4 Sales Content Pitfalls That Marketers Can (and Should) Avoid

Marketers and salespeople have traditionally spoken different languages. Salespeople use the language they learn in the sales arena, persuading prospects and closing deals. Marketers stand outside of that space, often working in a bubble they often struggle to get out of.

As a result, marketers spend time and effort crafting and perfecting the materials they think sales needs, only to have them go unused. Sales team members don’t use as much as 80% of the content that marketing generates even though most of it is created for sales and channel enablement.

Compounding the problem is that many marketers don’t even bother to learn if and how their materials performed. We often create the content, satisfy the request, and just move on.

It’s critical for sales and marketing to form a productive partnership for an organization to succeed. At Allego, our CRO and our CMO collaborate continuously—to align with business goals and proactively home in on the most effective messaging and content that the team can create—and we’ve learned a lot through this process.

Here are the four biggest problems that marketers face when creating sales enablement content—and how to avoid them.

Pitfall #1: Sales Materials Don’t Include Buyers’ and Sellers’ Voices

When marketers check on the value of their sales enablement content, many find that their content lacks a key element for success: language from the sales battle. Without that input, marketing is simply speculating on what sales needs.

Leveraging real-world feedback from buyers and sellers ensures that marketing understands the messaging, concepts, and language it needs to create sales content that resonates with the sales team and the customer.

To overcome this challenge, marketing teams can learn from recordings of real-world selling situations. Listening to sales conversations—or watching video recordings—expands a marketer’s understanding of selling situations and provides the key insights needed to create sales enablement content materials that deliver results.????

At Allego, the marketing team taps into call coaching recordings, training videos, role-playing sessions, and sales meeting videos to see how messaging resonates with actual prospects and to incorporate those learnings into new content.

Pitfall #2: Sales Resists New Materials?

Markets change fast. Marketing works to keep pace by creating new materials that reflect up-to-the-minute messaging and strategy. But after those materials are created and distributed to the sales team, many salespeople continue to use older content pieces they are familiar with.

Endorsements provide a way to get even the most jaded salesperson on board with your sales enablement content. Instead of marketing saying, “This is a great piece of content,” have the top sellers share their thoughts on why this content works and how it helped them move the sale forward.

There’s recent research that shows that sellers are 111% more likely to use a new piece of content when it’s introduced by a high-performing peer. You can see the complete study here .

Sales enablement platforms like Allego’s provide a great way to capture and share such endorsements. The salesperson records a talk track of a winning sale that discusses how the marketing materials were incorporated into the sales conversation.

Once shared with the team, marketers can monitor who is watching and what their feedback is, giving them solid data to use for their piece and for the next time sales makes a request of marketing.

Pitfall #3: Content Doesn’t Move Deals Forward

Even after incorporating buyers’ and sellers’ voices and getting buy-in, some sales materials still don’t help move the sale forward. In this case, the problem may be that the salesperson doesn’t understand the “creator’s intent.”??

The “creator’s intent” is simply the goal of the asset. Marketing develops specific pieces to communicate a certain point or overcome a particular objection: a video, thought leadership piece, or best practice example.

But when a salesperson gets that content, the context of why that piece was created or when to use it has been lost. Without that framing, the piece loses its effectiveness.

Here again, a sales enablement platform can play a key role in bridging the gap between what marketing intends and how sales is using it. Marketers can create short intent videos that describe the purpose and ideal situation for each asset, as well as drafting talk tracks and other knowledge to ensure that each new piece is deployed properly.

Wrapping each piece of content in context will give sellers the insight that guides them to use the content more effectively, and move deals forward.

Pitfall #4: Sales and Marketing Stay Siloed

Solving the challenges mentioned above means you are well on your way to breaking down the silos between sales and marketing . That is a good start. But as both sales and marketing get busy with new demands, they sometimes lose focus on what has made them successful.

Marketers must find fast, easy ways to create ongoing conversations with sales if they are to permanently break out of their bubble and engage with sales on a level playing field.

Here at Allego, we’ve learned that most salespeople like video and appreciate quick hits of content they can use to improve their sales conversations. These videos also work for marketing because we can see who has viewed the content and the levels of feedback and engagement that content generated.

Over time, this information helps marketers see what’s working in the field—and to redo, readjust, and revise that content as selling situations change.

Collaborating with sales, being transparent about working together, and iterating to incorporate new information will put you well on the way to creating sales enablement content that works.

After all, sales is dynamic, shouldn’t marketing match that dynamism??

Learn More

Find out how the right solution can help you overcome obstacles and turn your marketing into an engine that can turbo-charge your sales growth for years to come. Download your copy of The Marketer’s Guide to Sales Enablement .