Alright so hear me out. You know how there is a saying that companies should “eat their own dog food”? Great. How about we start with something a bit more basic. Everyone that works at your company should know the product. Now I talk about SaaS, so this is keeping SaaS in mind.

I know that for a lot of companies out there this sounds like utter nonsense. But give me a chance to explain why it really isn’t.

One of the companies that I used to work for had a concept called a client day. Now by definition client day meant that everyday of the week certain people from the company will be on the hot seat, assisting any chats or tickets that might come in from the customers. Essentially playing the role of a customer support team.

It would typically be a team of around four people from different departments on the hot seat on any particular day barring weekends.

Trust me when I started there and got my first client day, it was a nightmare. I felt so out of place, like I’m suppose to be selling this product, not assisting customers. This is a gigantic waste of my time.

Well, it didn’t just stop there. The questions got tougher, more technical, and it started taking more and more of my time every week on that day to help the customers. Not gonna lie, I even thought about quitting.

Until, I got better at it. Not just the technical side of things, the product as a whole started to make a whole lot more sense. Folks would be typing their Qs and mid way through I knew exactly what to say to them. How to connect the dots from one aspect of the product to another. Suddenly features starting to make a lot more sense, and to top it all off, there wasn’t a use case that could be thrown my way and I wouldn’t know much about or have dealt with before. Which ultimately led me to do much more comprehensive demos and made me a better seller.

So, was it because of the fact the person who set this policy was a sheer genius or the fact that the more we learned about the product and that too from the horse’s mouth the better it made us as a team. The latter right?

The product team understood the customer’s use cases a lot better. Development team understood what aspects of the product were confusing for customers the most. Sales learned about different use cases and got a more in depth overview of how everything works and success well success got success from making sure that the customers were happy and growing.

So, do I think adopting a client day type of rule would be the best option for everyone? Of course not. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here.

Having said that. What there should be though, is a goal that everyone understands the product at a level that would help them understand not only who is the product for, who buys it and how they use it. But also the fact that how it all comes together from start to finish.

So, let’s ditch the notion that only certain folks need to know the product. When everyone’s on the same page, that’s where the magic happens.

If anyone from the company had to demo or explain the product that you are selling, they should be able to do so in a way that makes sense to the recipient. At the end of the explanation, the person listening should know more or less what the product does. You do that and the advantages are nearly unlimited.

I’ve worked at companies where folks knew the product really well, advantages to be explain here momentarily. But there are times where folks that are critical to making sure that everything is running well don’t know enough about the product. This causes a lot of friction, from teams not trusting each other or the individuals that are trusted with the product decisions not being able to do their job.

Or worse, imagine wanting someone from the product team to hop on a call with a customer but they don’t know the product well enough to understand the proper use case. Considering they are the experts of the product, it’s in the name for crying out loud… it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

So how do you go about doing that if you cannot or may not want to implement an open roster client day at your company?

Well there are multiple ways this can be done. But I think enforcing this idea from the top down is really critical. Meaning, whenever you have a new hire, their first project should be to learn the product inside out, sure they should learn the processes as well. But the product and it’s offering needs to be put front and center.

And it doesn’t just stop there. Products evolve, so do customers, it should be critical for everyone in the company to keep evolving their knowledge and know-how of the product. It’s a continuous process that does not end at the very beginning.

Alright so we talked about the goal behind it and the logic. Let’s dig deeper into why is this important for companies to implement this best practice.

Improved Collaboration

When everyone understands the product, teams can collaborate more effectively. Communication barriers are reduced, and there’s a shared understanding of goals and requirements across departments.

Take Customer Success and Product for instance. If they both know the products inside out, they can collaborate a lot better when speaking to the customers and be on the same wavelength. It also saves time because the CSMs don’t have to explain a certain issue or feature in detail, as the product person would see that instantaneously and connect the dots for the use case.

Same goes for development and sales teams, dev reps can tag along on demos together with the sales team and explain to prospects what different aspects of the product mean and how they can be implemented. Especially when it comes to topics such as APIs or anything technical really. Furthermore, they will be able to better understand the use cases of the prospects and improve the close rates all around with assisting the sales reps.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Employees who know the product well can provide better support and service to customers. They can address inquiries more efficiently, offer personalized recommendations, and anticipate customer needs effectively.

I collaborate with the support team quite a lot and one of the things that I absolutely love about the support teams is that they know the answer to pretty much all the questions that will be thrown their way. Same goes for the customer success btw. It makes our interactions very efficient and helps us get to the crux of the problem very quickly.

Now imagine, if nobody knew the answers in the team, or just one or two people did, it would take a long time to find the answers and take up more people’s time all the while the customers are waiting for a reply. It really makes a dent in the customer experience side of things when the product knowledge is dispersed as oppose to centralized.

Adaptability

In a rapidly changing market, folks who know the product well are better equipped to adapt to new challenges and opportunities. They can pivot quickly, adjust strategies, and innovate in response to market dynamics.

This is one of the most important points here I think. Considering how quickly the markets are saturating, it’s getting more competitive by the day. You need to be able to navigate it as fast as possible. That means knowing the product, the customers and the whole ecosystem well enough to be able to propose changes that are necessary.

It’s very important on a C-level exec side as well, because if everyone understands the product well enough, decisions become that much easier to make about where the company should be headed as a collective.

On the employee level, it helps as well because if there are certainly other products out there that offer similar features, you as a team/company are able to tackle them better by having a very firm grasp of what your offerings are as well as what the market looks like. And what sets you apart from the competition.

Empowered Decision-Making

Let me start off with an example here. A project manager, armed with comprehensive knowledge of the product’s capabilities and market positioning, can make informed decisions about prioritizing tasks and allocating resources.

They understand the impact of their decisions on the product roadmap and company objectives, leading to a more strategic and effective project management. This removes that layer of what exactly needs to be developed and where the product should be headed because of that deep level of knowledge and understanding of how the product works.

You should always listen to the customers, their needs are important and should definitely play a role when it comes to product development. But that should not be the case most of the times, since the feature they are requesting might not be something that your customer base will take advantage off.

It also becomes that much easier to push back on requests like these if you have a good grasp of the product knowledge and the space in which you operate.

Continuous Improvement

With an immense amount of product knowledge, the entire company becomes invested in continuous improvement. Employees actively seek feedback, suggest enhancements, and contribute to the product roadmap, driving growth an innovation.

Let’s look at an example: Through regular product feedback sessions, customers provide valuable insights into areas for improvement for the product. Armed with this feedback through the customer success team, the product team collaborates with cross-functional teams to prioritize feature enhancements, streamline workflows, and address usability issues. This iterative approach to product development ensures that the product evolves in response to changing market demands and customer needs.

If you are developing product based on how you see fit, it will fall flat. Customer feedback is a critical aspect of this, of course combined with collaboration with the team, it will take you one step closer to achieving your goals.

These examples illustrate how a thorough understanding of the product permeates every aspect of the organization, driving collaboration, innovation, and customer-centricity.