In this post:

This week: sales versus marketing, strategy in action, and the hottest role in tech

? Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting tweets and articles from around the internet, plus highlights from my personal swipe file.

Every week, I publish 2 posts on Building Momentum: an essay on Tuesday, and The Overview on Friday. It’s free to sign up – just add your email below:

Sales versus Marketing

One lesson I've learned in running B2B Marketing teams is that when it comes to Marketing's data vs. Sales's word, the latter will always win.

The best Marketing teams realize this and develop a posture of servant leadership in working with Sales. When they win, we win.
— Anthony Kennada (@akennada) August 13, 2021

I agree that in most businesses, what sales feel often wins – and I think that’s because they can easily explain what they feel and cite tangible examples that are often based on anomalies: what went wrong, what doesn’t feel right.

Compare this to marketing data:, which is often complicated, disconnected from the yes/no decision, and based on large-scale patterns.

How can we resolve this gap? Marketing exists to serve revenue acquisition and retention – surely it’s data deserves an equal seat at the table.

I think one of the things that might help is when both marketing and sales focus on strategic disqualification at the top of the funnel. By disqualifying bad-fit prospects early on, we would see a smaller breadth of responses in the later pipeline.

That means we then have a more narrow set of opportunities – but anecdotal anomalies become easier to spot within the data. And we can both work on resolving the issues, and getting to a win.

What are you actually doing?

want to know the *real* strategy?

go through tickets….

proof is in the Jirapudding
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish) August 17, 2021

What can you tell from the work that happens within your business?

Product Jira board will tell you if the strategy is acquisition or retention
Your marketing Asana board shows whether you are working in sync with sales or not
The LinkedIn ads that you’re running will tell you what your marketing team think your positioning is (and whether your prospects feel the same).

Product marketing is a must-have

Ten years ago, product marketing communities didn’t exist. Today, it’s one of the hottest roles in tech.

I think it’s because PMM is so adaptable. Whether it’s positioning and narrative, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, analysts and PR… we can bring our customer-centric, commercial, creative outlook to any challenge.

That’s the Overview for this week

I hope you found something of interest.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to building momentum.

James