If you are not a sales person you might think the sales perspective is fairly simple: sell more, the company does better, I make more bonus. But as a salesperson…well, you might actually see it the same way. Regardless, any role can be boiled down to some simple statements, but a) there is obviously more to it than that, and b) that won’t necessarily be helpful for collaboration. In the context of design, it would be helpful to work with sales teammates to better understand how sales principles and responsibilities can yield insights during product development.

There are myriad ways in which products and services are developed and positioned. It could be that a brilliant sales strategy was the initial kernel from which an entire company grew, and which the branding, marketing, and scope of the products all take their cue. Regardless of whether the cart, egg, or tail, came before the horse, before the chicken, or wagged the dog, sales strategy has a profound influence on all other aspects of the business, and therefore product development. We could look at the underlying sales model, for example. Some companies spend years and extreme sums of money developing a product that sells for only a few dollars each, but then makes their money over huge sales quantities. Anything from software to pharmaceuticals fit that pattern. Other companies might have some form of razor-razorblade model, where they sell a base system at a very low margin, or even at a loss, to then make much higher margins on the consumables for the life of the system. There are service contracts, parts markets (as in automotive), and of course retail models where products are produced for X then marked up and sold for 3-4X in a final transaction. You could have a similar rule of thumb mark up in services/consulting where the billing rate might be 3X the hourly cost.

Determining a product’s cost, and therefore its influence on the design, can be a fluid exercise, subject to fluctuations, for example based on global material and logistics costs. On the other hand, we can think of it as primarily a math and engineering problem. We can work with our sales teammates to understand, but also poke and prod at, the various mark-ups in the sales chain, for example:

Manufacturing costs X mark-up% to wholesalers X mark-up% to retailers X mark-up% to consumers = retail price. 

There can be creative discussions about how to deal with each of these stages, even if they are not under your direct control. Perhaps some products can be sold direct to consumers, or you develop different margins at different sales quantities. Companies can also go through different phases where they prioritize revenue over profit and vice versa. For example, a new company might prioritize the former to absorb more market share initially. It is important for the team as a whole to at least understand the basic mechanics of the costs and revenue model because it will impact decisions they can make to optimize the product’s design, revise it, and/or create tiered models (e.g., your basic, limited, and platinum editions). More models can help give the sales team more options, which is not only a means to increase revenue, but perhaps make revenue more predictable on average.

The psychological component of sales is perhaps a bit less mechanical and difficult to pin down. As the saying goes, “How much is your home worth? What someone will pay for it.” Why does one t-shirt cost ten dollars at a big box store and another from a high-end designer brand cost a hundred dollars? Like any good psychological discussion, the answer to that question must start from within. Without being woo-woo, to put it plainly, a company (or business unit, or team)  must decide what it wants to be. You could imagine a tale of two companies that make the exact same amount of profit in their t-shirt businesses, each thriving on one of these models.

The question of “what do we want to be?” is directly tied to the sales perspective. You can be the company that makes hundreds of expensive t-shirts or the one that makes hundreds of thousands of inexpensive ones. In either case, your sales teammates help you tease out the costs, margins, and quantities that are going to be inherent in making your chosen “identity” thrive. Of course this is only one half of the “What is your home worth?” equation. Understanding the other half, the answer: “What someone will pay for it.” is the other key psychological component that the sales perspective provides; whether others are agreeing with the value you assign your company and your product.

In regards to this component, there is an overlap in many cases to marketing and business decisions regarding price, requirements, voice of customer etc. For example, although sales isn’t always discussing user experience in the same manner as, say, a user researcher, sales teammates are just as responsible for understanding needs, pain points, and value propositions. Though there might be overlaps, the sales folks have an incredible vantage point most do not: they are interacting with customers every day. They also experience a critical dynamic most do not. Having done my share of cold calls, I have learned a fundamental truth about sales: it’s far easier to get someone to like your product than it is to get them to buy it. In other words, when you are actually trying to convince someone to separate from their money, you uncover so many additional insights about what they value, what they prioritize, and what their goals really are.

Conducting effective sales discussions is not just a soft skill, it’s an artform. Tactics that lead to exaggerating benefits or making false claims (e.g., ‘it’s not a “bug”, it’s a “feature”!’), which would be wrong anyway, aren’t a wise strategy because, if nothing else, most people can smell bullshit and you come across looking foolish. The sales perspective is like many others in product development in that it’s a matter of helping people solve problems, getting to the most important pain points and determining the value customers assign to a solution, not the value you assign to it. There have been plenty of occasions when I got really excited to tell the client/customer about the best features or services or about the approach I wanted to take, only to have it fall completely flat. On other occasions I was lucky enough to have a sales teammate on the call to jump in and pull us out of that nose dive, either reframing the point, or moving on to a point the person really cares about. There will always be aspects of our product that people care less or more about, or are more or less useful to them. A sales perspective helps us understand where those values lie relative to which customers/users. Then, you can ask, is your product still a compelling and obvious solution to those problems? Or, more precisely: compelling enough, obvious enough, to trigger the sale.

Adding all of this into the mix of product development provides more and more context for making good decisions and beneficial tradeoffs. But, discussions amongst team members about costs, market price, sales quantities, customer acceptance, feature prioritization, and values will not always go smoothly. In one camp you might have those that argue that higher cost components, manufacturing techniques, and features are what drives value and to diminish those would risk the business, let alone the user experience. In another camp you might have those that argue that such costs would make purchasing prohibitive thereby risking the business and user experience (e.g., fewer sales will be made, fewer people will benefit from it, those who purchase it will feel the benefit was not worth the cost). 

For the purposes of this chapter, it might not be worthwhile to go through every combination of how the goals of design, marketing, sales etc. can balance each other for different types of products. Rather, for now let’s give sales the benefit of the doubt and assume that the feature prioritization and sales model being developed makes sense, or is even innovative. Perhaps creative professionals can take a sanguine view of the “requirements” set forth by the stakeholders representing business, finance and sales perspectives, whereas they might seem adversarial. If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps meeting sales goals can give teams a “necessity” around which to focus their creativity.

When forming the music band The White Stripes, Jack White deliberately confined the band to a box within to operate musically. He kept it based in a blues structure and included only two musicians (himself and his now ex-wife/“sister” Meg White). Moreover, he gave them a very specific, minimalist aesthetic of red and white. They even named their second album DeStijl after the Dutch movement of ~1918-1931 that sought to explore the reduction of design into its most basic elements.* Even within their self-defined box, The White Stripes became a critical and commercial success over their ~10 year run before disbanding to pursue other projects. A very similar aesthetic choice can be assigned to The Rolling Stones, who as of this writing, have been doing essentially the same blues-based rock songs for I think that past ~153 years. 

To put it another way, there is no universal law in the eyes of the consumer that complexity and/or higher cost equals value (or vice versa). This is where psychology and perceptions of value tie sales and product development together. You may very well exist in a market where the consumers love the latest gadgets, feature-rich products, and high-end performance. In such cases, that market might be ready to spend much more, enabling you to comfortably cover the cost of developing such items. But, when sales tells you that nobody really cares about that feature you put your heart and soul into designing, or provides a target price that seems confining or even unrealistic, rather than assuming it is an overt mandate to compromise, there could be a hidden opportunity to innovate, just like The White Stripes. Teams cannot avoid or wish away the input from a sales perspective regarding how much customers might spend and where they might spend it. Instead, it could be a wonderful opportunity for the rest of the team to figure out new ways to balance quality and value.