AMA: Seso Inc. Head of Demand Generation, Emily Chisholm on Sales / Demand Gen Alignment

Remember that you're all on the same team—that mindset solves more forecasting disputes than any model does. The fastest structural fix is a strong RevOps analyst sitting between the two functions. A good one will save you enormous headache by giving both sides a single source of truth, so you're not arguing about whose numbers are right before you can even talk about what they mean. And attribution doesn't have to be perfect. That's genuinely fine, as long as you and sales agree on the level of ...Read More

The tension eases when sales sees brand work paying off in their own pipeline. The foundation is a strong working relationship with your reps—when they trust you, they give brand-building activities room to breathe. The practical bridge is thought leadership content that prospects actually want to attend. Choose topics carefully and make them genuinely useful, and you get the best of both worlds: the content builds long-term authority, while also warming prospects and making reps' conversations ...Read More

I treat sales as a standing source of customer intelligence, not just a downstream recipient of leads. That means consistently asking reps what prospects and customers actually care about—the objections they hear, the language buyers use, the problems that keep surfacing on calls—and feeding that directly into messaging. The key is involving them early, during messaging development rather than after a campaign is built. It's a lot cheaper to pressure-test a topic in a 15-minute conversation than ...Read More

Test it against real accounts and see where it lands. The fastest gut check: run your model on accounts you already know, and if it surfaces a low-fit account as a top prospect, you know the model is off. That kind of face-validity test is also how you build trust with sales—they can see for themselves whether the scoring matches their instincts about good accounts, which makes alignment a shared exercise rather than a handoff. Keep the inputs to verifiable data. The biggest trap is building a s ...Read More

In short: believe them. If your company invests in enablement and you trust that sales is being held accountable for their ability to close, then you have no reason not to be constantly improving the demand gen engine and getting tighter on targeting. Defensiveness here is a trap. Treating their feedback as a signal rather than an attack keeps the relationship healthy and the engine sharp. The key is to build targeting from real closed-won deals—the ones you want more of. When you anchor targeti ...Read More