The Iron Triangle: Sales, Marketing, Product Development

Innovation is one of the key strategic pillars in any organization. To keep moving forward, companies must have a stream of new and improved product offerings for their existing and future customers.

The danger is when product development begins to take on a Field of Dreams vibe, "if we build it they will buy." The wrong product is created, the market rejects it, countless hours and dollars are wasted, and the organization is left without much to show for all their hard work.

This is particularly tough in companies with revenue from $50 to $500 million because they have the resources to place only a few solid bets. Having been around new product development all of my career - even the summer between my first and second year of graduate school was spent developing and launching a new piece of cleaning equipment for a small manufacturer in Oklahoma - I suggest that you can increase your chance of success by using the iron triangle of a Marketing, Sales, and Product Development alliance.

"Yeah, we already ask Sales what they want and then when we're all done we give the new thing to the Marketing folks so they can make it look good," you may be thinking. This is not what I am talking about.

Having spent time in all three camps, there is absolute value to bringing together key players of the Sales, Marketing, and Product Development groups to work together on your next big thing. They should all be on the same page in terms of goals and milestones, then dedicate resources from their respective areas to ensure success of the product development, testing, and launch process.

I value the collaborative nature of a cross functional team in terms of the perspective each member brings to the conference table. Why just today, during a team discussion about improving a product, an engineer asked a technical question that ultimately led the sales and marketing folks down a path of positioning the product differently with an important customer niche. Now that's collaboration!

Think about the value each brings. Sales should have a good idea where you are missing the boat with the market or with a product. Marketing should have a good idea of what will trip the trigger of target customers and how to do that. The engineers in Product Development should have a good idea about what is feasible to create under a given set of constraints.

Consider your organization. How is product development handled? Do you have a stream of new products in the pipeline? Do you even have a pipeline? As a starter, might I suggest taking a few minutes to sit down with the heads of your Marketing, Sales, and Product Development teams and ask the group a simple question: "In 12 months, what should we be introducing into our market, and what three steps should we take to get the ball rolling?"

A few minutes may turn into hours of discussion.