One of the first challenges a marketing team has to overcome is being seen as the “make-it-pretty” department. Sales pushes the content aside, budgets get cut every planning cycle, and deals stall for reasons no one can explain. The strange part is that this has nothing to do with how good the content is.
I have spent more than 20 years working in marketing and business operations, and I have used this approach to help even global companies move from a sales team that ignored every piece of marketing content to one that requested it weekly. Here is why the gap exists, what sales actually wants, and the small moves that close it.
Why Sales Ignores Marketing Content
If you lead sales, you have probably watched your team push marketing’s content aside. If you lead marketing, you have watched it happen and felt the frustration. There is a reason this keeps happening, and it is not laziness on either side.
Sales sees marketing as the department of PowerPoints, trade show booths, and brand polish. Marketing thinks the job is leads, creative, and brand. The tension shows up in the handoff, because the leads coming over the fence are not the leads that sales wants.
Part of the problem is that marketing does not know what motivates sales. That is the root of it.
What Sales Actually Wants From a Lead
Sales wants a prospect they can act on right away, with a high probability of closing. That is the whole story.
Sales is not interested in who visited the website or who filled out a form, and they are not interested in who read a white paper or watched a video. To a salesperson, those are vanity metrics.
Sales wants to know one thing: is this a prospect they have a high probability of selling to? When marketing hands over a lead based on a download, sales sees a tire kicker. When marketing hands over a lead based on a buying signal, sales sees a deal.
Marketing measures attention while Sales measures intent. Until those two line up, sales will keep ignoring the lead list.
Has your sales team ever told marketing that the leads are not good? That’s the case almost everywhere.
Marketing Is Already Part of the Sales Process
Sales tends to think educating the customer is something sales does. That misunderstanding breaks the whole system. The customer is self-educating through marketing content long before sales sends an email.
In the old model, marketing did an early handoff. Marketing built awareness, threw a lead over the wall, and walked away. That model is dead.
Marketing now works side by side with sales through the entire buying process, because no one knows what the customer is researching at any given moment. The customer is reading, watching, listening, and comparing, and all of that happens between marketing touches, not between sales calls.
Marketing’s job is to keep the customer warm, build a preference for your brand, and stay in the path of the buyer at every stage. By the time sales talks to that buyer, marketing has already been in the room for weeks.
Stop Measuring Marketing With a Sales Ruler
One of the most critical changes marketing leadership has to make is to stop measuring marketing with a sales ruler. Sales lives on monthly, quarterly, and half-year goals. Marketing does not work that way.
Good marketing is persistent and cumulative. It takes time, and it compounds. A marketing effort that runs in Q1 may not move the needle for sales until Q3 or Q4.
Marketing is not coin operated. You do not put in a dollar and pull out two. It is a solid investment in the future of the business, closer to an investment than an outcome purchase.
Marketing also sells 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which your ads and your sales team cannot do. Paid marketing still has its place, and evergreen content matters even more, because evergreen content keeps working long after the campaign budget is spent and the ads stop.
The report period does not match the marketing period. When a sales leader grades marketing on a quarterly close rate, the grade is already rigged, because the work that closed this quarter’s deals was paid for two or three quarters ago.
The CASH Framework: Where Alignment Breaks
I wrote a book called CASH after years of working in between sales and marketing teams and learning what made them work, and what made them fail. CASH stands for communication, alignment, systems, and honesty. Those are the four places where alignment tends to break.
Communication
If sales and marketing are not communicating, they will never understand the value of each other’s roles. And if they do not understand those roles, there is nothing to align around.
Alignment
Alignment requires both teams to understand each other’s role and agree on a common goal. Without that, you have two teams running in different directions and calling it teamwork.
Systems
Communication and alignment have to be recorded in your systems. If the activity is not in a system, it cannot be measured. And if it cannot be measured, no one can prove it is working.
Honesty
Honesty is the one most teams skip. It means working for the betterment of the business and not for individual numbers.
When people game the numbers at the granular level or the report level, leadership makes bad decisions on bad data. Bad decisions hurt the business, bad business hurts revenue, and revenue hurts jobs. It starts with one person padding a report, and it can end with the company in trouble.
Which part of CASH have you seen teams break the most?
Marketing Wins When the Customer Responds
One of the best ways for marketing to earn the respect of sales is to be mentioned by the customer. A salesperson can ignore a dashboard for years, then change their mind on a single discovery call.
All it takes is the buyer saying, “I’ve been reading your stuff for months.” That sentence is worth more than a quarter of marketing reports.
To make that work, sales needs to ask a few simple questions on every discovery call:
- How did you learn about us?
- What have you researched?
- Where did your research start?
- What are your thoughts about our company or our product?
Those questions tell sales exactly which marketing touches landed, and they show that the deal did not start with sales. If the customer says the research began before they talked to sales, your marketing is working.
Include Sales in Content Creation
If you are a marketing leader and sales is ignoring your content, the first move is to include sales in the content creation process. When sales sees what they know reflected in the content, they gain respect for the work. When they see their frontline experience in it, they start to trust that the content serves their purpose.
The framing matters. Sales speaks to customers every day, so sales is the authority on what happens when you try to close a deal.
Sales is the subject matter expert, the closest to the customer, and the one who needs customers educated in a specific way. When marketing leads with that respect, sales does not feel like a content factory, they feel like a partner.
So do not ask sales to write content. Ask sales what objections they hear every week, and what customers say right before they say yes or no. Then go build content that answers those exact moments.
Sales leaders, give marketing the unfiltered version of what your team hears all day. The objections you cannot beat with a slide deck are the same objections marketing needs to answer with content.
And if you are in marketing, ask yourself when you last sat in on a sales call. Be honest. For too many marketers, the honest answer is rarely.
The Content Sales Will Actually Use
Sales will reach out for content when it helps them close, and not for any other reason. That content has three traits.
- It answers objections. Sales wants content that handles the objection before they have to. A buyer asks a question, sales sends a link, the question is answered, and the deal moves forward.
- It educates on unique value. Sales wants content that explains the specific value of your product or service, not generic category education. It has to speak to the thing that makes your company different.
- It is easy to send. If the content is buried in a content management system or sits behind a new login, sales will not use it. It has to be a link or an embed that lives in the email and the systems sales already uses.
If sales cannot find it and send it in under 30 seconds, it will sit there unused. The content has to come to them.
The Small Moves That Close the Gap
The moves that close the gap between sales and marketing are small, and almost no one does them.
- Marketing has to stop reporting reach and start reporting responses.
- Sales has to stop grading marketing by the calendar and start grading it by the customer response.
- Both teams have to sit in the same room every week and look at the same customer story.
When that happens, the make it pretty department goes away.
Bring Your Teams Together
CASH is built on what I saw working between these two teams for years. If you want to see where your organization stands, there is a free assessment at taketheCASHtest.com that gives you an alignment score to share with your team, along with actions and tips to improve it.
For teams that want to fix the divide at the leadership level, I run a workshop based on the lessons and frameworks in the book, so your sales and marketing teams can operate like one revenue team instead of two silos. Learn more here.
