Sales and marketing alignment: mapping content strategy to sales goals
By Afton Brazzoni
As a marketer, you’re shooting for the same net as your colleagues in sales, so why does it sometimes feel like you’re on different teams? You’re likely struggling with the delicate dance of sales and marketing alignment.
Logically, you know you need to align your content strategy with your sales team’s objectives, but you run into roadblocks every time you try.
You’ve shared the success metrics from your latest content program, but you’re still met with skepticism when you float new ideas. Your colleagues in sales just aren’t convinced your content program is tied closely enough to their goals, or that you truly understand their prospects’ needs.
However, sales and marketing alignment is critical — a sentiment backed up by data from the Content Marketing Institute’s Enterprise Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2024.
“To separate top performers from the pack, we asked the enterprise marketers to assess the success of their content marketing. Twenty-nine percent rate the success of their organization’s content marketing approach as extremely or very successful,” the CMI reported. “The most common factors cited by successful enterprise marketers include setting goals that align with their organization’s objectives (73%) and collaboration with other teams (62%).”
Gillian Selby, Principal at Gunn + McQueen and a sales expert with 25 years of experience, agrees with this view. She argues marketing and sales alignment is more important than ever in today’s complex B2B sales landscape.
Is it time for a clean slate between marketing and sales at your B2B company? In this deep dive into sales and marketing alignment, we’ll cover:
A definition of true marketing and sales alignment
How marketing can best support sales
How sales can best support marketing
Challenges that make this relationship tricky to navigate
Advantages of achieving strong alignment
How to (finally) make sales and marketing alignment a reality
What is sales and marketing alignment?
Alignment simply means being on the same page and heading in the same direction. When you’ve reached a point where your content marketing team is strategically coordinating and collaborating with your colleagues in sales to attract, nurture, win and retain customers, you’ve got sales and marketing alignment.
In this kind of environment, no silos exist. Instead, open communication is the norm and everyone understands they’re working toward common goals to drive growth for your B2B company. And because your objectives, strategies and processes are aligned, this also creates a seamless experience for prospects and customers throughout the buyer's journey.
How marketing can best support sales
Marketing supports sales throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Generating leads, nurturing prospects, and providing them with the information and resources they need to make informed purchasing decisions are all part of the process.
However, all of this effort is wasted if your content strategy isn’t tied to your sales team’s goals. Think of content like the connective tissue between your B2B company and its audience. You need to make the right connections at the right points. Each piece of content you create should effectively serve its purpose within the sales funnel.
Effective alignment ensures that content resonates with the needs and pain points of your audience. It enables marketers to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, instead of producing content their sales team can’t fully leverage.
In B2B SaaS specifically, with its increased focus on customer retention, well-aligned content not only helps acquire new customers but also plays a vital role reducing churn and fostering advocacy.
How sales can best support marketing
Of course, this relationship is a two-way street. From a positioning perspective, sales representatives have valuable firsthand knowledge of market trends, competitor activities and industry developments to share with their colleagues in marketing. This helps inform strategic decision-making and shape strategies to better position your B2B company in the marketplace.
Sales can also provide marketing with a gold mine of feedback and insights from their interactions with prospects and customers. This helps marketing refine messaging, strategies and content. For example, sales reps often have deep knowledge of customer success stories that can be turned into written case studies and leveraged across multiple channels.
The bottom line? You’re better together. But it’s not always easy to create alignment. Let’s explore a few reasons why.
Challenges in reaching sales and marketing alignment
Marketing and sales alignment isn’t something you order up at the company cafeteria like a lunch special. It can take years to create.
Do any of these scenarios sound like your workplace?
Differences in goals and priorities: Content marketing teams often focus on building brand awareness, educating prospects and nurturing leads, while sales teams prioritize closing deals and driving revenue. Misalignment can occur when the goals and priorities of each team are not fully understood or communicated effectively.
Lack of communication and collaboration: Content marketing teams and sales teams may operate in silos, with limited communication and collaboration between them. This can lead to misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and inefficiencies in content creation and distribution — for example, as related to your blog content strategy.
Varied perspectives and expertise: You may have different perspectives, experiences, and areas of specialty. Content marketers may be more focused on creative storytelling and brand messaging, while sales teams may prioritize practicality and relevance to the sales process.
Disconnects in the sales process: Content marketing teams create content based on the buyer's journey and general market trends, while sales teams often have a more nuanced understanding of the specific needs and pain points of individual prospects.
Lack of data and insight sharing: Content marketing teams and their colleagues in sales often have access to different data sources and insights, making it challenging to align on the most effective content strategies. This gap can cause problems when it comes to planning based on real-time feedback and analytics.
