Advantages of sharing a roadmap with your customers

• Seeing suppliers' roadmaps has become a customer expectation in many industries; customers want suppliers to tell them what changes they can expect to see in the foreseeable future because, among other things, it could create new savings or revenue-generating opportunities for them.
• Sharing its roadmap can help a supplier to build credibility, burnish its image, and improve its customer relations by demonstrating a real understanding of that customer's business. The roadmap can also convey the company's capabilities by showing how it has delivered in the past.
• Sharing a roadmap can alert innovators and early adopter customers to pending product developments, perhaps paving the way for co-funded development, beta test sites, initial reference customers, and more.
• Roadmap sharing can be a form of market research by eliciting customer reactions that generate practical information about your vision, strategy, possible product pitfalls, customer needs, and the customer's own future plans.
• Sharing can help to pre-sell a customer on a product before the product is fully market-ready.
• Sharing your product roadmap can help engage a custoemr in a collaborative discussion about their needs.  It can be a powerful way to building stonger relationship.

Advantages of sharing a roadmap with your own Sales force

• Sharing plans with Sales can help to build their enthusiasm and confidence in the business and its product lines by showing how the company's offerings provide the best fit for customers' current and emerging needs.  Securing your Sales organization's buy-in both increases the credibility of the Sales function within the company and secures the sales organization's support for the company's direction.  
• By providing a unified vision of where the company is moving, roadmaps can help your Sales staff to more realistically shape customers' expectations, to more clearly define where their markets are going, and to better understand your company's own priorities in product development.  
• Roadmaps strengthen a sales representative's ability to handle customer questions.  They can also help to validate business cases which may be used to support future sales presentations.
• Roadmaps provide discipline for the sales organization, better aligning Sales with the company's overall strategic direction.  They can also help to define what the Sales organization has to sell and what it cannot sell.  And feedback received from the Sales organization can be used to refine and improve the product roadmap itself.

Read more quick tips featuring product roadmapping:

Managing risks when sharing product roadmaps

Making product roadmaps work for your business

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