The uncomfortable truth
Every CRO has said some version of this:
“We didn’t lose the deal. We lost the feature.”
But here’s the real truth:
Most deals don’t die in the field, they die in the roadmap.
Not because Product is incompetent. Not because Engineering is slow. Not because your reps can’t sell.
They die because the information flow between Sales and Product is fundamentally broken and you, the CRO, are stuck in the middle, losing revenue you should have closed.
Think of Product as a different language that sales must become fluent in. We've covered how the product team, sales team divide is crucial for executives to close.
Let’s unpack the mechanics.
Product doesn’t see what Sales sees
Sales lives in a high-frequency, high-feedback world:
calls → objections → feature asks → decision risk → next step → ghosting → revive → close.
Product lives in a slower, more evidence-driven world:
themes → patterns → customers → effort → scope → roadmap → engineering bandwidth.
Sales speaks:
“We’re going to lose this deal if we don’t build X.”
Product hears:
“Anecdote.”
And the roadmap rolls on. As we've covered, product ignores sales when they get, what they perceive, as non data-driven feedback.
The roadmap ≠ reality
Your reps hear feature demand in real time.
Product hears it 6–12 weeks later, filtered through:
- Slack threads
- Gong clips
- CS summaries
- Salesforce notes
- Ad-hoc meetings
- Whatever the PM happened to notice
No one is doing this maliciously. It’s simply an information architecture problem that’s decades old.
Sales sees signal. Product sees noise. Product needs it translated into their language!
And this noise problem is where deals quietly die.
Why Product can’t keep up (even when they want to)
It’s not because they’re ignoring you.
It’s because:
1. They get too many requests
Every request from every rep across every region across every vertical.
2. The requests aren’t standardized
What counts as a “must-have” in Sales is often unclear to Product.
3. They don’t see the revenue risk
They see “3 customers asked for this,”
not
“$1.3M ARR at risk this quarter.”
4. They lack usable evidence
Product managers don’t prioritize anecdotes.
They prioritize:
- patterns
- repetition
- documented customer pain
- clear user narratives
- validated quotes
- multi-account resonance
Sales provides fuel, but not in Product’s format. This is the bottom line. It's why we've built Arkweaver.
The CRO’s invisible job: translating urgency
Your most important internal job isn’t motivating the team.
It’s not forecasting.
It’s not QBR theater.
It’s translating revenue pressure into a language Product respects.
This is why the best CROs:
- show patterns, not complaints
- aggregate customers, not anecdotes
- document quotes, not opinions
- quantify revenue impact, not “feels important”
- present evidence, not emotion
You’re doing half the PM’s job just to get heard.
And that shouldn’t be the job.
AI is breaking the product bottleneck
This is the turning point.
For the first time in 20 years, Product bottlenecks are no longer inevitable.
AI can:
- ingest every Gong call
- surface every repeated feature request
- cluster customer types
- quantify ARR at risk
- spit out product-ready summaries
- create user stories and problem statements
- show Product exactly what buyers want
- in the language Product actually uses
Suddenly, Sales doesn’t have to fight for airtime. Suddenly, Product isn’t drowning in noise. Suddenly, deals don’t die silently inside the roadmap.
This is the new world.
The CRO takeaway
Your win rate doesn’t hinge on “better selling.” You’re good at selling.
It hinges on whether your company can turn buyer demand into product reality fast enough.
You can fix this. But only if you fix the information architecture between Revenue → Product.
We highlight recommend augmenting Gong or another sales recording software with Product Intelligence software. Need recommendations, here are the top 5 product intelligence tools that work with Gong.
Because deals don’t die in the field.
They die on roadmaps built in the dark.