The Sales Process Has Become Part of the Product

I used to think of sales and product as two different jobs. Product built the thing. Sales went out and sold it.

Took me a while to see how wrong that was.

Every founder eventually decides sales is broken

There's a moment at most companies where the number stops moving and everyone agrees the sales motion is the problem. So they hire a VP of Sales. Maybe a consultant too, and a new CRM to replace the one they've decided to blame.

Six months later the number still isn't moving.

The thing they called a hiring problem is usually the product, showing up in the one place customers meet it before they ever log in.

Your pipeline is an honest report on what you built

Not the version on the website. The real one.

If a rep can't say what you do in two sentences, the positioning isn't finished yet, and no amount of role play will fix that. If you lose to the same competitor over and over, that's differentiation, and differentiation lives in the roadmap.

I'd rather read a stalled-deal report than a positioning deck. The deals tell the truth.

"It depends" is a product answer

The one I run into most in the bank channel is integration.

A prospect asks how long it takes to get live. The rep says it depends. And they're being honest, because it does depend. On the core. On the queue. On how much professional services work is hiding behind the demo.

The buyer hears risk. Then it goes to IT, and IT hears risk too, and now you're seven to nine months out with a vendor management review sitting on top of it.

You have two ways out of that and both are legitimate. Build the integration tooling until the answer becomes a number. Or move your ICP toward customers who don't need the integration at all. What generally doesn't work is sending the rep to another training on handling that objection.

Where I start now

When someone brings me in to fix sales, I usually spend the first couple of weeks barely touching the sales team.

I sit on discovery calls and read support tickets. Then I pull every deal that died in the last two quarters and look for the same sentence showing up over and over in the notes.

Sometimes what comes out of that is coaching. Reps who don't ask enough questions, or follow-up that quietly dies after the second touch. That's real and it's fixable.

More often than people expect, it turns into a conversation with the product team instead. Not a fun conversation. Still the right one.

If you're the founder reading this

Your sales process is the first version of your product your customer ever experiences. Before onboarding, before login, before any of the good stuff you actually built.

How fast you answer. How straight you are about what isn't built yet. How many people inside your company they have to chase to get one answer.

They're grading all of it, and they're grading it against a thing they expect to live with for five years.

So if sales feels broken right now, look hard at the sales org. Then go look at the roadmap. I've been surprised by which one it was more times than I'd like to admit.

If you're in the middle of that and it isn't obvious which one you've got, I'm around. Happy to talk it through.