An efficient GTM organisation depends on Sales and Marketing alignment. They are deeply complimentary functions both critical to the overall goal of efficient revenue growth. This is true now more than ever, with 80% of B2B Sales interactions taking place via digital channels.

Sadly, this is rarely the case in SaaS go-to-market organisations. The two functions often seem almost antagonistic, competing when it comes to attribution and with vastly different perspectives on how to achieve the same goal: efficient revenue growth.

This is especially problematic when you consider what we have learnt about how organisations make purchasing decisions. You might be familiar with Gartner's buyer journey research. What it demonstrates is that buyer journeys are deeply disconnected from sales processes. The latter are linear, a funnel-like progression from engagement to customer.

A buyer journey, particularly at an organisational level, is "looping". It includes a range of interactions with the vendor but also with colleagues, partners, friends and different digital channels. It also features lots of stakeholders going through this process at different paces.

This should be the final nail in the coffin of the Marketing to Sales "handover" upon generation of an MQL. If we want to view it as a handover, we are going to be playing hot potato all throughout the sales process. Instead, the two must operate as one to create a consistent buyer experience that bridges digital research and actual vendor engagements.

Good Revenue leaders are conscious of this and work hard to reduce friction, but in many more established organisations there is an entrenched cultural misalignment that can be difficult to break down.

Bridging this gap requires more than good leadership, it requires a concerted effort across the entire go-to-market organisation. Here, we thought it would be helpful to look at a few ways Content Marketers can work more effectively with Sales to improve the effectiveness of their content strategy, and the revenue function as a whole.

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Why is it so important to bridge the gap between Sales and Marketing?

If your focus is on driving MOFU and BOFU impact, Sales is arguably your most critical distribution channel for content.

They are your route into high-intent prospects that your content can get to work influencing, with the ability to be super targeted in how you put the right piece in front of them at the right time based on the insight your reps insight into that buyer.

Likewise, just 17% of the buyer journey is spent with sales reps.

Great content lets reps influence buyers even when they’re not in the room. Gartner published a great study recently making the point that “Information Connectors” - reps that serve as curators of brokers of information, rather than direct experts - outperform “Information Authorities” in B2B sales.

(We wrote a separate blog on this topic if you’re curious!).

In the context of G2’s report that 94% (yes, 94%!!!) of buyers don’t trust sales reps, this makes sense. Great reps don’t speak from personal authority that is tainted by this mistrust, they listen, and they curate information that leads the buyer to the right conclusion. They are dependant, then, on access to great content that can support them in this role.

With that in mind, lets get into some practical ways you can work more effectively with Sales. Of course, it’s a two-way street, but these tips will help you get the buy-in you need at different levels of the organisation to build a more collaborative culture and a more efficient, effective GTM organisation.

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1. Take a Structured Approach to your Content Roadmap

Content Marketing is a lot like Product Management in that it’s easy to be pulled in a thousand different directions. Everyone has an opinion on what the content strategy should look like, what you should do more or less of, and everyone has a content requirement.

It’s a tough situation because, as a Content team, you absolutely need this feedback. Coming up with new ideas for great content is hard. Sales, Customer Success and your executives are the folks on the front lines talking to the market, and they should absolutely guide the content strategy. The trick is to let them guide it, without letting them set it.

That’s where it becomes important to act like a product manager. Implement processes to capture this feedback, but be careful not to become completely reactive. They may have their fingers on the pulse, but it’s your job to pull all that insight together into a cohesive strategy that drives business value.

Shiv Narayam makes this point very well in his book, Post Acquisition Marketing. OK content leaders are reactive. They treat requests and suggestions as their team’s workload and do their best to juggle the requirements, at the expense of a strategy that drives enterprise value. That’s how people lose their jobs 12 months later. Great content leaders are proactive. They define a strategy that drives growth and assess suggestions against it.

That’s where implementing some kind of framework against which content ideas are assessed becomes important. We recently did this internally, and even though we’re only small (it’s more about prioritising than managing a lot of stakeholders interests) it gives us the ability to filter through ideas objectively, without making the originator of that idea or request feel ignored. Everything is taken seriously, and plotted against our framework to decide its place on our roadmap.

