“If you become the truth teller, the honest broker, the person that’s going to come in, and if anybody says, ‘what does the market think?’ and you’ve got the right answer to it – that’s a quick trip to being invited to all the C-suite meetings.”
- Brady Jensen, founder of Aggregate Insights
In this episode of Product Chats, we are joined by Brady Jensen, a versatile professional who’s navigated the worlds of tech sales, product marketing, and entrepreneurship. His career journey unveiled a glaring issue: a trust deficit between sales and marketing teams, stemming from a misalignment with external market realities. In response, Brady founded Aggregate Insights in 2018 with a mission to empower companies to validate assumptions through primary source research, harmonizing sales and marketing for business success. Brady Jensen has seen too many product marketers rely on internal deliberations to differentiate their products, which can erode trust between sales and product marketing teams. According to Brady, the key to success is to “show our receipts”—to demonstrate through market conversations, not just customer feedback, how messaging has been tested and validated. Brady argues that sales enablement is only as strong as its foundation of credibility, which is built on robust market insights. He cautions against relying solely on feedback from existing or best customers for market intelligence, as their perspectives may not represent the broader market’s needs. Instead, engaging directly with the market through first-party research is crucial. This approach involves conducting interviews to validate and discover product differentiations, which are essential for developing effective messaging. One of the most challenging aspects of this process is recruitment for market interviews, which should be approached with the persistence of a sales strategy. He also emphasizes the value of learning from recent win/loss analyses by engaging customer success and implementation teams.
Key Takeaways:
1. Develop Deep Market Understanding: Brady emphasizes the importance of a deep understanding of the market. He suggests that this understanding should be built through direct conversations with buyers, rather than relying solely on known data or AI summarizations. These conversations can provide unique, and sometimes counterintuitive, insights that can significantly improve product development and sales strategies.
2. Build Credibility Between Sales and Product: Credibility is a critical factor in the relationship between sales and product marketing teams. One way to build this credibility is to demonstrate a thorough understanding of the market and the buyer. Product marketing and sales teams should come together to discuss effective buyer conversations and bring data-driven insights to the table.
3. Test and Adjust as Necessary: Brady advises that insights gathered from the market should be tested and strategies should be adjusted based on feedback. This feedback loop should be formalized and should be a continuous process that allows for the development of more effective sales strategies and better-aligned product marketing.
4. Bridge the Trust Gap: This discussion underscores the need to bridge trust between sales and product marketing teams. Brady believes that this can be achieved by ensuring that the product marketing team understands the market realities and has the ability to effectively communicate these realities to the sales team. A shared understanding of market realities can lead to better collaboration between the two teams and ultimately, improved sales performance.
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Brady Jensen is a seasoned product marketing professional with a diverse background in tech sales, product marketing, and entrepreneurship. His vast experience has allowed him to understand both sides of the sales and product marketing aisle deeply. His career journey led him to identify a glaring issue that he later dedicated his career to solving. After being named Inside Sales Rep of the Year at Jive Software, demonstrating his aptitude in sales, he founded Aggregate Insights in 2018 with a focus on addressing the problem he had identified — bridging the gap between sales and product marketing. Brady is passionate about understanding the market and conducting effective buyer conversations. His approach involves gathering unique and non-obvious insights directly from the market to fuel product development and sales strategies. He believes in testing these insights and adjusting strategies based on feedback. Find more and follow him at aggregateinsights.com or download free win/loss handbooks at: https://aggregateinsights.com/podcast/
ABOUT PRAGMATIC INSTITUTE:
Since 1993, we’ve provided training and professional development for product, design, and data professionals to accelerate innovation, increase customer satisfaction, and bolster revenue. Through our comprehensive methods and propriety Pragmatic Framework, we train professionals with the skills needed to accelerate their product management and product marketing careers, increase team efficiency, and boost revenue. Our online, in-person, and on-demand courses are taught by industry experts with decades of experience at top companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Hallmark, Quaker Oats, and Dun & Bradstreet. We offer individual course training in product, design and data, and certification tracks for Product Management Certifications, Product Marketing Certifications, and the Pragmatic Product Master Certification. All attendees gain access to the Pragmatic Alumni Community, a network of over 30,000 alumni worldwide. If you’re looking for product management or product marketing training or are pursuing a product marketing certification or product management certification, browse our certification paths at https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/product/. Courses are available online, in-person, or on-demand to fit your schedule.
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