The story of sales and marketing teams with a love-hate relationship, and why every launch is a chance to finally resolve it.
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Not “marketing could do better” or “we have some alignment issues to work through.” Three quarters of the people your messaging is designed to arm, your campaigns are designed to support, and your launches are designed to enable ... believe they would be fine without you.
When you ask those same professionals what they really need to sell confidently at launch and beyond, you will see that front-facing teams value marketing. They just stopped expecting us to show up in the ways that matter.
Over the past year, I surveyed more than 100 sales and go-to-market professionals in tech (frontline reps, solutions engineers, sales leaders, customer success teams) on a deceptively simple question: what do you actually need from marketing at launch, and beyond? The answers were illuminating, some uncomfortable, and all of them useful.
This long read consists of four parts: the scramble that precedes most launches, the gap between the assets that marketing builds and what sales can actually use, the structural reasons alignment keeps failing, and three things you can change before your next launch without waiting for a reorganisation.
Ask a marketer how a recent launch went and they’ll tell you about the launch campaign. Ask a sales rep the same question and they’ll tell you about the week before it.
That gap in reference point is, in miniature, the whole problem.
In my survey, I asked sales professionals a direct question: what support do you get from marketing when a product goes live? Less than half (42%) described something that resembled coordination: training, content, and campaigns working together before the launch date. The remaining majority described something closer to improvisation.
It’s not just WHAT sales get from marketing teams for the launch, it’s also the WHEN that matters. 60.7% of the sales professionals surveyed receive their enablement materials at the 11th hour: at launch, or after it has already happened. Only a third report getting what they need with enough lead time to actually absorb it, practice with it, and walk into early conversations with something resembling confidence.
The bar is not high. It’s just not the night before.
The consequences of that timing gap is that sales walk into a launch improvising without proper preparation. Improvisation produces inconsistent messaging. Inconsistent messaging produces confused prospects. And confused prospects don’t buy. Or they buy slowly, with friction, from a rep who is working twice as hard to compensate for a gap that should never have existed.
And sales aren’t asking for much. When the survey asked about ideal timing, 60.7% said two to three weeks before launch would be sufficient. Another 12.5% said one week would do. One week before the launch sounds very reasonable and achievable.
Something that survey couldn’t capture is the emotional cost of the pre-launch scramble. When a sales rep has to piece together their own understanding of a new product (pulling from half-finished decks, old positioning docs, a Slack message from a product manager) they don’t just feel under-prepared. They feel like an afterthought. And people who feel like afterthoughts stop asking and flagging gaps. They stop expecting the partnership to work, and they start working around it instead.
So we see the 75% not because sales doesn’t need marketing, but because they’ve learned, launch after launch, not to count on enablement arriving in time.
Preparation produces confidence, confidence produces better conversations, better conversations produce deals. The fix is a shift in the place launch readiness takes on the priority list, and whose problem it’s understood to be.
Dropping materials on sales the night before a launch is a trust-killer. It signals that sales is an afterthought rather than a partner. The reps who get materials early don’t just sell with more confidence; they instill more confidence in customers too.
The majority of reps don’t see materials until the last minute, which forces them into scramble mode. A smaller group gets everything early, and they walk into launch more confident and prepared to sell.
“Dropping materials on sales the night before a launch is a trust-killer. It signals that sales is an afterthought rather than a partner. The reps who get materials early don’t just sell with more confidence; they instill more confidence in customers too.”
“The majority of reps don’t see materials until the last minute, which forces them into scramble mode. A smaller group gets everything early, and they walk into launch more confident and prepared to sell. That timing gap slows momentum and creates missed opportunities right when a launch should be strongest.”
“Product launches often get delayed, meaning marketing is put in a tight spot to ‘go live with something’. Last minute updates and changes can render copy ineffective. Without the time or insights to support a launch, the messaging is often generic and jargon-filled.”
There is a version of sales enablement that looks thorough on a content calendar and lands with a thud on the sales floor. The deck is polished, the one-pager is on-brand, the battlecard exists. And yet, somehow, the rep talking to a prospect three weeks after launch still doesn’t quite know what to say.
Most of the time, the gap between what marketing builds and what sales can actually use in a live conversation does more damage than any lack of effort ever could.