For you, it might be slightly different. It’s going to depend a lot on the maturity of your business, your content strategy, and your go-to-market function as a whole. It should also depend on a data-driven analysis of where your content strategy is currently performing well, and where it isn’t, so that you can identify gaps and opportunities in a strategic way.

Some things you might want to factor into your overall evaluation of whether that content is worth producing:

• Have we already covered this topic in depth?
• Does it allow us to bring a unique opinion to bear on a topic?
• Are there high leverage keywords we can naturally optimize for with this piece?
• Is this relevant in the current market? Is it the right time to write about this?
• What is the ROI : Effort ratio we’d expect? Is it worth it?
• Can an existing piece of content be adapted or repackaged to achieve the same goal?
• Is there derivative content we can produce off the back of this piece?
• Does it fit into the formats we’re set up to produce efficiently?
• What buyer journey stage does it support and does that align with the content gaps we’re seeing in our performance data?
• Most importantly, does it fit with our broader strategic content objectives?

For you, some of all of these might be relevant. There’s no singular approach. The key is to think like a product manager, implement an objective framework, and then communicate that to your stakeholders.

2. Establish the Revenue Impact of your Content.

Content attribution is famously tricky. I’ve heard a lot of folks - even content leaders - diminish it.

"We’re small, investing time in attribution is a waste of time."

"We should focus on delivering value."

The problem is, you have no idea what delivers value.

I can understand that time spent on attribution might seem self-promotional or self-congratulatory, but that’s a mindset we need to challenge. Would you say that to a Sales leader looking to understand their function’s efficiency? What about a product leader? Never. You’d think them negligent if they weren’t focused on establishing data-driven performance measurement.

It’s time we started taking content just as seriously.

Historically, for all but the most mature content functions that benefit from a sizeable Marketing or Content Ops team, content performance has come back to two metrics: clicks and downloads.

This is fine in a world where content is strictly a top of funnel marketing tactic, but those days are gone. 80% of B2B sales interactions are digital. Great content is what separates great go-to-market functions from OK ones, because it’s how you influence your buyers even when your reps aren’t in the room.

Content is a revenue generating function. Like any other revenue function, we need the tools to measure it’s impact or we are blind when it comes to optimising its effectiveness.

Once we understand exactly how content is performing against the metrics that your sales team and your board really care about - how it’s helping them to progress and close deals - then we can start to strategically identify and plug content gaps.

Better performance measurement is critical to this. It’s the difference between doing so based on high level assumptions of the role each format plays (E-Guide = Consideration, Case Study = Conversion, and so on) versus an actual real-world understanding of how content performs that can help us validate and refine these hypotheses in the context of extremely complex, non-linear B2B buyer journeys.

Great content is what separates great go-to-market functions from OK ones, because it’s how you influence your buyers even when your reps aren’t in the room.

I know I know, this probably sounds great in principle, but most content marketers don’t have the benefit of a 10 person marketing ops team behind them to conduct this kind of analysis.

It is something you absolutely have to solve though, and that’s where I hope you’ll permit me one brief plug. You don’t need that marketing ops team in 2024, Demand-Genius puts this kind of data at your fingertips.

3. Evangelise that Impact!

Establishing the ability to accurately measure content performance is the first step. It gives you the data and tools to build an effective, revenue-generating content strategy.

The next step is to evangelise that impact internally. Don’t look at this as self-promotional, it is critical to establishing a proper working relationship with other business functions, sales first and foremost.

Sales and marketing alignment is, in many organisation, a cultural issue. Most SaaS businesses are sales-led organisations in which high-performing reps are the “rain-makers”, with other GTM functions seen as supporting their mission.

This may have been true once, but it isn’t true today. Efficient go-to-market teams recognise the complexity of enterprise purchasing decisions and that a lot of factors converge to produce a closed won deal.

Breaking down this perception relies on demonstrating the direct connection between content and revenue. It has to be clear in the data if it is going to influence the way leaders and boards set culture and allocate resources.

