How Marketing Can Help Sales with Effective B2B Content Creation

Sales teams often find themselves in a difficult position. They need adequate collateral to support their sales efforts, but the materials they require are hard to find, miss the mark, or simply don’t exist. 

As a result, salespeople often end up taking on the responsibility for content creation themselves - alleviating a short-term need but creating a whole bunch of new problems in the process:

• According to Seismic, sales reps spend an average of 30 hours per month searching for and creating their own content - time that could be better spent on face-to-face and closing deals.
• When sales teams create their own collateral, there's a high risk of inconsistent messaging and sales promises spreading across different channels and touchpoints.
• Sales teams might have creative aspirations, but they’re not creatives. Left to their own devices, they risk building a whole patchwork of off-brand content that can undermine your image in the market.

Something rotten in the state of sales and marketing?

If your sales teams often find themselves in a position where they need to physically create their own collateral, something’s gone badly wrong. There may be some fundamental lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams that’s creating misunderstandings and, even, resentment.

Without having a proper collaborative process in place for content creation - the two teams may have reached an impasse. Over time, sales may have become dismissive of marketing's ability to support them.  At the same time, marketing may have begun to feel that sales are arrogantly ignoring their efforts or simply not deploying their content effectively to open the right doors.

The result can be a sales team that feels under-equipped and a marketing team that feels undervalued and underexploited. 

Sound familiar?

If this sounds like your company, you are not alone.

This misalignment is common in companies around the world and is a major reason for weak and inconsistent content offerings, increased sales friction, and revenue loss. 

In fact, according to a Harvard Business Review article, these tensions are estimated to cost businesses more than $1 trillion each year. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this. 

Sales and marketing are, in reality, the perfect match.  Marketing exists to help sales reach their full potential.  They just need the right conditions to flourish together.

With this in mind, here are 7 hot tips for bringing your teams together and creating branded content that reflects your business's sales goals and the individual needs of the ‘troops on the ground.’

1. Align your sales and marketing teams!

If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to lay the groundwork for alignment. Bring your teams together and agree on the buyer personas and ideal customer profiles you’re targeting. Map out the customer journeys and identify any content gaps that sales feel need to be filled. Review the existing content to see what isn’t working, and collaborate on what formats will work best—whether that’s video, social posts, or white papers. Prioritise and plan together. You can refer to our Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment to ensure you have a solid process in place.

2. Establish clear communication channels

It’s not enough to align your team once—ongoing communication between sales and marketing is essential. Regular meetings or workshops help keep both teams on the same page, allowing sales to voice their needs while marketing brings more data driven insight to the table, suggesting the most effective approches. Collaboration on projects ensures that the collateral you produce is directly relevant to the challenges sales teams face in the field.

3. Co-create content

Using the insight of your sales team, you can co-create relevant blog titles for each stage of the buying cycle that marketing can then ghostwrite. But the co-creation possibilities don’t stop there. Sales teams often have great on-screen presentation skills. Use them to create video snippets for socials and more formal pieces to accompany blogs and other website content. Marketing can script and orchestrate to help your sales team create their own personal brands within your organisation and open doors more easily in the future.

Think of the way Andy Crestadina and Neil Patel bring credibility and personality to the content offerings of their brands.  Could your marketing team do the same for the sales stars in your business?  Could these resources be deployed to accelerate their selling process?

4. Create a centralised content repository

Salespeople often waste valuable time hunting for content that may already exist. A centralised content management system (CMS) like HubSpot solves this by housing all relevant collateral in one easily accessible location. This system should allow sales teams to quickly find, personalise, and share content without needing to create it from scratch. By simplifying access, you improve efficiency and ensure consistency.  Here’s a great blog on why sales asset management is so important.   

5. Develop customisable templates for quick personalisation

Sales teams often spend time personalising existing content, but in doing so, they make mistakes or compromise branding. Providing sales with customisable content templates allows them to make quick adjustments for individual prospects while maintaining brand consistency. Templates might include email scripts, presentation decks, and case studies, all of which sales can tweak as needed. This ensures flexibility for the sales team while keeping the core messaging and branding intact.

6. Measure and optimise

To create truly impactful B2B content, it’s essential to track its performance and continuously optimise. Sales and marketing should work together to measure key metrics like content engagement, lead-to-customer conversion rates, and how different pieces of content contribute to deal closures.

Using tools like Hubspot and Salesforce, teams can track which content is driving the most success and which pieces need revision or retirement. This data-driven approach helps both sales and marketing stay aligned and ensures that content is constantly evolving to meet business goals.

7. Formalise your sales enablement process

What we’ve been talking about here is really a sales enablement process—just some of the tactics and approaches that you can use to ensure sales and marketing know exactly how to collaborate on content, share their insights, and measure success. Formalising this process will help you manage content creation faster and more professionally, train new team members, and keep everyone accountable for revenue generation over time.

To find out more and plan a more frictionless sales strategy, read our guide to establishing a sales enablement process in your business.