscle WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us about BrandMuscle, the company that you work for. JAMES MORSE:  So we fall into the – we call it “Through-Channel Marketing Automation.”  So if you look at the analyst space, that’s the title and terminology they’ll use.  But really what it is, is technology that empowers channel partners of all types.  And when I think of channel partners, ultimately these are people who sell products and services through a channel on behalf of our clients.  So it could be a nationwide insurance agent.  It could be a Pandora jewelry retailer, a franchisee, an alcohol and beverage distributor.  Ultimately they take corporate brand assets, their messaging, the advertising, co-op funds, really demand generation activities to drive local sales and market locally to reach their customers, and so that’s where BrandMuscle steps in.  So we offer both software and services to act on behalf of corporate at that national or global level to enable local marketing. WENDY GROUNDS:  Where are your offices based? JAMES MORSE:  So we have four offices in the U.S. – Cleveland, Ohio; our headquarters is in Chicago; Kansas City; Austin, Texas.  And then we have two offices in India, in Bangalore and Noida. The Sales Guy’s Perspective BILL YATES:  James, the experience that you’ve had with BrandMuscle I think is going to help you relate to so many of our listeners, and the fact that you’ve done project management.  So you’ve also been the liaison between a project manager and the sales team, and you’ve done the sales role, as well.  Which brings me to the elephant in the room, which is many times project managers dislike, despise, want to torture the sales team.  Do you agree with me that that can be the case in many instances? JAMES MORSE:  I completely agree.  I wouldn’t even limit it to just project managers; right?  The entire organization can sometimes loathe the sales team. BILL YATES:  Yup.  Yeah, it’s a love/hate.  I mean, if you don’t have sales, you’ve got nothing.  You’ve got to sell something before any other business will happen.  So it is the catalyst.  But all kidding aside, I mean, there are times when we can look back on our careers as project managers and go, wow, that project was especially difficult because there was a miscommunication between sales and the customer and us, you know, the team that actually had to implement it.  So that’s the elephant in the room that we thought, this is the perfect opportunity for us to discuss this issue and share some advice.  There are some reasons that sales and project managers, sometimes they don’t get along. And one of those, I think back, because a lot of my background is software, many times we would go in as a team to implement a solution, and we had a very clear understanding of how this was going to work.  We’d done these types of projects before.  And then we realized the salesperson has sold vaporware to our customer.  There’s a capability that doesn’t exist, and we’ve got to figure it out, and so many times, you know, we’re finding that out in front of the customer.  The customer says, “Okay, well, Bill, I’m excited about you and your team doing XYZ.  So this is going to completely change how we do our business, and we’re excited about it.”  And I’m looking at him going, “Whoa, it doesn’t work that way.” JAMES MORSE:  Right. BILL YATES:  So that’s one of them.  Wendy, we were talking through this.  Sometimes it’s a scheduling issue, too. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  Sometimes there’s a bit of unrealistic timing.  The salesperson could have said, oh, yes, we’re going to have that done.  We’ll have it done before Christmas, or before the holidays or something like that, and this isn’t going to happen.  Timing is off. BILL YATES:  As a project manager, you are meeting with the customer, and you realize, okay, there’s a disconnect here. So James, maybe bring us some fresh ideas, help us look at it from both perspectives since you’ve served in both roles.  Share the perspective of the sales guy. JAMES MORSE:  You know, I don’t think it’s very different in the grand scheme of things from us as project managers; right?  Ultimately, the salesperson wants to do right by the buyer, the client, the stakeholder, however we want to think about them.  It’s just in a different term, and so I think that a lot of times the salesperson might not be ingrained into the everyday activity.  So we talk about software; right?  They may not know every little bell and whistle the software can do, and oftentimes they may hear something and think something else, and so there’s just a disconnect there. So at the end of the day I think that their intent is pure.  I think sometimes that the execution could be off.  And you know, oftentimes I think that even as project managers, whoever we deliver to, the client or even internally, who our stakeholders are, might think the same thing about us at times.  I was given this project.  What do I do with it, whatever it may be.  It’s just where do we look at that in the overall stream.  So I think that moving to the sales role really helped put that into perspective for me, having done project management.  And honestly, that’s how it was sold to me within BrandMuscle.  Because that elephant in the room is how I felt about sales, is I had been delivering projects and being handed things that, when I think of that iron triangle, right, its scope, its cost, its timing, I thought all the sales team cared about was the cost.  They wanted to look at it from a top line revenue perspective.  And I cared about all three. And so I think moving into the sales role helped me understand where they were coming from because that still is a lot of it.