The survey asked sales professionals two versions of the same question: what do you need to feel confident selling a new product at launch, and what has actually helped you close a deal recently. The answers were not the same, and the space between them tells you almost everything about where enablement goes wrong.
To feel confident before launch, sales want the fundamentals: value propositions and feature descriptions, competitive comparisons, product demos and videos, customer success stories, and pricing and packaging breakdowns. These are knowledge assets. They answer the internal question every rep is quietly sitting with before they open that first outreach sequence: do I understand this product well enough to not embarrass myself?
But when the same reps were asked what actually moved deals across the line, the list shifted. Customer success stories topped it at 55.4%, followed by competitive comparisons, common use cases mapped to solutions, demos, and deal-specific coaching. These are proof assets. They answer the external question every prospect is quietly asking: why should I believe you?
Confidence and conversion are connected, but they are not the same thing. Marketing that only builds one without the other leaves sales equipped to start conversations but not always to finish them. The sequence of enablement should be deliberate: knowledge assets first, so reps can speak with authority, proof assets close behind, so they can answer the moment a prospect says “that sounds interesting, but can you show me where it’s worked?”
But what about the situations when you have a brand new product? There may not be a customer success story yet!
The workaround is to work with what exists, not wait. Existing customer stories can often be reframed around the new product’s value proposition, particularly when the underlying problem being solved is the same even if the solution has evolved.
And for teams running beta or early access programs, even a handful of attributed quotes from pre-launch users – not polished case studies, just honest signal from real people who used it – gives sales something evidence-based to carry into early conversations. A two-sentence quote from a willing beta customer does more work than three paragraphs of positioning copy.
Another recommendation from the Sales Enablement expert Jennifer Sillars is when your product and sales engagement is at the early stages – you need to communicate your best case argument, essentially your positioning strategy that answers the questions of why your product is the right fit.
Then there is the question that keeps surfacing in sales and marketing conversations, reliably and with mild exasperation on both sides: the pitch deck.
Pitch decks did not make the top five most wanted assets in this survey. They didn’t make the top five deal-closing assets either. And yet requests to update, reformat, or rebuild decks remain one of the most consistent points of friction between sales and marketing teams – the ask that marketing finds exhausting and sales can’t seem to stop making.
What the data suggests is actually going on: when a rep asks for the deck to be updated, they are rarely asking for design help. They are asking for a current, coherent, professionally structured document they can put in front of a client without mentally footnoting every outdated slide.
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Keeping the deck current, making it easy to find, ensuring it reflects the latest positioning – these are small investments that remove friction. This kind of consistent, low-drama support for the sales teams builds the everyday trust that makes the bigger partnership possible.
The same logic applies across the entire asset library. More than a third of respondents (37.5%) cited collateral and enablement materials being hard to find or access as a top frustration. Which means some portion of the enablement investment is effectively invisible, sitting in a folder structure nobody navigates, doing no work for anyone.
As for what different roles inside the GTM team actually need – depending on the maturity of your sales department, one launch can generate several distinct readiness requirements.
A BDR running outbound sequences needs a one-liner and a short video clip they can drop into a follow-up email. An account executive needs a competitive matrix and a case study. A solutions engineer needs technical FAQs and a demo with context around what’s changed. A customer success manager needs messaging for existing customers and a roadmap they can share. Enablement that treats all of them as a single audience will, by definition, fully serve none of them.
| Role | Primary Goal | What They Need at Launch |
|---|---|---|
| BDR | Book meetings via outbound | One-liner, short video clip for follow-up emails |
| AE | Close deals | Competitive matrix, case study, pricing breakdown |
| SE | Demonstrate technical value | Technical FAQs, demo with context on what’s changed |
| CS | Retain & expand existing accounts | Messaging for existing customers, shareable roadmap |
Marketing speaks in assets and campaigns. Sales speaks in conversations and objections. The battlecard, the launch email, the one-pager – these are marketing’s native format. What sales needs is for those formats to answer the questions their prospects are actually asking, in language that travels across a buying committee, at a moment when the rep can actually use it.
That gap is closeable only if marketing asks sales what they need before the content calendar is locked, not after the launch has already happened.
