Marketing Content vs. Sales Content

According to the American Marketing Association, 50% to 80% of marketing content goes unused by sales. Given that Sirius Decisions research reports that 82% of executives say sales reps are unprepared for meetings, there's an obvious disconnect.

There's also an obvious (if not, it should be) reason for this. Marketing content is (or should be) focused on generating leads and sales content needs to help leads make the final purchase decision. They are focused on different stages of the buyer's journey.

In the beginning of the journey, buyers are interested in gaining knowledge about the problems they're facing, exploring options and assessing possible solutions. More and more of this is being done without "sales" interactions. The Internet gives buyers access to more information than they've ever had before. By the time they get to a sales conversation, they probably know as much or more about your products than your sales reps.

However, the decision stage is critical. Salespeople need to be able to have conversations that seamlessly connect from where the lead transitioned off the marketing content. The focus shifts. In the final stages, the buyer is evaluating the company—assessing viability, and working relationships, and partner value add, and deciding how much they trust you.

If marketing is providing sales with the content they're using to generate attention and educate leads, no wonder it doesn't get used by sales. It's not what they need. Sales needs conversational toolkits loaded with the tools and information that helps them extend the dialogue in the stage the buyer is in.

Since marketing's job is to expose your company's expertise and the value you'll bring to the table beyond the lead's in-house resources, sales needs materials that help them provide the personal validation that what marketing has told them is true.

In addition to the lead's activity, demographic and psychographic profile, sales needs the following resources that tie the earlier stages of the marketing process to the end stages of the sales process. The conversational toolkit may include:

• value propositions
• campaign-based FAQs
• conversational outlines for problem/solution scenarios
• conversational scripts for features/benefits

And all of the above are customer focused—not product oriented. Marketing cannot just reload lead generation and transitional content into the sales portal/system and expect that to be the end of it.

Sales content deserves to be created just for sales conversations. And it's not a one-time thing. Just like marketing content evolves, so does sales content. In order to tune sales content, it's imperative that marketing get feedback, monitor content use and pay attention to what's working for sales and either fix or eliminate what's not.

In fact, marketing should treat sales content like a campaign, paying the same attention to the metrics of sales force attention as they do to lead generation and nurturing campaigns.

Comments

[Todd Cabral]

Great post Ardath. For some reason there often seems to be a contentious relationship between sales and marketing...something comparable to the rift between the Marines and the Navy as noted in "A Few Good Men". But some of the most successful marketing efforts I've been a part of stemmed from early and frequent collaboration with smart sales people who understood the buying cycle. Only when sales and marketing come together to discuss customer pain points and their implications, the roadblocks that pop up in telemarketing calls, and objections that doom sales at the 11th hour does the whole picture come into focus. And that picture is needed to provide the foundation for good sales and marketing tools.

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Todd,

Thanks for commenting!

Yes! Collaboration is vital to connecting the stages for buyers and achieving the ultimate results - customer acquisition. But not just for the sake of the sale. It's also about how solid that relationship is that sets the foundation for the entire customer relationship.

If you look at the end-to-end process as a relay, and the hand-off that gets companies to the end result they want, then it just makes no sense that marketing and sales aren't working hand-in-glove.

Not to mention the efficiencies and productivity impacts on time-to-revenue...which is probably another blog post.

Ardath

[messels]

hi ardath, your advice may actually end up being the same as before, but how does one go about making this "ah-ha!" occur for the marketing department? i mean, i certainly wouldn't want them to think that i don't value the work they do because they're doing everything in their power to create sales leads. i simply find that their focus, as you stated in your post, is drastically different from mine. everything is very surface level which is fine when a prospect is looking at "which dealership to stop in" but when it comes to making the purchasing decision, the information needs and demands change directions and quite quickly.
maybe it's just my personality but i find that most of the discussions i come across on blogs are extremely relevant to my company but i'm the only one reading them...and i'm about as low on the totem pole as it gets.

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Messels,

Thanks for your comment! Once again, the lack of pertinent facts is limiting, but I'll give it a shot. This one is a bit different than the last.

Here are some ideas that come to mind:

1. Do you have any documented evidence of the type of materials you (and other sales reps) are using that help you close deals? Ones that you guys created because you had holes in what marketing has provided?

2. Do you know how to articulate to marketing what changes you'd like to see in the materials they give you to use? For example: "This white paper is terrific, but can you give me some pointers about how I tie in a discussion about it with the campaign you've exposed the lead to so I can pull them forward in the buying process?"

3. Can you make a list of things your opportunities ask you that you have no content or insights about? Or maybe it's that you get asked the same things repeatedly and you'd love to have a thought leadership piece about a specific problem/solution that you continually deal with which marketing is not addressing.

I think the key from your position is gracious requests. Appreciate what they are doing and ask for what you want, backed up with evidence from potential customer situations and experiences. It would also help if you weren't the only sales guy asking.

I'm not sure I've helped any, but hopefully those suggestions will give you some ideas.

Thanks,
Ardath

[messels]

great suggestions! plenty to think about and clearly formulate before making any moves but i appreciate the suggestion. thank you!

[Chris McCrory]

Ardath,

Another great post. You have hit on the fundamental problem dividing marketing and sales - time to feedback.

Marketing often has to generate content with a longer time before they get relevant feedback as to its success.

Sales, however, enjoys more immediate feedback, thus the message delivery and content must be different.

The message itself should be the same (hence the prior planning), but the manner in which the customer receives depends on the stage in the process.

Chris

[Ardath Albee]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for your comment. I agree with everything you've said with the potential exception of "the message should be the same."

Can you say what you mean by that?

I think the "story" is the same, but the message varies with the buyer's stage. When they get to sales conversations, they're at validation of their beliefs and confirming the company is who they say they are and verifying that they're a partner they want to work with. They also need more product-specific info vs at an earlier stage. (We may be saying the same thing a bit differently?)

Totally agree about the delivery. Thanks for adding that to the discussion.

Ardath