How do you cultivate a strong relationship with Sales where it's not fixated on just requests for collateral, requests for new content? Oftentimes I've seen Sales think of PMM as order takers, rather than partners. How do you fix that?

The best sales relationships come from the top. Where the PMM leadership, or marketing/product leadership is aligned with sales leadership on key OKRs and where and how product marketing can come in.

If you are truly not getting that support from your leadership, or you are in charge of building a relationship - there’s a few ways you can gradually build a relationship with sales

First - if you don't want to be known as the "collateral team" , then stop talking about collateral in your interactions with them, and start using the language they use everyday. Talk about sales stages. About discovery or solutioning. About contracting and negotiation. About demos or discounting. About competition and next meetings. About buying committee and champions. Collateral is simply an enabler for helping the right kind of deals move faster. Focus on the underlying struggles, and you will invariably get a seat at the table

Second - Understand the sales agenda and problems. Do they have a pipeline problem or a conversion problem ? Break it down even further….are they having trouble facing access issues to the buyer? Is the 1st meeting to demo conversion rate poor ? Are the demos not working ? Are they getting stuck in competitive comparisons ? Are they struggling to tell a value story ? If you want to help them at a strategic level, you almost have to diagnose their problem for them, or have them share their diagnoses with you. Then solve it for them. And measure and prove that solution. If you are building a demo narrative, then measure how that has improved conversion and win rates. Bring back that measurement to everyone in the company. And develop a virtuous cycle where you go from being 'content creators' to 'strategic partners in my sales process'. This will help you develop credibility both with sales leadership as well as frontline sales reps

Finally - There’s no shame in being an order taker, especially if you are just beginning to form a relationship. Particularly in very enterprise sales heavy cultures , sales reps are the frontline teams that bring in revenue. My mantra in such cultures is that Product marketing, but even Product, or rest of marketing, is there to help sales win. Our work on messaging, or launches, or enablement, or campaigns, is only as relevant as its applicability and use by sales teams in growing revenue. Frontline reps know what they want - particularly if the need is coming from multiple frontline team and their leaders. If there are obvious content gaps, you can develop credibility by filling them and that helps you develop the relationship and the trust to have a deeper partnership conversation

Have regular sync. Make the information they have available to them a priority to you. Let them know that you need to learn from them in order to provide them the services they need - and demonstrate that need regularly and clearly. Make sure to bring new information to them as well whenever possible, so they can see your value beyond collateral creation. Collaborate with them on feature needs, prioritize requests together with him, and be as transparent as you can with them.