[leesalminen]

Good teams do.

I employ a team of implementation specialists at a B2B SaaS company. We heavily rely on that team to help guide future product development. But you’ll likely need to be able to translate the ask from 1 customer to something applicable to many customers for the product team to really listen.

One other tip for you- our culture is one of transparency with customers. We encourage our implementation team to be on the lookout for “deal breakers”. It’s best to identify those early and get them a refund than to waste weeks/months only to find that one show stopper right before going live.

You’d think that would be the sales team’s job. I did too, until I hired sales people ;).

[richem]

I would definitely second the suggestion of identifying "deal breakers" as early as possible. It's much easier to highlight a shortcoming and come up with a reasonable solution when a few hours/weeks have been committed vs 100/1000's of hours.

Sales people can greatly mis-state product capabilities so be on the lookout for where they let themselves get carried away with selling a solution. I've even worked with them before and gotten called down for correcting their "misunderstandings" in front of the potential customer.

Sales people live for the sale, you should be living to deliver the final solution to a happy/content client.