How sales managers help us improve the product in Overgear

Dmitriy Beseda, managing partner and co-founder of Overgear took part in a PC product conference, where he shared his experience in product management.

Over the past three years, the company has attracted several rounds of venture funding to work in new markets and has reached an operating profit showing at least x6 growth every year. Dmitriy has experience in creating effective communication in teams, marketing, sales, and product development.

In this article, he will tell about how sales managers can help develop the product, share tools, and mechanics that are implemented in Overgear.com, and that you can use for your products.

Let’s take as an example Overgear’s case.

Overgear is a worldwide gaming marketplace that allows gamers to buy and sell items and services in popular MMO games. In Overgear there are no phone calls at all, all sales are made via online chat. Therefore, sales managers work only with a chat.

How the process of data delivery from sales manager to product team works in Overgear

If a question in the chat would be interesting for product support, marketing teams then the sales manager uses the tag #feedback for this chat and notifies the Head of sales forgetting about this problem.

Then it should be discussed at a staff meeting. The head of sales discusses solution options with the marketing manager. At the next staff meeting, the head of sales and CMO raise the problem again and offer options for solving it. After that, the sprint can be started or the issue can get in the backlog.

It is important to understand that sales managers are a certain type of employee who is not interested in anything other than money. A good sales manager is someone who just wants to make money. So, in general, they are not eager to provide feedback or help develop the product. You should come with a plan of how to make this process easier for them that will not prevent them from their main tasks.

What could be improved in our system:

● Send chats with a specific tag to the Slack channel so that the product manager can see everything immediately.
● Once a month collect feedback systematically and analyze the average mood of users, without analyzing specific cases.

What you absolutely need to do:

● To think with the head of sales about how you will tag chats/calls.
● To come up with a process for getting this data regularly.
● To pay attention to such a type of feedback as “I couldn’t find XXX on your site”. If it is a common case, it is the best reason to reconsider UI and navigation.
● To remember that sales managers will do the absolute minimum of work. It is useless to force them to pay much attention to the OS.

Why you need the template of objections and how to work with it.

If a person often asks the same question, then just writing a script for the sales manager is not enough. You need to transfer this issue to the marketing and product teams.

The marketing team, for example, can write an email newsletter that will answer the question, add it to the onboarding process or pay attention to it in creatives.

In a term of the product, this problem can be solved by the interface or by its text. If everything is done correctly, then the intensity of the question should decrease.

It also happens that no matter how you try to change something in the interface, add some explanations, people can still ask the same not clever question. There is nothing you can do about it. You just should be ready for it. It’s ok.

This template is an example of how a regularly updated database gives huge benefits to everything: sales, marketing, product.

What you should do immediately after reading this article:

● Ask the sales managers to tell about their base of scripts, check their product knowledge.
● Help them update all the information, they will be grateful.
● Take a break to “think,” then return to the head of sales with a template of objections.
● Create a document and agree on what day of each month the database should be updated.
● Do not forget to show it to your marketing team.