tw-zhuliye: Forrester Claims Marketing Content Not Relevant for Sales Teams, Customers

“If ‘mobile-first’ is the new rallying cry for digital design, then ‘sales-first’ should be the mantra by which marketing delivers and distributes content.” – Laura Ramos, Forrester Analyst

Research released by Forrester this month found some shocking information about sales’ use of marketing content. And there’s really no easy way to put it: sales isn’t really using the content that B2B marketers create. In fact, 90% of content goes unused because it’s irrelevant, out-of-date, difficult to customize, or hard to find (click here to tweet this stat!). Chris McLaren, VP of Marketing at Aimia, explained that his sales team has challenges even finding the right pieces of content and knowing which ones are applicable to their prospects.

In addition, a lot of the content created for sales teams are top- to mid-funnel resources. This content often focuses on features and functions but most buyers in today’s day and age have already discovered this information on their own in earlier stages of their buying journey. As a result, 62% of executives and technical buyers find the content they’re receiving useless (click to tweet this stat!). Yep, useless.

But content is a crucial tool to help move prospect conversations along. Without relevant, easy-to-find, and easy-to-use content, large enterprises are wasting millions of dollars producing content that neither sales nor customers find relevant (click here to tweet this stat!).

Getting to the Root of the Problem

Fundamentally, the problem lies in the lack of understanding from marketers in how the sales team operates. And understandably so … they’re not walking in sales’ shoes day in and day out. But while sales focuses on the individual, marketing markets to segments; and while sales is more inbound, marketing is more outbound.

And this needs to change.

At least it does if we want to create more effective content to help our sales team have relevant conversations and therefore close more business.

Laura Ramos, author of Make Sales Conversations an Integral Part of Your Content Marketing Plans, says B2B marketers need to involve sales in their content development and delivery in three ways:

Invest in content delivery systems and training to turn sales into content experts
Make it straightforward for sales to get the content they need, when they need it
Track what sales uses (and doesn’t)

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