How to Share Customer Needs With PMs

Sales managers play a critical role in understanding customer needs and translating them into business growth. But when it comes to working with the product team, communication can sometimes feel like a game of telephone—messages get diluted, misinterpreted, or overlooked.

Clear, purposeful communication with product managers (PMs) helps ensure your customers' voices are heard and your company continues to offer relevant, valuable solutions. This article outlines how to bridge the gap between the sales and product teams by focusing on your shared goals and communicating customer needs more effectively.

Step 1: Reflect on Your Role and Goals

Before changing your communication tactics, take a step back and look at your role through a strategic lens. Doing so will allow you to identify how communication relates to the goals within your department and interdepartmentally.

• What are your department’s core goals? Typically, sales is focused on revenue generation, customer acquisition, and retention.

• How do these align with company-wide objectives? Often, that includes growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

• How does your work influence the product team? Your insights may help prioritize feature development, prevent wasted resources on low-value features, and offer valuable market context.

• How does the product team support sales? They build the tools and features you sell. They provide demos, documentation, and feedback on what is (and isn’t) feasible in the near term.

The stronger the alignment between departments, the better you can both support overall company goals.

Step 2: Audit How You Communicate Customer Needs

Not all customer feedback is equally useful to the product team. As a sales manager, your job is to filter and frame insights in a way that supports product strategy.

Here are a few reflection questions:

• Where is your sales data coming from? Is it anecdotal, or based on patterns from your CRM? Have you gathered structured customer journey maps, research data, or insights from tools like NPS or support tickets?

• Are your customers also your users? If the people who buy your product typically don’t use it (e.g., managers buying a tool for their employees), important user feedback may be obfuscated.

• Are you passing along the right information? Product teams need actionable insights. If you’re unsure whether your information is helpful, just share it.

• Are the right people involved? If someone on your team regularly works on topics that closely relate to the product, it’s important they have a direct line of communication with the product team. This helps avoid bottlenecks and ensures everyone gets the information they need more clearly and efficiently.

Also, think about how you package that information. Are you communicating via Slack, long emails, or spreadsheets? Is it clear, organized, and easy for the PM to follow up on?

Step 3: Understand How the Product Team Communicates With You

Just as you provide feedback to product managers, they should be giving you the context you need to manage client expectations and pitch features effectively.

Ask yourself:

• Do I understand why certain customer requests are accepted or rejected?

• Is the explanation clear enough for me to relay to clients?

• Are there regular updates from the product team on what's coming next and why?

Sometimes, the issue isn’t the decision—it’s the way it's communicated. You might be hearing, “That’s not possible,” without understanding why it’s not feasible. But that context can help you close the loop with your customer or revisit the idea later.

Also consider how much information you have to rework before it’s usable. Are the graphics, language, or formatting tailored to your audience? Do you have to spend time rephrasing or removing technical jargon? If this happens often, it might be worth building shared templates for smoother communication.

Step 4: Propose Communication Improvements

You don’t need to overhaul your entire communication structure overnight—but small, consistent improvements can go a long way.

Start by collecting feedback from your team on:

• What’s working well in your communication with PMs

• What gets lost in translation

• Which methods (e.g., shared dashboards, recurring syncs, quick check-ins) might help

Then propose clear, mutual wins. For example:

“If we use a shared doc to track customer feature requests by frequency and urgency, it will help the PM team prioritize and help us manage customer expectations.”

Stay flexible. You may want a weekly meeting, but the product team prefers asynchronous updates. The important thing is to agree on a method that maintains clarity and accountability.

Step 5: Establish a Feedback Loop

To keep communication flowing, make feedback a regular habit—not a one-time conversation. Sales and product teams should both be comfortable saying:

• “Here’s what we heard from customers this week.”

• “This update might affect your client conversations.”

• “This strategy helped us reduce churn or increase feature adoption—should we scale it?”

Encourage open discussions about evolving customer needs, especially as markets shift, buyer behavior changes, and new competitors emerge.

When sales and product teams operate in sync, customer satisfaction increases, churn decreases, and growth becomes more sustainable.

Final Thoughts: Customer Needs Are a Shared Responsibility

At the end of the day, both sales and product teams are working to solve the same challenge: meeting customer needs in a way that supports business growth. Whether you’re dealing with feature requests, product demos, or client feedback, approaching these interactions with curiosity and strategic alignment will help your whole organization succeed.

NetNow used this framework to build the most intuitive and customer-focused credit management platform on the market. If you found this article helpful, you may also enjoy the following:

• How to Resolve Latent Issues at Work

• The Ripple Effect of Tariffs

And if you’re looking to improve your customer onboarding or creditworthiness checks, book a free demo to see how we can support your team.