Your frontline team members (i.e., sales, onboarding and/or customer success) know which messages land and which don't.
They also know:
Which questions prospects typically ask at different points in the decision-making process.
Where buyers need clarification on what they've actually bought.
Where sales might be overselling (or, less commonly, underselling).
Which product limitations confuse buyers (and new users).
They know all of this (and more) because it’s their job to talk to your prospects and customers every dang day.
(In the Buyer Proximity Principle bullseye, these are the people closest to the buyer after the buyers themselves.)
And yet so few sales-led marketing teams seem to have a formal cadence or process for actually pulling this information back into marketing. It's done more by feel, reactively, than proactively.
This is a systems problem, not a people problem. (The system doesn't exist and the muscle needs to be built.)
Yes, in some orgs, there's real tension between marketing and sales that makes putting this system in place a little harder. Talking usually helps relieve the tension. Plus, it can help bring everyone onto the same page and make them feel like they’re really playing on the same team.
It’s really important that this listening loop exists for marketing, because marketing is typically more removed from the buyer than sales or customer service. We’re not the frontline. So, without a feedback loop, marketing is almost always working with outdated or incomplete buyer intelligence. And you end up with a gap between what sales knows, what customer service knows, and what marketing is putting out there.
The lightest lift to start building your frontline listening loop:
If you already have a recurring meeting with frontline people from sales, onboarding, CS and marketing all in the room, add a standing agenda item with three questions:
What messaging is working now?
What, if anything, has changed?
What hasn't?
Yes, some of these questions seem redundant. Still my preference, because it helps folks spot where the teams may be falling out of alignment with one another. This is more important if the meeting cadence is less frequent.
Also, yes, you could automate a listening loop via AI… but should you? Even if the internal conversation is AI-supported (e.g. call summaries, aggregate trends, etc.), you should probably still devote some team time to talking about your customers because, well, they’re the ones who give the business a reason to exist.
Time cap the agenda item and nominate frontline “spokespeople” from each team. This small change helps you build a proactive listening loop. And if new patterns pop up, marketing has the intel they need to take action.
'Til next week,
Carolyn
Off the clock…
🎥 Worst Ex Ever on Netflix. So freaking creepy. This series once again reminded me that exaggeration is not needed. Reality is weird enough.
📕 Mediterranean Every Day by Sheila Prakash. I'm cooking through this right now. I never really knew how to eat hot-smoked salmon other than throwing it on a cracker and calling it a day, so the hot-smoked salmon Greek salad is a fun alternative.
📨 Why don't Québécois identify as Canadians? by French with Frederic. This (very niche, very French) newsletter offered a nuanced insider view of the distinction between Québécois and Canadian culture. As a transplant in the province, this helped me better understand a point of contention at some family dinners.
Before you go…
My firm (Boxcar) helps sales-led B2B software and tech companies build a messaging strategy that actually drives pipeline.
We also work with clients to operationalize their messaging strategy using AI to create high-quality, on-brand outputs. (If you’re curious about this, mention it when you reach out.)
Interested in working together? Reach out by filling this form.