Establish Reporting Cadence with Senior Leadership

If sales and marketing misalignment is a cultural issue, then you need leadership buy-in to solve it. To get this, you need to talk their language. They view sales as the “rain-makers” because there’s a direct, traceable line from what they do to what your board cares about. Revenue.

Once you’ve established that line for your own work, you need to make them aware of it. Not at quarterly reviews or in your annual budget request, on a regular basis. Just as they would expect of their other revenue generators.

Compose a weekly, or at least bi-weekly, update of the contribution content is making to revenue and the trends you’re seeing here.

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What should you include in your update? Our internal reporting includes: 
Traffic
Pipeline Generated
Revenue Impacted
Revenue KPI Influence (How does content influence ACV, close rates and time-to-close. This is a great way of generating buy-in with both executives and sales reps).
Best performing pieces, segmented by pipeline stage.
Engagement trends that can help customer conversations (e.g. this topic is hot).

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Not only will this start to correct the imbalance, it will put you in a much better position when it comes to budget season. In its current state, content always runs the risk of being considered a “nice-to-have”. Establish this line of reporting, and it won’t be.

Show how Content helps to Close Deals.

The other critical function with which you need to establish your impact is Sales. This takes a different tone, it’s not about shouting from the rooftops about how great you are, but rather the impact your work can have on their goals.

Most reps understand the need to establish credibility, and share content that helps their buyers. But they lack the tools, curation skills and data with which to do this job well.

Help them.

Take a look at the below chart as an example.

Imagine going to your reps with this data. “If you can get this account to engage with 5 pieces of content after a discovery call, your deal will close 17 days faster”.

“Not only that, it will close at $28k higher ACV”.

“If those engagements are from 5 separate stakeholders across the organisation, your close rate will also jump by 14%”.

Of course, this is dummy data and exaggerated slightly for dramatic effect, but you see the idea.

You’re starting to talk their language!

Even better, arm reps with insight into what is working at each stage of the funnel. Typically reps share content, but they do so thoughtlessly. It’s often based on a topic that came up on the call, not a strategic understanding of how they need to influence that buyer to increase close rates or ACV.

Just published a whitepaper that is performing great with prospects in demo stage? Make sure your reps understand this, so they can not just share it, but really promote it during the demo.

That’s the key to a great Information Connector - they don’t sell the idea. They sell the content that sells the idea.

You need to show them what to sell, why, and to who. Then let your content go to work.

4. Fix your Buyer Experience

One of the oldest forms of Sales and Marketing friction in SaaS centres on how we share content.

I saw it myself when working in enterprise sales.

Almost weekly I was chided for not sharing content links, but downloading the PDF and sharing that directly. It messed up our attribution. But I felt weird directing prospects to gated content. In my view, our prospects’ buyer experience comes before our own attribution needs.

Admittedly, that’s short sighted. As long as I did that, we’d never have the insight we needed to develop a content strategy that can truly support me. As a rep, though, you are short sighted. You are under intense pressure to close deals now, and make decisions that help you do that.

We can fight that mindset, or, we can solve the underlying issue.

Establish the ability to identify users onsite, and adapt your content experience (gating, messaging, etc.) to suit and the problem disappears. Reps can share content and push prospects to the website confident that they will receive an outstanding buyer experience without unnecessary friction.

We published a simple guide on how a one person team can achieve this quite easily - we call it reader-led gating.

It’s quite simple. Most gating decisions are content-led today. What type of content is this, how hard did we work to produce it, and therefore do we want leads from it? What’s more important is the potential buyer accessing it and where they are in their journey.

Reader-led gating might sound complex, but it is not difficult to achieve. Many CRMs offer capabilities, Hubspot for example, that with a bit of time can be used to provide a basic level of personalisation and avoid repetitive lead forms. Or, if you don’t have the resources to manage this, a content experience platform like Demand-Genius makes it super simple to implement this code-free.

As you mature, you can also implement a progressive profiling strategy to support the broader revenue function better, capturing key data at different stages in your sales process that helps reps close deals, and leaders forecast deals. Again, in 2024 you don’t need a huge team to do this.

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