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I went in feeling great about the launch.
I came out feeling like an idiot.
Sales was completely in the dark.
Sound familiar?
This has happened to me plenty of times in my career. One time in particular, we had spent nearly four months preparing for a launch and failed to loop sales into the process until the last minute.
You have a choice:
❌ You can enable sales as a last-mile stakeholder in the release process.
✅ You can partner with them when planning your go-to-market strategy.
Empathy is an underrated skill in product marketing. It’s easier to work with sales when you take a second to try and understand the different pressures they feel during a launch.
Sales reps often feel out of the loop. And in situations where their comp structure, performance metrics, or credibility with prospects is impacted, it can be super stressful when things seem flung on them at the last minute.
That’s why it’s important to Involve them earlier in the process.
➡️ Work with them to build and test your messaging.
➡️ Run pitch contests to help reps learn from each other and perfect your message.
➡️ Partner with sales leadership to run spiffs around new products.
➡️ Allow everyone to play with new features and get confident with demoing.
➡️ Create a space for reps to ask questions and build an internal FAQ.
Is this all going to happen for every launch?
Of course not.
But there’s no doubt we can all be more mindful of how the next launch impacts sales and try to loop them in earlier.