Most sales-led teams don’t intend to ignore their buyers. Yet few have a structured system for listening to and learning from them.
This is the system I call a listening loop. A listening loop is a two-track system for continually pulling market signals back into your messaging strategy. The goal is to get incrementally smarter about your buyer, so you deepen your understanding over time and reduce messaging drift.
It runs on two parallel tracks. Ideally, you run these tracks consistently and concurrently.
The Marketing Results Track is what most teams already do (at least partway). Get something into the market. Collect the performance results. Analyze what happened, ask why, and synthesize what it tells you about your buyer. Decide what to do next. Repeat.
The Frontline Insights Track is what more teams seem to skip. Your sales, customer success, and onboarding teams are in front of buyers and they're typically pattern-matching all day, every day (success in their role depends on it). This track creates a mechanism for those patterns to reach marketing. My preference is a regular touchpoint for a focused conversation about what's being heard, what's shifting and what's still working. Marketing collects raw data where possible, and anecdotal patterns where not.
Both tracks follow the same steps:
Deliver → Collect → Analyze → Synthesize → Decide
The listening loop looks a little something like this:
Sales-led B2B software companies have a built-in advantage here (they’re just not always using it).
Sales-led B2B companies typically collect all of the data for both tracks by default. In addition to the marketing data that almost every marketing team collects, these sales-led B2B software companies also record nearly every sales call, every onboarding conversation, every customer success touchpoint. So the data for each track exists. But the loop for each track often breaks down between analyzing and deciding.
On the other hand, a 100% PLG business is far less likely to have this two-track system:
They have the marketing results track.
And they typically have comprehensive product behavior metrics,
But without a dedicated sales team or white-glove onboarding process, there are fewer face-to-face moments with buyers, so there’s limited data to fuel the frontline insights track.
(Yes, sales-led companies use product behavior data too. But it’s typically representative of the buyer later in their buying journey (first use and ongoing use in the JTBD mapping), and most useful for upsells, cross-sells and related outreach timing. Who owns learning from that data typically depends on who owns those motions internally.)
For all the criticism sales-led motions seem to receive (too slow, too expensive, lacking transparency, etc.), the motion’s access to qualitative frontline data is a major advantage because that data gets you closer to the buyer than product metrics. And the closer you get to the buyer, the more confident you can feel in your messaging strategy and the resulting copy.
But even with this data advantage, too many companies operate in broadcast mode: marketing and sales collateral go out, the team glances at the results, then they move on. This is a dangerous default, particularly for sales-led software companies.
Without listening loops, your messaging strategy drifts. And if you happen to have a long sales cycle, you won’t spot the drift in time to adjust. Instead, you’ll find out you’ve drifted when your team misses its targets.
So, take a look at what your marketing team did last week:
Were you operating in broadcast mode? Or were you running listening loops?
‘Til next week,
Carolyn
Off the clock…
🎥 Letterkenny. We’re working our way through season 3. Funny (like Shoresy), but all of the characters feel a little more like caricatures than I’d like. (Also, if you’re into regional dialects, this is a fun read about how the writers created the Letterkenny/Shoresy “conlect”.)
🎧 Steve Carell | Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Highlights include a discussion about how fellow Bostonians keep Amy and Steve humble (more regional considerations, this time focused on approach and behavior), plus a silly guest appearance by Amy’s parents.
Before you go…
My firm (Boxcar) helps sales-led B2B software companies turn their proven sales motion into the messaging foundation that gives the whole team a clear path to generating more qualified leads.
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