Can content marketing change the relationship between sales and marketing?
- Summary:
- Should Sales own Marketing? Should Marketing be subsumed into Sales? Recent blog posts have debated the issue. Now, Barb Mosher Zinck plays provocateur, raising the question that content marketing provokes. She's in search of your feedback, so chime in below.
Content marketing for the sales funnel
A recent SiriusDecisions Summit noted that 79% of buyers say content is “very influential.” It also noted that B2B buyers consume up to 17 pieces or more of content during the buying cycle and that sellers (sales) can use up to 10 pieces of content just to close a deal.
That’s a lot of content right? And it’s for sales. But content marketing lives in the Marketing department and more often than not these two departments aren’t well aligned.
Heather Cole and Christine Polewarczyk did a session at the Summit called “Sales Content: What Winners Do Differently,” (quick note: thanks to HighSpot for the summary of the session). They provided some suggestions on how Marketing could help Sales be more effective such as “stop throwing content over the wall”. They also suggested providing inbound content that empowers high performing sales reps and external content that “activates the buyer to move forward.”
In a way, you’d think these were no brainers, but how often do Sales and Marketing sit together at the table to talk about content needs? Do they work on buyer personas together? Or map out customer journeys?
These activities tend to be in the hands of Marketing. They might have conversations with Sales, but they are peripheral. Marketing has a tendency to create the content they believe a customer needs and uses at different stages of the journey, and then give the content to Sales to use. Also, Sales will ask for the content they want - giving few details on why or how they use it or how the content performs.
There needs to be a tighter relationship here. There needs to be more visibility of both departments into what content to create and how the other department uses it.
What if Marketing needs to fall under Sales?
This was a conversation I had with a client, who believes that, at some point in the future, marketing may exist under the Sales umbrella, because everything they do is in the effort to convert prospects to sales and customers to repeat customers.
You might think that’s crazy because there’s more to marketing that creating sales-based content. For example, Inbound marketing is about brand awareness more than it is about actual conversions. However, marketing does pass on leads from inbound marketing to sales right? Same thing for demand generation.
And what about account-based marketing (ABM)? The “new” marketing approach that focuses in on specific customers or prospects, and is a sales function more so than a marketing one? With ABM, Sales and Marketing have to be closely aligned, or it won’t work.
If Marketing did fall under Sales, the content and campaigns would be tightly aligned with Sales processes and projections. Salespeople would have a greater say in what content they need, and it would be easier to track performance and tweak things on the fly.
Marketing could more easily influence the sales process, leveraging their knowledge of buyer personas and the buyer journey.
Maybe Marketing doesn’t fit under Sales because Sales is too “by the numbers.” It’s about the bottom line, and content is simply a means to that end. To put the Marketing department under this umbrella could reduce it to a mere Sales tool, one in an arsenal that Sales can leverage.
Wrapped up in all this: content marketing
The creation of content in and of itself means very little. Creating specific types of content that generate awareness, interest, the desire to learn more and ultimately to buy is what makes content marketing so important.
That’s a key point from the Sirius Summit session mentioned above. The speakers suggest that Marketing needs to analyze closely how their organizations are using content types overall and at specific content at each step in the buyer’s journey. It’s also suggested to monitor high performing sales reps to see how they are using content in their processes to determine what content is resonating and leading to conversion.
A post on IDG asks the question, how can content marketing be successful for a company if everyone is doing it? The answer, it points out, lies in the data - using the data to create better content and experiences:
Content marketing isn’t going to stop working just because of the rising tide of posted content. But ‘just posting’ is not likely to be a self-sustaining approach. Marketers will have to adapt to historic levels of competition for attention. The challenge in content-saturated markets is to find holes that competitors are not serving (one of Mark Schaefer’s more credible points).
And to do that, marketers will need good data. Are there sub-segments of the audience who aren’t being addressed? Are there experiences the others don’t offer, such as webinars, videos, podcasts or industry insights?
Content marketing needs to produce as much content for the acquisition phase as it does for the retention of customers, some of which is the same content. How much of the data needed to create more compelling and contextual experiences comes from Sales? Could Sales provide the insights that help find the holes not currently served? This is not about content types; it’s ultimately about information - useful information - information that ultimately helps make a decision.
Final thoughts – sales or marketing: who runs the show?
We talk today about how Marketing needs to be as analytical as it is creative. But that should also mean that Sales needs to be as creative as it is analytical. And if that’s true, then why couldn’t Sales run Marketing? Or at least merge the two groups under one authority (maybe that’s actually the CMO).
It’s an interesting concept that is worth exploring in mid-sized B2B organizations (in fact, some already operate this way to some degree), but even enterprise companies could make it work. And so I ask you, could Sales run Marketing? Should they? Or could Marketing run Sales?
To be clear, no one in either of these quoted posts suggested that Sales should take over Marketing (or content marketing). What they did, though, is raise questions I have about the relationship between the two.
Curious to hear your perspective in the comments.