Sales people are not often seen in product development meeting, they enter when the product is ready to be sold. But many would agree that the sales acumen of the people involved in various levels of product development tremendously contribute to the final success of the product.

Then why is a sales guy not involved in a product journey from the very start?

The answer is quite simple sales people should sell and not develop. I have a different approach and my point is that if you can get some knowledge assimilation from the streets on to the white board you will have a better product at the end of the day.

The logic behind this statement comes from the following reasonings

• You always think market intelligence and miss on the sales intelligence which is the real-time innovative flavor that the sales team adds to you product face to make it enticing to the customers in absolute real time
• Your sales person is the closest you can get to your customers if you want a street opinion much ahead in a product life cycle. Unless you have some customer evangelists available to you during product development
• All great innovation happens when two approaches to the same problem confront. Put a developer and sales guy mid way during a product development. you will see the chaos but if you stay as a third party reviewer to the commotion, you can take home some very interesting perspectives of where you are heading

Now the biggest challenge is an IP issue where you don’t want many people outside the product group to be aware about what is going on. But this is a challenge you can overcome if you really want to

Fix that and next time try getting one of your sales guys to your product meeting and see what happens