It's actually incredibly important for our sales team. They use it to ask questions of product & marketing, share information about our products with each other

It's actually incredibly important for our sales team. They use it to ask questions of product & marketing, share information about our products with each other, track new launches, etc.. This is hard in a distributed workspace and a company with many hundreds of people. How else would you expect it to work? Email doesn't cut it (point to point, not searchable, low signal:noise) and I haven't seen a high functioning wiki, which seems like the closest alternative. For sales in particular, though, I think the integration with SFDC (in Chatter's case) is pretty key. They live on Salesforce, so the messages & communication is right there and can easily be linked back to specific accounts as necessary.