If we can’t clearly talk about the value, the product won’t gain traction. That’s why I push hard for early access programs. Getting real customers to use the product early gives us proof points…
People are sleeping on sales decks. We let them be mediocre so they don’t do the heavy lifting upfront that they should. If we all put a bit more strategic thought into the deck…
“Competitive decks and messaging frameworks help reps feel ready, but buyers also need evidence. That’s why customer stories and real use cases show up as the biggest deal closers. Marketing’s job isn’t just to arm reps with knowledge; it’s to provide the kind of proof that travels through a buying committee.”
“If we can’t clearly talk about the value, the product won’t gain traction. That’s why I push hard for early access programs. Getting real customers to use the product early gives us proof points, ROI stories, and differentiators that sales can immediately take to market.”
“People are sleeping on sales decks. We let them be mediocre so they don’t do the heavy lifting upfront that they should. If we all put a bit more strategic thought into the deck, follow-up sales enablement needs would drop dramatically.”
“Sales often sees product marketing as just there to ‘pretty up’ decks. I’ve tackled that head-on by educating the org, and by treating internal visibility like PR.”
“It all comes down to helping sales and marketing communicate. Once shared goals are in place, marketing should proactively ask sales what they need, involve them early in development, and refine based on sales feedback.”
That number has a way of making people defensive. Sales points at marketing. Marketing points at product. Product points at timelines. And somewhere in that triangle of redirected frustration, the actual cause gets lost.
When asked to identify the biggest blockers to better alignment, nearly half of respondents (48.2%) pointed to a lack of structured process for collaboration. Not bad people or competing agendas, but the absence of a reliable mechanism for working together. Marketing moves too slowly for sales’ immediate needs, said 39.3%. Feedback loops are broken or non-existent, said 33.9%. We don’t share the same goals and KPIs, said 32.1%.
The structural failures compound each other. When there is no shared process, marketing operates on assumptions about what sales needs. When feedback loops don’t exist, those assumptions never get corrected. When goals diverge, each team optimizes for different outcomes and calls the other team’s priorities a distraction. The result: two teams working hard in slightly different directions, wondering why the launch keeps landing softer than expected.
There is also another argument the survey data points toward: the proactive sales enablement material delivery is not always a marketing problem. PMMs are frequently waiting on product teams for demo access, final specs, and confirmed positioning before they can build anything. The launch countdown starts for sales the moment the announcement goes out. It starts for marketing weeks earlier, in a holding pattern that the rest of the organisation rarely sees.
Sales frustration with late materials delivery is legitimate, and marketing producing late materials isn’t being careless. We are often the last link in a chain that was already running behind before we touched it. Understanding both of these things simultaneously, rather than choosing one to be true, is where the conversation about alignment actually has to start.
Which brings us to what the survey respondents said when asked to name the single thing marketing could do differently to make launches easier. The answers consistently clustered around three themes:
In the survey, there was one more finding that adds one more layer to the conversation about why launches fail.
When asked to identify the top reasons new products fail to gain traction, sales pointed primarily at execution: poor marketing or positioning (50.9%), lack of sales enablement (43.6%), and insufficient training (36.4%). Only 25.5% identified poor product-market fit as a primary cause.
Sales may be entirely right to feel this way about the launches they’ve experienced, but this also reveals the weight of expectation sitting on marketing’s shoulders. In the eyes of the front-facing teams, powerful positioning and strong enablement can make or break a product’s fate.
That is simultaneously a vote of confidence and an enormous amount of pressure.
The way to honour it is for us in marketing to be so well-prepared, so well-aligned, and so present in the room before launch day that the question of blame never needs to be asked.
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Egos, misaligned priorities, and a lack of systems thinking across teams has led to lower realised revenue, but generally this is not the fault of the individual or even specific departmental teams.
In my experience, the biggest blocker to better alignment is the perception that sales and marketing are two disjointed teams. All companies need strong acquisition and strong conversion.
“Too many leaders treat sales and marketing misalignment as ‘a tale as old as time’ – just the way it’s always been. But when two-thirds of companies admit it’s having a real financial impact, it’s no longer something to shrug off. It’s a revenue problem with a structural solution.”
“Egos, misaligned priorities, and a lack of systems thinking across teams has led to lower realised revenue, but generally this is not the fault of the individual or even specific departmental teams. It’s due to the culture within the organisation.”
