The Sales, Customer Success & Product Fire Triangle
When I was at school I can remember learning about the Fire Triangle in Chemistry.
Basically it’s a model for understanding the necessary ingredients for fire to happen — heat, fuel and an oxidising agent of some kind. Take one of these three ingredients away or get the mix wrong and the fire will struggle to get going (or not get going at all).
However, if you have all the ingredients present with an optimal mix you’ll get a powerful, sustained blaze.
The fire triangle is analogous to the relationship between Sales, Customer Success and Product Teams in a SaaS.
The relationship between those three teams is critical for success, and any disharmony can cause serious issues accross the business.
If Sales for example are selling too far ahead of the product CS will (rightly) come under pressure from customers who are struggling to get the value they were promised. NPS scores will be low and customers will start to churn.
Similarly Product will come under pressure from both Sales and CS when customers learn they can’t do all the things they were promised, and design and engineering teams start playing catch-up and spend less time on their core objectives or roadmap.
These situations lead to teams living in the top left hand corner of the Eisenhower Box, constantly dealing with urgent things, but crutially never getting time to work on far more valuable, but less urgent strategic imperitives.
However, when these teams are well aligned great things happen.
In an ideal scenario all three teams work together to properly understand customer pain points and how the product relieves those pains and drives improved customer outcomes.
Sales can then confidently sell to those points, CS can manage to them, and Product can set metrics and optimise against them.
If you’re a PM, make sure you are spending time with CS and Sales to not only understand what they’re hearing from customers and the market, but also align product value and strategies across your teams.
This will stop powerplays and politics, build trust and buy your product team time and space to get on with delivering strategic pieces that everyone will appreciate, making sure your team fire burns bright and long!