Resistance to change: Both teams may be resistant to change, especially if existing processes and strategies have been successful in the past. Aligning on new content initiatives such as a LinkedIn content strategy may require buy-in from key stakeholders and a willingness to experiment and adapt to evolving market dynamics — which isn’t always present.
“I'll give you an example of how it goes awry,” says Gillian. “When I lived in New York working in sales, we would get holiday promotions to send out, but they only said ‘Merry Christmas’, so we didn't use them. Our colleagues in marketing would pull their hair out and go, ‘Those sales guys in New York are trouble and they don't listen.’ But we didn't sit down and ask, ‘Hey, could we come up with an alternate because this could offend someone?’”
Results of strong sales and marketing alignment
Even if you thought, “Yup, that sounds like our company,” as you read through every single challenge we just outlined, or if you’ve been in Gillian’s shoes, you can still turn things around and make a fresh start with your sales team. Here’s why it’s worth the effort to align your content marketing strategy framework with your sales team’s objectives.
Improved lead quality: Alignment ensures that content marketing programs like your SEO content strategy target the right audiences with the right messages, resulting in higher-quality leads. This equates to less time wasted on discovery calls or demos with tire-kickers.
Increased conversion rates: Alignment results in a more cohesive customer journey and smoother handoffs between marketing and sales. This reduces friction in the sales process and improves conversion rates.
Enhanced customer experience: Aligning marketing and sales allows for a consistent and cohesive customer experience across all touchpoints. From initial engagement with a piece of content to the sales conversation and post-purchase support, a unified approach ensures customers receive the information and assistance they need at every step.
Faster sales cycles: When marketing and sales teams are aligned, they can identify and address potential roadblocks or objections earlier in the sales process. This proactive approach helps streamline the sales cycle, reducing the time it takes for prospects to move from cold to close.
Higher revenue: Ultimately, by working together to attract, nurture and win customers, marketing and sales teams can drive more sales and generate higher revenue. Additionally, a unified approach to customer retention and upselling/cross-selling further contributes to revenue growth over time. Content plays a key role in retention by providing ongoing education, training and updates to existing customers, reinforcing the value of their investment and encouraging continued usage and loyalty.
Better data: When marketing and sales teams share data and insights, they gain a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and market trends. This alignment enables teams to make more informed decisions, optimize strategies and identify new opportunities for growth. Aligning content with the sales process also enables marketers to track and measure the effectiveness of their efforts, so they can identify areas for improvement to help boost overall sales performance.
Greater accountability and collaboration: When both teams share common goals, they are more likely to work together effectively, share resources and support each other in achieving success.
“There’s often no way that marketing can create something that works for everybody, but I think there's an 80/20 rule where 80% of what you create will show your brand and carry that same strong message,” Gillian says. “That final 20% might have to be tweaked, but the conversation should be had about how you can achieve that. That sort of communication would be incredibly valuable for both teams.”
How to create marketing and sales alignment around content
Your content marketing strategy framework should be informed by insights from your sales team. Whether you’re working on an SEO content strategy, blog content strategy, LinkedIn content strategy or something else entirely, their feedback is key to helping you drive results.
Start by aligning on common objectives for your content initiatives. Clearly define the target audience, messaging and desired outcomes for each piece of content to ensure alignment with sales goals.
Next, confirm that your buyer personas are up-to-date. By involving sales reps in the persona development process, you can be confident that any new content you create will be tailored to address the specific problems and desires of your audience.
From there, work with sales to map out the buyer's journey and identify content needs at each stage of the funnel.
“We know most customers do research before they call someone. They're astonishingly well-informed,” says Gillian. “So if they've already figured out, let's say on average, 70% of their decision, the content marketing pieces they need to make that final choice are so critical now.”
Beyond producing content like blog posts, ebooks and customer stories, you should also be developing sales enablement resources such as product guides and objection handling scripts to support reps in their conversations with prospects.
“Our business relationships are so complex now,” Gillian says. “If I’m selling a basketball, I might go to the gym teacher and say, ‘You need 100 of these.’ That was great 10 years ago. Now for that same piece, I might have the janitorial team coming in to see how they mark up the floor. I might have the school board coming in and asking if they can get a better price for larger quantities.”
Regular communication and feedback between marketing and sales teams can help ensure alignment around content initiatives. So, schedule joint meetings, brainstorming sessions and debriefs to share insights, discuss performance metrics and gather feedback on content effectiveness.
Also establish a reporting process to track the performance of content assets throughout the sales cycle. Monitor key metrics like content engagement, lead quality and conversion rates to identify trends and opportunities.
