Jason Lemkin: belief

Transcript context

…So the advice there is, basically, "Talk to your manager, I'll talk to my manager. They need to hash this out. It's not my call." I think you got to push it up and I think you got to force the VP of Sales and the VP of Product to have this weekly meeting about the budget, and that will force them to have enough, just enough organization on their team so that it can all be surfaced up. Because that means they each have to have a meeting with their team for 30 minutes each week and say, "I'm going to put up on the whiteboard guys, so my sales team's going to say ... And I've been to many of these meetings where you force the sales team to force rank what they want and you end up, I tell you, Lenny, 100% of the time in the sales meeting, when you do a whiteboard force rank, you end up walking out with very different outputs than when you start the meeting in sales 100% of the time. On the product side, you need to do the converse. You just need to say, "We owe sales 10% of our points, so in our team meeting, we're going to put in 15 minutes of our team meeting and we're going to make sure we have the priorities right from the sales team. Let's go over what I got from Linda. This is what she says. Is she wrong? Should we do something? How can we help the sales team be even more successful? And what inputs is the team hearing?" And they can raise their hand and say, "Look, I just had this all the way conversation with Bobby, but honestly, Lenny, I can build a HubSpot integration in a day." "What? I thought it was really hard." "No, I did it my last company. And listen, actually, we can actually outsource it to Bob and Linda at this agency I know for 20 grand. They'll build it next week." That's a magical moment. That's a magical moment. But you've got to each have these parallel meetings. The good thing, that tension can become debilitating. We've all seen those fights, those almost fights that break out, and they come from a place of passion, but you got to have structure. Great advice. Another trend I've been noticing is that product teams are taking on P&L responsibilities and revenue goals. What's your sense of, is that good? Is that bad? How do you think about that for product teams?…

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