Hi {{ first name | there }},
When someone tells you they work in sales, what’s your first reaction?
I’ve been in and around sales for almost 30 years. Starting as a 12 year old boy working in my family’s retail department store.
And long before I understood anything about product marketing and positioning, I learned something far more practical:
If you don’t try to understand the customer in front of you, you will not earn the right to sell to them.
Over time, I’ve come to see sales very differently from how it’s often portrayed. Sales isn’t “just selling”.
At its best, it’s applied demand-side strategy in real time. It requires quick judgement, contextual awareness, financial literacy and the ability to interpret motivation across stakeholders.
Which is why I find it strange that, in many enterprise organisations, sales is still treated purely as a revenue engine rather than as a strategic source of demand insight.
That’s the opportunity most teams are missing.
The structural disconnect inside enterprise teams
Marketing invests heavily in understanding the market:
Customer insight programmes.
Buyer segmentation work.
Product positioning and messaging refinement.
All 100% necessary and essential.
At the same time, enterprise sales teams are in complex conversations with buying committees every single day. Those conversations surface:
The triggering events behind change
The internal politics shaping decisions
The financial and reputational risk involved
The real definition of “success” in context
In Jobs-to-be-Done terms, these are live expressions of the forces of progress.
Yet in most organisations, there is no deliberate mechanism for turning those conversations into structured, institutional learning.
Sales is principally focused on progressing the deal. Marketing is still focused on clarifying the narrative.
Both are studying the same thing - how enterprise organisations make progress - but through different lenses.
Without a loop between them, insight stays episodic. It never compounds.
The shift: build a live JTBD validation system
To unlock this, we don't simply need “better alignment”. We need to create a continuous demand-side learning system.
Enterprise teams should treat sales conversations as live validation of the marketing hypotheses.
Every serious buying conversation contains evidence of:
The core job the organisation is trying to get done
The circumstances that made the status quo untenable
The forces pushing towards change
The forces pulling them back to the habitual status quo
The anxieties and constraints holding them back
When sales teams are equipped with a clear hypothesis, they can test it:
Is this the progress the executive sponsor needs to demonstrate?
Is this initiative truly strategic, or reactive?
Where is the friction inside the buying group?
That feedback should not live and die in CRM notes.
It should shape positioning, enablement, proof points and account strategy.
Quick aside: If you want the JTBD prompts and hypothesis template I use to structure this, reply “loop” and I’ll send the doc across.
Why this matters even more in ABM
This becomes particularly powerful inside Account-Based Marketing.
In the ABM programme I’m currently running, marketing and sales collaborate upfront to articulate a hypothesis for each target account:
What strategic shift is this organisation navigating?
What proof must the executive sponsor demonstrate?
What would make our solution the logical next step?
Sales then validates or challenges those hypotheses in live conversations.
What resonates?
What gets reframed?
What resistance keeps surfacing?
That insight flows back to marketing and reforms into messaging, objection handling, enablement and account studies.
Over time, I know something more valuable will happen.
We will stop relying on isolated account wins or anecdotal feedback.
We will build a cumulative understanding of how these enterprise buyers actually make progress.
That understanding will sharpen positioning, improves win rates, and ultimately: make strategic selling repeatable rather than "heroic".
If you’re serious about enterprise growth, this type of work isn’t optional. Sales and marketing must work together.
Stop viewing your sales team purely as a revenue engine. They’re your richest source of demand-side truth.
The big question is: Are you treating them that way?
Speak soon,
Peter
P.S. If you want to institutionalise this loop inside your organisation, that’s exactly what we build inside the Voice of the Customer Sprint. We're enrolling our April cohort now.
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