Improve your content strategy to better align with sales
Most B2B content marketers don’t have a ton of extra budget to work with these days. Here are 7 ways you can iterate on your existing content strategy to improve it and achieve greater alignment with your sales team.
1. Ask for their ideas
Recruit your colleagues in sales to share their insights and help build out your strategy. This will help you champion your cause (content) internally and show company leadership that quality content marketing is an indispensable revenue driver.
Teaming up with sales can enable you to create content that caters more intelligently to different stages of the buyer’s journey — an area where 61% of marketers feel like they’re missing the mark. Fresh eyes and new ideas from other employees will produce better results that benefit everyone.
2. Analyze your customer lifecycle
Whether you’re a B2B SaaS company monitoring customer churn, or another type of B2B organization looking at customer lifetime value, it’s essential to understand how you can improve upon nurturing your audience so your relationship doesn’t end after the first sale.
Customers need to feel valued through every interaction, from your marketing to conversations with your team. So, foster the relationship with positive experiences.
If someone has bought from you once but isn’t taking full advantage of your offerings, give them a gentle push in the right direction through emails tailored to support customer expansion. Your colleagues in sales can be invaluable resources in helping you obtain this information.
3. Manage your resources wisely
While we all love a new trend, now is not the time to sink time and effort into passing marketing fads that may have disappointing ROI. Instead, fast-track your marketing results with a clear content creation plan that prioritizes your shared goals.
Your strategy should include repurposing old but high-performing content to maximize each piece’s reach and impact while saving you time. It should also take into account topics prospects are bringing up during sales calls in the here and now. That’ll get you farther than chasing fads.
4. Fine tune your buyer personas
Sometimes when you’ve exhausted other avenues, you need to go back to the drawing board and ask who is buying from you, and why? Gather new information to beef up your existing personas by sending questionnaires and offering a small incentive, like a freebie or add-on, to gain insight from your audience.
Valuable information can also come from focus groups and one-on-one interviews with existing customers. Ask questions that explore pain points relevant to your industry to get the most out of these conversations. Ask your colleagues in sales about their experiences with customers, too, as they’re likely to have a different perspective to offer.
5. Nurture existing customers
Never be so focused on customer acquisition that you ignore retention. Listen to the conversations your customers are having and create the kind of content they’re telling you (directly or indirectly) that they want to see. Continue to teach, problem-solve and entertain in your marketing.
Remember that your B2B company’s content should help customers feel like they can lean on your products and services to make their lives easier, improve their businesses and further their missions.
6. Champion your customers through case studies
There’s a reason 97% of B2B companies say the case study is the best tactic to use to support purchases with social proof.
Social proof leverages the power of recommendations and reviews to show customers that you’re not just tooting your own horn. Demonstrating results in a case study is vital, especially when budgets are tight.
So, team up with sales to create case studies that highlight interesting and relatable challenges your customers have faced, and tell a compelling story of how you provided a great experience while helping them overcome their problems. (You can read a few of our customer stories to get an idea, as well as B2B case studies we’ve written for clients).
7. Prioritize quality over quantity
Do you feel like you’re being pulled in multiple directions — parcelling precious resources and trying to please existing customers, while also feeding the top of the marketing funnel? The key to maintaining your sanity is to focus on quality over quantity with your content, and there are several ways to do this.
For example, conducting subject matter expert interviews can help you create industry-specific content that positions your organization as a trustworthy thought leader. If your B2B company is releasing a new scheduling software, don’t just talk about the product — tell an original story with the help of a time management expert. Involve sales in the process to learn which pain points are most important to address in your content.
Stick with us! This post is part of a series on developing a 10-step content creation workflow for exceptional results. Read the next post.
Alignment isn’t a myth — make it a reality
Achieving sales and marketing alignment on content strategy is crucial for growth. When you’re playing from the same sheet music, you can improve lead quality, conversion rates and customer experience, accelerate sales cycles and ultimately drive higher revenue. Alignment also enables better data sharing, greater accountability and collaboration.
It will take effort to reach alignment, but by consistently involving sales in content strategy development and fostering open communication, you can make it a reality — and reap the rewards of a unified approach to content marketing.
Instead of receiving blank stares or skepticism in meetings, imagine developing a newfound appreciation for each other's roles and contributions. Meeting regularly to review content ideas, share feedback and work together on future initiatives. Being confident you can create content that not only resonates with your audience, but also supports your sales team's objectives. You have the building blocks to make it happen. We can’t wait to see what you achieve.
Need a hand producing high-quality, original long-form written content for your B2B company? Explore our services.
