The supply-and-demand model between marketing and sales teams is faulty, especially when it comes to content. Marketers create 39% of sales content on average, more than any other division within companies, according to a recent Cso Insights study. Yet you’ll often hear salespeople say they’re unhappy with what they receive because it’s irrelevant to their meetings, outdated, isn’t personalized to customers’ use cases, and so on.  

Nearly 25% of sales people create their own content (partially because of the complaints above), distracting them from what they’re best at – selling. When reps stray from their area of expertise to create collatera, the quality of that content suffers, setting them up for failure. The Cso Insights Study found that quality content is “mandatory” to achieve above average quotas.

Those trained to distill complicated technology into something anyone can understand through writing and visuals should be the ones doing it. Unfortunately, those people – the content marketers – are typically thinking about how to attract early-stage leads, rather than how they can aid salespeople in later-stage prospect meetings.

Marketers think one-to-many; salespeople think one-to-one. And there’s a good reason for that. Sales meetings need to be personalized to each customer and their specific pain points, while top-of-funnel marketing should often be relatable to as wide an audience as possible. But the problem is obvious. If 39% of marketers are creating sales content, there’s a good chance they might not be thinking about the right audience. According to CSO Insights, “It’s a dangerous illusion to reduce the required sales content to only marketing content as this produces inevitable content gaps.”

So what to do about it? CSO Insights gave three simple, great guidelines to follow that’ll help us start narrowing the sales and marketing divide.

Get better at mapping content to the customer journey

Marketers must involve salespeople and their managers in the content creation process more often, so they understand which pain points they need to tackle in the copy. Both teams should agree how to define the content types – things such as blog articles, white papers, customer stories – according to audience and purpose. After collaborating, map each piece of content to the customer’s journey.

Analyze the results

Analyzing the results will show you the gaps you need to fills. Common gaps include:

• Organization: how you organize content research, creation, and dissemination throughout the company
• Perspective: an understanding of the audience’s needs and each employee’s role in addressing them
• Customer’s journey: making sure the right content touches the customer at the right time during the buying process

“By identifying the areas where there is insufficient content coverage, the results of the analysis become actionable,” according to the study.

A quick note on audience: while the study found that white papers were used most during the sales process, sales reps used product collateral more often than customer case studies and references. Be careful not to overwhelm the customer with me-focused material. They care how your product is going to help them, but they have to know you have an understanding of their core problems if they’re going to trust you to fix them. The customer needs to know you’ll give them more than just the right features. White papers, blog posts, and case studies can help with that.

Make a plan

If you want to make sure you spread relevant content throughout the customer journey, CSO tells us to start by defining:

• Who’s responsible for creation
• Who’s accountable for the result
• Who should be consulted along the way
• Who should simply be informed

Here are two examples from the study

• For customer case studies, marketing is usually responsible and accountable, while the account manager should consulted, and sales enablement should be informed.  
• A playbook might be sales enablement’s accountability and responsibility, while marketing should be consulted, and sales managers should be informed.

Remember that context always matters. There’s no one-size-fits-all fix for any organization, but these guidelines can be a useful starting point. If you want to learn more, check out the entire CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study here. We’ll also be distilling stats from it in posts in the weeks to come. 

And don’t forget to share your own thoughts and strategies around content’s role in the sales enablement process in the comment section below.