Not because market research doesn't belong in sales. Because sales was already doing the research. The real problem wasn't collecting customer insight. It was making sure it survived the meeting and created direction. At one company I worked with, the proposed solution was straightforward: every salesperson should ask the same structured discovery questions during every demo so Product could feed the roadmap with consistent market data. On paper, it sounded perfectly reasonable.
I still said no. A consultative sales conversation absolutely requires discovery. But a demo is not a research instrument. You have three to five opening questions before the prospect expects you to demonstrate that you understand their world. Those questions exist to route the conversation towards value, not to complete a fifteen-point questionnaire. Spend that attention budget on research, and you lose the room.
More importantly, the highest-value product insights almost never arrive in response to your prepared questions. They emerge when a prospect explains why their current process keeps breaking. When they describe the workaround nobody documented. When they tell you why the last two vendors failed. When they casually mention the adjacent problem you never knew existed.
That is genuine market signal. And by definition, it is unpredictable. Most organisations build capture systems only for information they expected to collect. The insights that actually reshape a roadmap arrive unexpectedly-and disappear with the meeting. That's why I believe Product is often asking Sales for the wrong thing.
You cannot standardise the question. You can only standardise what happens to the answer. Every meaningful product observation should follow the same lightweight process.
- Capture it.
- Create a ticket.
- Periodically cluster similar tickets into recurring themes. Turn those themes into epics and user stories.
- Prioritise them against company OKRs-not against the loudest customer, the biggest deal, or the last conversation anyone remembers.
Run that process consistently for two or three quarters and something changes. The roadmap gradually stops reflecting opinions. It starts reflecting persistent patterns in the market. Product-market fit becomes less about occasional flashes of insight and more about the systematic accumulation of evidence.
The demo was never the research instrument. The process behind it is.