Sales people are not often seen in product development meeting, they enter when the product is ready to be sold. But many would agree that the sales acumen of the people involved in various levels of product development tremendously contribute to the final success of the product.

Then why is a sales guy not involved in a product journey from the very start?

The answer is quite simple sales people should sell and not develop. I have a different approach and my point is that if you can get some knowledge assimilation from the streets on to the white board you will have a better product at the end of the day.

The logic behind this statement comes from the following reasonings

• You always think market intelligence and miss on the sales intelligence which is the real-time innovative flavor that the sales team adds to you product face to make it enticing to the customers in absolute real time
• Your sales person is the closest you can get to your customers if you want a street opinion much ahead in a product life cycle. Unless you have some customer evangelists available to you during product development
• All great innovation happens when two approaches to the same problem confront. Put a developer and sales guy mid way during a product development. you will see the chaos but if you stay as a third party reviewer to the commotion, you can take home some very interesting perspectives of where you are heading

Now the biggest challenge is an IP issue where you don’t want many people outside the product group to be aware about what is going on. But this is a challenge you can overcome if you really want to

Fix that and next time try getting one of your sales guys to your product meeting and see what happens

Outsourcing has been written about over and over for the past several decades. Stories for and against the whole idea. Here is a slightly different look at the Pros and Cons of Outsourcing.

The Pros of Outsourcing

While Cost advantage is the most discussed positive of outsourcing I am not sure if that is correct in its full sense. How many times have to hired a plumber to do something when you could have done it your self. The reason might not have been cost, its more about time and sometimes the price of time is just priceless.

The biggest pros of outsourcing is that it lets you give some of the work to someone else (and in IT this means lower cost and that is a bonus) who do it for a living and buy your self the time to do what you like or what is more important for you.

So its not cost, but the opportunity for you to buy and manage your own time while being ahppy that the work will be done by a professional

The Cons of Outsourcing

This is also related to time, but in a different way as it deals with the kind of outsourcing partner you work with

When cost is considered as a prime criteria then you end up spending more time to save money (managing relations) and in the end loose money because your time costs you more.

So the biggest cons of outsourcing is that there is a high chance that you end up choosing the wrong partner. Every outsourcing vendor might have a strong value proposition that a customer would find attractive. But It is also true that it might not be a  value add to you.

Just because a vendor does a great job it does not mean they will be best suited for you. You need to scout for your own vendor.

The same goes for vendors, if you have a value add that you can give and you don’t choose your customers properly, you will end up selling the wrong stuff to the wrong people who will never know its value.

It is nothing different from dating. Not all girls like all boys and vice versa. You need to find your best match and that can only done if you are ready to openly discuss and take the relationship as a partnership.

More on this later…

The Business and Technology folks often live disconnected from one another in many ways. They assume that new tools and new process will help them bridge the gap.

This is often so untrue and the result is that both parties come up and blame the process and tools later on.

The cost of this effort for the company is so humongous that they fall into a trap of dissecting failed processes and investing on new tools.

History tells us that people build bridges, cranes and pulleys aid the effort. It is the intelligence of the workers that go into keeping each brick and stone into the right place.

People understand when they do something wrong and when they do it right. It is just that they don’t always act on this knowledge.

When you want to connect with folks in a different team doing a different function, first understand that you need to build the bridge for you both to connect. Tools and processes are too dumb to tell you what to do, they only aid you and every time they fail they are just telling you how big an A**hole you are.

So don’t blame the process and don’t blame the tool when it fails, correct your self and try looking at the other side and saying that we both have a common agenda and that is why we chose to sail in the same boat.

Get your acts together and build the bridge using your intuition, intelligence and focus.