“One of the biggest reasons sales materials arrive at the 11th hour is the mistrust between product marketing and product management. Product managers often hesitate to share specs early because they’re worried things will change during development. Building trust in both directions made the biggest impact.”
“We’re not having enough conversations at the idea and development stage. Marketing is throwing things over the wall, sales ignores them and forges its own path, and the feedback loop with the market disappears. We need to be partners in developing the narrative from the start.”
“Acknowledging there is a problem is the first step. Based on that, both sides need to sit together to describe how they envision an ideal partnership and go from there.”
“Most misalignment happens because sales and marketing don’t share the same definitions of lead quality, handoffs, or success metrics. The companies that avoid this usually build shared KPIs, hold joint pipeline reviews, and make both teams accountable for revenue instead of just their own numbers.”
“Close alignment between marketing and sales is essential to ensure a successful launch, and that both teams are rowing in the same direction to support revenue goals.”
“In my experience, the biggest blocker to better alignment is the perception that sales and marketing are two disjointed teams. All companies need strong acquisition and strong conversion. The sooner we realise these are two sides of the same coin, the sooner we start winning together.”
Everything in the previous three sections points toward the same conclusion: the launches that work are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most elaborate campaigns. They are the ones where sales walks in prepared, marketing shows up as a partner rather than a supplier, and the gap between “we built this” and “they can sell this” has been deliberately, methodically closed.
None of that requires a reorganisation. It requires three things, applied consistently.
The single most effective thing a marketing team can do is to define, in advance and for every launch, the non-negotiable minimal set of launch assets that sales can expect before go-live. The minimal library of assets doesn’t have to be perfect, or comprehensive, and fully designed. It shouldn’t be perfect.
The instinct to wait until assets are fully polished before sharing them with sales is understandable and almost always counterproductive. A good-enough value prop that arrives three weeks early does more work than a flawless one that arrives the morning of launch.
See the minimum viable scope for every launch below:
Ship these 2–3 weeks before launch. No exceptions, even if they’re not perfect.
This minimum viable scope should be a standing item in every launch plan – with an owner, a deadline, and the same level of accountability as the campaign itself. If the campaign can’t launch without creative assets signed off, the launch shouldn’t go live without sales enablement signed off either.
The most consistent finding across the survey – surfacing in the data, in the open-ended responses, and in the expert commentary – is that sales feels informed rather than consulted. Materials arrive fully formed, and the implicit message is: here is what you need, go use it.
The alternative is simple: before the content is finalised (ideally when messaging is still in draft) bring in two or three trusted sales voices and ask them to stress-test it. Get Sales to challenge your assets:
This practice does two things simultaneously: it makes the enablement materially better, because the people closest to the customer conversation will find gaps that internal review never will. And it creates a small group of sales advocates who were part of building the launch, rather than recipients of it. Those two or three people carry that ownership into their teams. They become the informal champions who answer questions, share assets, and close the loop when something isn’t working.
You can ask Sales to weigh in in several ways: a 30-minute call with a draft document, a Loom recording with a comment thread, a question dropped into a Slack channel. The format matters less than the habit. Ask before you finalise, consistently, and the relationship between sales and marketing starts to shift from transactional to collaborative in ways that outlast any individual launch.
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The absence of enablement process is part of what got sales and marketing into this situation. 48.2% of respondents identified a lack of structured process as the top blocker to better alignment, but the answer to that isn’t more meetings, more documentation, or a new project management tool nobody wants to learn.
The answer is one ritual, chosen deliberately, that keeps both teams looking at the same information at the same time.
For some organisations that’s a monthly “what’s new” presentation. For others it’s a shared GTM roadmap. For others still it’s a standing tiger team for each launch: a small cross-functional group that each own a piece of the plan.
What sales needs, more than any individual asset, is the sense that marketing is a constant presence, not a team that appears at launch, drops a folder of PDFs, and disappears until the next campaign. Regular, predictable touchpoints build the ambient trust that makes everything else easier: the feedback loop that actually closes, the draft messaging that gets stress-tested, the launch that lands.
