Question for revops on empowering their sales teams: How do people get sales deal blockers and requests prioritized by R&D? Anyone feeling like the silos between departments are costing them deals or opportunities?
As in active deals or by creating a functional closed-lost feedback loop?
i guess either, both when you need a quick feedback loop on we need to win this deal vs. we're seeing a trend of losing these deals, and we need this prioritized so we can win them.
Brian K. - here's how we solve the problem at QP
Have a custom object in SFDC where reps can put in feature requests tied to the ARR of the opportunity
Product team rolls up those requests into themes (ties the ARR to size the potential work)
Team considers the revenue impact of features from prospects & current customers when prioritizing roadmap
We have a "Product Council" where ELT talks through roadmap together
Active deals take internal executive sponsorship. Without it you can’t get much moving up on the list of improvements or features. The revenue from the deal in question also needs to outweigh the total NRR of at risk accounts who need X feature to commit to renewal. Just an example. For a retro motion: Two parts: Closed Lost Reason: Drop-down Closed lost reason detail: elaborate notes with full and exhaustive detail that can qual and quant the reasons that features, competitors, etc, are causing you to lose revenue. Happy to chat more about how I’ve been solving it for clients in my engagements.
Thanks all! that definitely makes sense, to track this along with ARR, wondering how the product council / ELT conversations go and how the cadence feels... do you feel like there could be significant gains if this feedback loop was tighter? or is this system good enough? lot of sales teams I've talked to also feel like they don't know when a feature ships and who they should follow up with exactly and does this process seem like it takes a lot of manual time? or fits into your clients' existing workflows pretty well?
It takes time, yes, but if the data isn’t captured then you won’t see improvement or prioritization.
Time as in 5-10 minutes for a closed lost deal. Unless you’re high vol then it shouldn’t be a massive undertaking.
gotcha, we have some pieces of this internally with AI, where we extract every blocker/feature request from customer conversation transcripts/messages with AI and group them across all the calls our team is making. but the part about connecting it with the ARR from the CRM is great, because it's been tough to prioritize purely based on # of times we've heard it and whether it means we should prioritize it over other things. we should be able to do that with our AI agents too. our goal is that the roadmap/backlog tasks of R&D has a clear picture at all times of who is asking for what/the opportunity size, so we can tighten the feedback loop with sales to have them go win those deals once blockers/reqs are addressed.
Definitely feeling this across teams that deal with custom or complex builds. We’ve seen quoting delays or unclear specs absolutely kill deal momentum. In our world (manufacturing), we’ve started helping teams tie sales input directly into engineering output, without the sales team needing to touch CAD or wait for R&D. It’s been huge for cutting cycle time and keeping deals moving. Curious if others have found tools or workflows that bridge that sales-to-engineering gap?
