Let’s clear something up

Product is not ignoring you.
They’re not dismissing your reps.
They’re not anti-revenue.

What they are is deaf to the way Sales typically delivers information.

Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t speak your language.

Sales talks in:

  • deals
  • urgency
  • momentum
  • competitor pressure
  • revenue at risk
     

Product talks in:

  • user problems
  • evidence
  • scope
  • impact
  • constraints
  • tradeoffs
  • themes

These are completely different operating systems.

You’re not misaligned, you’re untranslated. It's why most deals that depend on features, die.

 

Why Sales input breaks down

1. Sales input is “raw”

Gong clips, call notes, Slack threads — these aren’t evidence to Product.
They’re fragments.

2. Sales input is anecdotal

Even when it’s real.
Even when it’s urgent.
Even when it’s a deal-killer.

Product hears:
“One rep said one customer might need something.”

3. Sales input lacks context

Product needs to know:

  • what type of user asked
  • how often it’s asked
  • why it matters
  • how it fits into the workflow
  • whether it’s a workaround problem or a real pain
     

Sales rarely includes this because—fairly—it’s not their job.

4. Sales input isn’t aggregated

Three reps hearing the same request = a signal.
Three isolated Slack messages = noise.

Product treats noise as noise.

 

The Product manager’s worldview (you need to know this)

PMs aren’t skeptical.
They’re responsible.

Their job is to:

  • prevent the team from building the wrong features
  • validate customer problems
  • organize demand into coherent themes
  • justify every engineering hour to leadership
  • avoid being hijacked by one loud stakeholder

Which means:

They must ignore input that isn’t validated, repeatable, or structured.

If they didn’t, the roadmap would explode.

They’re not ignoring Sales.
They’re ignoring bad data.

 

Your real job as CRO: become the translator

You don’t need to turn your reps into PMs.
You don’t need more meetings.
You don’t need more Slack threads.

You need a translation layer that turns Sales input into:

  • patterns
  • clusters
  • quantified revenue impact
  • cross-account themes
  • problem statements
  • use cases

     

This is the moment where Product finally says:
“Okay… now I see it.”

 

What Product actually responds to

If you want Product’s attention, give them:

1. Frequency

“12 customers in the mid-market segment asked for X.”

2. Patterns

“This is the fourth time a hospital system blocked us because we didn’t integrate with Y.”

3. Quotes

Exact customer language — not summaries.

4. Buyer persona

Admins, end users, IT, clinical leads — it all matters.

5. Business impact

“$600k ARR tied up because of this gap.”

This is Product’s currency.
You win influence when you trade in their coin.

 

 

AI is the bridge

Here’s where AI, like Arkweaver, changes the game:

  • Arkweaver listens to every Gong call
  • Extracts every feature request 
  • Clusters them by theme 
  • Assigns frequency 
  • Attaches customer quotes
  • Quantifies ARR
  • Generates PM-ready summaries
  • Produces user stories
  • Highlights opportunities and risks

In other words:
AI turns Sales noise into Product language.

Exactly the way Product needs to hear it.

The CRO takeaway

The problem has never been that Product ignores Sales.
The problem is that Sales and Product have been forced to communicate through static, unstructured fragments.

That era is over.

The CRO of the next decade is the one who finally connects the dots — not by shouting louder, but by speaking Product fluently.