Ep. 86 – Aligning Sales and Product to Drive Revenue with Mike Milburn - Part 1

In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Mike Milburn—former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and founding team member of Service Cloud—joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson for a masterclass in aligning product and sales teams around a shared go-to-market mission.

Drawing from his 15+ years at Salesforce, Mike shares hard-won frameworks for building product roadmaps that sales can actually sell, developing trust between CROs and CPOs, and scaling alignment across growth stages. This is a blueprint for leaders who want revenue-generating product strategy—not just internal harmony.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Product–Sales Friction Point: How most teams mismanage this relationship and how to turn it into a revenue advantage.
• Revenue-Calorie Framework: Why Salesforce prioritized roadmap decisions by “calories” and how to balance innovation vs. renewals.
• V2MOM as a GTM Operating System: What the V2MOM framework taught Mike about prioritization, transparency, and shared accountability.
• From Anecdotes to Data: How to structure sales feedback into decision-ready inputs for product teams.
• Product + Sales = One Team: What world-class collaboration looks like—when sales leaders evangelize the roadmap and product leaders join customer conversations.

Key Topics:

• CRO and CPO relationship-building strategies
• Translating sales objections into roadmap investment
• The role of customer success in roadmap prioritization
• Quantifying “deal blockers” to influence product
• Running effective board conversations around product
• How “True to the Core” made Salesforce a customer-led company
• Scaling product-sales collaboration from startup to enterprise

Guest Spotlight: Mike Milburn

Mike Milburn is the former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and was part of the founding team of Service Cloud. Today, he serves as an advisor to multiple SaaS companies. His career centers on building GTM systems where product, sales, and customer success function as one growth engine.

Resources & Mentions:

• Framework: V2MOM – Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Metrics
• Salesforce Event: “True to the Core” session at Dreamforce
• Recommended Book: Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff
• Other Concepts: Revenue-calorie model, sales telemetry, deal blocker mapping

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