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None of these three things are complicated, nor do they require sign-off from a C-suite, a new headcount, or a six-month implementation plan. They require a decision to treat sales readiness as a launch deliverable, with the same rigour, deadlines, and ownership as anything else that goes out the door.
It’s important for leaders to remember that the ultimate goal for sales and marketing is the same: to increase revenue. You can reinforce this alignment through shared metrics, regular cross-functional communication, and a single, consistent story…
Sales needs proof. Without it, they have to reinvent the wheel on every call. That’s why most deals go from enthusiastic champion to ghosting, because buyers can’t sell the purchase internally…
“The fact that more than half of sellers get launch support reactively is telling: too many launches are built for campaigns, not conversations. A great launch doesn’t just hit the market; it hits the field.”
“Building launch playbooks, training sales teams ahead of time, and holding both teams accountable for being ready before anything goes live would help close the support gap significantly.”
“When I took over as lead in product marketing, we sat down with sales teams, reviewed their messaging, tested different approaches, and gathered real customer feedback. By tweaking the positioning and rolling out updated messaging, we increased win rates by 20%.”
“Sales often doesn’t fully appreciate the work marketing does behind the scenes. But we’re not having enough conversations at the idea and development stage – and when that dialogue disappears, the feedback loop with the market disappears with it.”
“A top-down understanding of product marketing’s realised impact on sales needs to be understood in-depth by the C-suite, so that they install a culture of both sales and marketing being on the same team.”
“It’s important for leaders to remember that the ultimate goal for sales and marketing is the same: to increase revenue. You can reinforce this alignment through shared metrics, regular cross-functional communication, and a single, consistent story that both teams tell.”
“Sales needs proof. Without it, they have to reinvent the wheel on every call. That’s why most deals go from enthusiastic champion to ghosting, because buyers can’t sell the purchase internally because they don’t have what various stakeholders need to prioritise it.”
“Marketing needs to be there to enable sales, and sales needs to make itself available to learn. Unless that’s done, the other reasons for launch failure are almost secondary.”
75% of sales professionals believe they could manage without marketing if we magically disappeared tomorrow. It stings, because it has been true for long enough.
But spend enough time with the data that I shared in this long read, and the provocation starts to look like an invitation.
Because in the same survey sales told us exactly what they need, when they need it, what actually closes deals versus what merely sounds good in a kickoff meeting. They told us that the launches they remember were the ones where marketing showed up early, asked good questions, and stayed in the room.
They are not indifferent to what marketing does – they have simply stopped expecting our support to arrive in time.
The 75% is not a verdict on sales and marketing relations – it is a measure of how much ground there is still to claim, and every launch is another chance to claim a little more of it.
This research would not exist without the generosity of the sales and go-to-market professionals who took the time to answer the survey honestly, and without the marketing leaders and practitioners who contributed their expertise and unfiltered opinions.
Particular thanks to:
And to the 100+ sales and go-to-market professionals who answered the survey with candour and specificity: this is your research as much as mine. Thank you for telling us what you actually needed, instead of what you thought we wanted to hear.
Aleksandra Mitroshkina is a product marketing leader with nearly a decade of experience across software, open source, and enterprise technology. She has led product marketing at Percona, where her GTM campaigns grew company revenue by over 200%, and served as the founding marketer for AlmaLinux OS, an open source Linux distribution now used by over a million organisations worldwide, including CERN. She currently serves as VP of Marketing at CloudLinux, where she oversees marketing across four product groups and eleven products.
Over the last several years, Aleksandra has interviewed and surveyed more than 300 sales, solutions engineering, and customer success professionals on what it actually takes to walk into a launch feeling prepared. The research behind this ebook is part of that ongoing work – an attempt to close the interpretation gap between what marketing builds and what sales can use, one honest conversation at a time.
She speaks regularly at GTM and product marketing events, and has built her practice on a simple belief: the best way to know what sales needs is to ask them. Not once, not at the post-mortem, but before the content calendar is locked and while there is still time to do something about it.
The 75% is what happens when we stop asking. This research is an argument for starting again.
Connect with Aleksandra on LinkedIn or follow her work at mitroshkina.com.
“Sales can get deals done, but without us they are working with half the toolkit. What strikes me is that while sales already sees marketing as a key resource, we are not giving them the evidence that proves it.”