I used to be that marketer building campaigns from a room with myself in it. Slides looked perfect. The data was clean. Strategy felt bulletproof. On fudging PAPER! Then, when I started working with Platforce, I watched a $30K campaign flop because I'd never actually talked to a real buyer. Thank you, Artem Brytchenko 🇺🇦, for not firing me right there. Sales would not let me, that was my excuse :( The wake-up call came during a pipeline review with my CEO and the Head of Sales. I sat there listening to a prospect explain why our "perfect" messaging made zero sense to them, and immediately I thought that I should be selling just like the AEs do. Now I spend one day every week in real conversations. Sales calls, industry events, even customer support calls. Hell, I am even considering switching to sales from marketing. I started hitting every industry event I could and try to sell the shit out of it. This is how I learnt sales. There are no more excuses, as a marketer, you either learn to sell the same or better as your AEs or say bye-bye to that tech career of yours. AI is here to eliminate the weaklings. Here's what changed: I make a 3-question field template for every conversation: What sucks today? What workaround do you use? What would make you switch? Every Monday, I share one raw insight with the team — no marketing polish, just what I heard. I build one small experiment per quarter based on field sales feedback, not opinions. The result? My messaging hits different now. Pricing makes sense. Product roadmaps actually solve real problems. You, as a product or marketing lead… you have to be customer facing as well. Because if you never talk to buyers, your GTM is just expensive fiction.