Product, Go-to-Market and Customer Alignment with Sahir Azam

In this episode of the Revenue Builders podcast, John Kaplan and
John McMahon talk to Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer of
MongoDB. Sahir shares his insight gained working in the
intersection of product and go-to-market teams. Sahir also
touches on creating synergy between pre-sales and sales teams,
and the need to balance innovation and solving actual customer
problems. 


Additional Resources:


Connect With Sahir Azam on LinkedIn |
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahirazam

Donate to The Jed Foundation | https://jedfoundation.org/

Quoted in this episode |
https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-saas-marketing-is-different/ 

More about Force Management | https://forc.mx/3waMDDS

Aligning Your Sales Engine With Product Development |
https://forc.mx/3Hd1QYv

Product-Led Growth: Driving Cross-Functional Support to
Evolve Your Go-to-Market Strategy | https://forc.mx/3mE2iW8



HIGHLIGHTS


The focus of a Chief Product Officer

Aligning with your customer's buying behavior

Encourage synergy between sales and pre-sales teams

Sitting in the seat in the moment of the customer's pain

How to balance innovation with solving a need

Take the time to do a proper discovery call

Selling internally can be harder than selling externally



QUOTES


Sahir: "Product marketing and product
management, there's sort of a Venn diagram of overlap of skillset
there and different organizations align slightly different on how
those things are defined. But we think it's really important,
regardless of how they report organizationally, but for those two
functions to be paired up really closely to have a successful
outcome." 


Sahir: "If you don't have a very seamless way
for your end-customers to try and use a product, you're many
times never gonna get in the door." 


Sahir: "Great product people can really
articulate and translate that pain from the way that it's
articulated by the customer, which isn't always like, here's my
pain point, here's the business value but extracting that,
qualifying that, documenting that in a way that's crisp and
concise." 


Sahir: "The most cohesive team is where everyone
knows the role, but there's a natural overlap of trust built here
and everyone knows what you're solving for." 


Check out John McMahon’s book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064