The following is our response to a post on LinkedIn on Oct. 10, 2023:
There were some great responses to the question, but I have found that the right time to ask this question is much further back in time. At the time of product definition and throughout product development, the product marketing team should always be adhering to making a product easy to use (customer) and easy to sell (sales team). Another way to think about this directive is that the sales team is the company’s first customer. There are other product directives I recommend to clients as well like make it easy to support (post-sale) and easy to debug for example. Adhering to these directives is not always easy especially is they increase cost or delay the schedule, however one must look at the overall product costs to determine what makes sense for the company, its customers, its brand, its employees, etc.