As a strategic and hands-on leader with over 20 years in procurement and supply chain technology, guest blogger, Bill DeMartino, shares his thoughts on the importance of Product Marketing for assisting early-stage innovation through scaled enterprise execution.

Why This Isn’t Just Another “Hand Off Sales” Essay

Much has been written about the transition from founder-led sales to building a scalable commercial organization. And rightly so—it’s a pivotal step for any growth-stage company. Once a company achieves initial product-market traction (typically around a Series A or B round), attention often turns to building out the sales and marketing organization. The standard advice? Hire a sales leader. Stand up repeatable sales processes. Create content. Build pipeline.

But in many cases, those moves are insufficient.

Because what’s often underestimated is that scaling sales requires more than just headcount and process. It demands a re-evaluation of how the company shows up to a broader, more skeptical market. The audiences change. The competitive context expands. The buyers get more diverse—and more distracted. And suddenly, the messaging and positioning that worked so well for early growth fall short.

This blog is not about the founder’s psychology or the hiring of a VP Sales. It’s about a critical capability that often gets overlooked—and that can dramatically improve the odds of scaling successfully.

Why Scaling Requires More Than Just Sales Process

In the early days, deals often came through relationships, vision lock with early adopters, or shared enthusiasm with founders. Founders are typically the best evangelists, deeply attuned to the market problem and able to personalize every pitch. But that doesn’t scale. As the company enters a new phase, sales must be executed by teams who don’t carry that founder credibility.

The buyer landscape also shifts. Instead of early champions, the audience now includes operational stakeholders, cross-functional influencers, and economic decision-makers. Competitors may emerge with similar language or better funding. Analysts begin to take interest—and ask harder questions. Suddenly, the go-to-market motion needs to do much more heavy lifting.

That’s why one of the most important shifts at this stage is not just who is selling—but what they’re saying, how it resonates, and why it wins. And that’s where a specific form of Product Marketing capability becomes a difference-maker.

Messaging, Positioning, and the Missing Capability

Most companies at this stage attempt to solve the gap by hiring Product Marketing. But the function is often misunderstood—especially by product-oriented founders. It gets defined narrowly as a content or campaigns function. Or it gets staffed with someone from another part of the org who can “just take it on.”

What’s missing is not just more content. It’s a strategic, credible voice that can help reframe how the company communicates value—internally and externally.

In reality, this role is not simply a resource—it’s a capability. And it needs to combine:

• Strategic clarity – helping unify product, marketing, and sales around a refined value proposition
• External credibility – guiding messaging in a way that resonates with analysts, partners, and the broader market
• Internal influence – earning the trust of founders and functional leaders to make tough calls and challenge assumptions

This is hard to do from the inside—especially for early team members whose assumptions were shaped by what worked before. That’s why an independent, domain-fluent counterbalance can accelerate the transition and elevate the outcome.

Where the Capability Comes From

And that doesn’t always require hiring a full-time Product Marketing leader. The capability can be fulfilled through:

• A domain-fluent consultant
• A fractional product marketing lead
• A partner with deep expertise in market structure, buyer behavior, and ecosystem dynamics

Critically, this isn’t just about content or messaging—it’s about credibility. The right contributor must bring:

• Domain fluency: a working understanding of partner go-to-market motions, analyst expectations, and category dynamics
• Ecosystem awareness: experience positioning solutions within broader technology landscapes, including integration points and strategic adjacencies
• Competitive insight: clarity on how competitors frame similar problems—and how to differentiate against them

These capabilities can serve as a bridge—accelerating the transition while giving the company time to build the right long-term team. They also provide an independent, informed perspective that helps pressure-test assumptions and elevate positioning beyond what has historically worked.

Final Thought

Scaling a growth-stage company is never easy. But doing it without a clear, credible, and competitive position makes it even harder. If you’re navigating this transition—or preparing for it—consider whether your team has the Product Marketing capability required to succeed.

It might be the critical lever that determines whether you scale with purpose—or stall in the gap between traction and growth.

Let Liberis Consulting help you scale your business through effective product marketing strategies..