Should Product Managers Learn to Sell?

Selling your Product *vision*, vs. Selling the *Product* itself

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If you are in Product Management, the core of your job is to constantly test out new product ideas with potential customers, come up with solutions to problems that lots of people care about and turn them into products.

That’s all great, But here’s an important question. Once the product is ready — Who is actually selling the product that your team built?

If you are Managing a B2C SAAS product — the sales channels are perhaps totally online — without the need for any feet on the street or a Salesforce. Your product already has (or should have) inbuilt Lead Capture & Conversion funnels such that the product will sell itself.

But if you are building products (say B2B products, or a Hardware product) that need a sales team to pursue potential customers ) — then it is highly likely that once the product is built and launched — it’s tossed over the fence to the sales team to go sell it.

I’ve seen this happen many many times, especially in large multi-product companies. Product Managers consider…