Why product marketing should be involved in sales
Product marketers working closely with sales get quicker and cheaper messaging feedback. They also influence the product roadmap by selling the vision — not just the current features.
Before finding product-market-fit; before you have a repeatable customer acquisition strategy; before you close your first customer that wasn’t a warm introduction; before all these things, you must run dozens of small marketing experiments.
You have intuition about the messaging that will work, but prospective customers will tell you what “they think they want.” It’s your job to recognize patterns from this qualitative feedback and develop micro-campaigns that test your hypothesis. The fastest (and cheapest) way to quickly validate each hypothesis is via cold outreach, which your sales team does daily.
I say cold outreach because well-run sales teams don’t just make phone calls. Modern sales organizations use sequencers like Outreach, Apollo, or Salesloft to create multi-touch campaigns to target prospect lists. Some sequences have 10 to 20+ steps per prospect, including multiple channels like email, LinkedIn InMails, connection requests, phone calls, and SMS.
When your sales team gets a “no” from a prospect, they often get a “hell no.” But that’s OK. They also get some “maybe” and “yes” responses as you help them test different messaging. So, why should you, the product marketer, work closely with sales? That’s simple — it’s the quickest way to run marketing experiments.
In a matter of minutes, you can create a list of 100 United States-based CMOs who work at companies with 100-500 employees in the retail industry. Why only 100? That’s all you should need to test your idea. Your sales team should get some meetings with the right pitch, and with the wrong messaging, they'll get crickets.
Good sequences get around a 5% response rate, and great ones achieve a response rate of 20% or more.
Your job is to listen to recorded calls and demos and look at email chains for insights. When customers ask questions, what are they saying? Do customers say they want some feature your product team says will be released in six months? How big would the deal be if you had that feature today? How much pipeline? What can you show customers to close the deal?
Revenue and signed contracts change product roadmap priorities. Help your sales team land a deal, and that integration with Figma will get moved up to the next sprint.
Sell the vision, not today’s functionality
There are a thousand things your product “could” do. What 1-3 features have customers repeatedly requested? If your product did those things today, would your prospective customers sign a contract?
It’s your job to push your messaging ahead of your product. Don’t promise a HIPAA-compliant video chat feature when you’re an agile project management tool. But do promise that feature that lets people add new tasks directly from their Google Workspace account (if it’s a $20K+ deal).
As a product marketer, you should know the complexity of each customer’s feature request. Entertain features that take weeks — not months, to implement.
In an ideal world, every customer loves what your product does today. In the real world, you're always chasing that sweet spot where your marketing message and product offering perfectly align with your customers’ wants, needs, and desires.
So, when searching for those first customers and that repeatable customer acquisition process, you need to give your sales team the tools to “sell the dream.”
How to sell the vision
In the product marketing department, you have resources. Can you grab a few hours from a designer to mock up a few screens? Can you publish a landing page describing that requested feature? Or perhaps you create a video showing a "user" clicking through a Figma prototype?
You can use many sleight-of-hand tricks to show that killer feature everyone wants. Some tech-savvy customers will see what you’re doing and walk, but others may not care. They may sign a contract if they’ve seen your product demo and like your feature prototype. If you’ve established trust, that may be all you need.
Selling the vision is about showing just enough to get your customer to sign on the dotted line.
How this all accelerates your marketing campaigns
Working closely with sales, you understand the pain points that resonate with buyers. You could start a campaign and buy ads on Google, LinkedIn, and other channels, trying to achieve the same results. But you'd be lighting a few thousand dollars on fire before seeing results. Your boss will appreciate your ingenuity when you integrate with the sales team to learn what works quickly.
Now that you’ve identified messaging and target personas that work. You can invest in ad campaigns on various marketing channels. Instead of burning piles of cash, you turn your marketing budget into annual recurring revenue (ARR).
This method lets you learn quickly and build a repeatable customer acquisition strategy.