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 Objection: “Don’t touch our accounts.”
My Workaround: Talk to the customers of competitors. These individuals are not in your sales pipeline, pose no risk of cannibalizing deals, and often provide brutally honest feedback. This move completely avoids internal friction and unlocks a wealth of unbiased market perspective.
3. Adopt a “Startup” Posture in Early Interviews
Sales Concern: “You’ll misrepresent our brand or set wrong expectations.”
My Tactic: In early conversations, I recommend not presenting yourself in a traditional sales capacity. Frame the interaction as exploratory research. For example: “We’re exploring new concepts in industrial connectivity and would value your expert perspective.” This approach involves no promises, pricing, or product announcements, thereby eliminating reputation risk and sales conflict.
4. Build an “Innovators Program” as a Sales Asset
Sales Hesitation: “Showing unfinished work makes us look amateur.”
My Strategy: Create a formal Innovators or Co-Creation Program that sales can offer as an exclusive benefit to key accounts. Sales can position it as a privilege: early access to prototypes, a chance to influence future solutions, and preferred upgrade conditions. This transforms the innovation team’s need for feedback into a value-added sales conversation, aligning incentives for everyone.
5. Frame Tests with Zero-Pipeline-Risk Language
Sales Anxiety: “This will mess with my forecast and credibility.”
My Clarification: Explicitly frame every test as having no promises, commitments, deliveries, or timelines. The script is simple: “We’re only exploring whether this concept solves a problem worth solving.” This reassures sales that the experiment will not affect their quota, pricing, or forecast—it doesn’t even count as a product introduction.
6. Tap Into Lost or Dormant Accounts
Sales Resistance: “We can’t risk current relationships.”
My Insight: Use lost, inactive, or dormant customers. Sales will likely raise little objection, as these accounts are not in the active pipeline and represent no short-term revenue risk. They become a goldmine for candid feedback about past shortcomings and future needs.
7. Reposition Testing as a Sales Advantage
Sales Perception: “This is a distraction from real selling.”
My Reframe: Position customer discovery as a competitive advantage for the sales team.Messaging to sales should highlight:
- “This helps you build deeper, strategic relationships.”
- “You get to bring something visionary to customers before competitors do.”
- “It positions you as a trusted advisor on future technology.”
This shifts the narrative from risk to strategic relationship asset.
8. Involve Sales Strategically, Not as Gatekeepers
Implicit Block: Sales acting as a barrier to access.
My Principle: Engage sales as a source of access, not as a governing body. Ask them for specific help: introductions to lost accounts, customers with exploratory projects, or trusted early adopters. Do not require them to pitch, validate, or manage the process. This respects their role while preventing them from becoming a bottleneck.
The Bottom Line
My guidance boils down to a principle of respectful pragmatism. It acknowledges the valid concerns of the sales team while systematically creating alternative pathways to learning. By designing a process that explicitly removes risk from the sales pipeline and reframes discovery as a relationship-building asset, innovation teams can gain the customer insights they need—without the internal conflict.
The goal isn’t to circumvent sales, but to collaborate under a new set of rules designed for learning, not selling. In doing so, companies can move faster, smarter, and with far greater alignment between their future-builders and their revenue-engines.