My Playbook for Testing with Customers Without Alienating Sales
In many organizations, a quiet tension exists between innovation teams trying to validate ideas with customers and sales teams protecting their pipeline and relationships. Sales’ legitimate fears—of confusing customers, disrupting quotas, or damaging credibility—often create barriers to essential early discovery. In my experience, a pragmatic, no-excuses approach is needed to navigate this friction. My advice offers a clear roadmap for gaining customer insight while aligning with, rather than opposing, sales objectives. Here are my specific, concrete strategies for managing sales-team barriers. 1. Bypass the Pipeline: Create a Parallel Discovery Track Sales Fear: “Don’t disrupt my quota or confuse my customer.”My Solution: Do not run experiments through the normal sales pipeline. Instead, I advise establishing a separate, parallel path dedicated solely to early discovery. This ensures learning activities never interfere with active deals, forecasts, or revenue targets. It’s a clean separation of exploration from execution. 2. Target Competitor Customers for Unbiased Insight Sales…
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