For B2B organizations, generating revenue relies heavily on the alignment of sales and marketing. In a perfect world, the marketing team sets the sales team up for success with content, and the sales team gives marketing the insight they need to remain relevant to buyers.

So it only makes sense that sales would leverage all the awesome, relevant, and engaging content that their marketing team creates, right? Well, 60-70 percent of B2B content goes unused, so perhaps it’s time to look at some tactical ways to ensure your sales team is making the most of your content.

Whether you’re using content to educate a lead or to re-engage an ice-cold prospect, here’s how marketers can help sales put their content to work.

1. Regularly update your sales team about new content

This might seem obvious, but I’ve talked to so many marketers who admit that their sales team has no idea what content assets are available to them. Part of this is an accountability issue—it’s up to marketing to put in the effort to keep sales informed about what treasures are hiding in the content chest, and it’s up to sales to use them when necessary.

Here at Uberflip, we’re lucky because we have a very content-forward culture. There are a few defined places where we can always find our latest and greatest content assets:

• Our content calendar is accessible to everyone in the company via Google Calendar.
• We have a Slack channel dedicated to any new content that the marketing team has published.
• We’ll discuss any big upcoming content assets at our monthly sales and marketing meetings or at our weekly company-wide touch base.

And, we use our product's Sales Assist feature to make it easy for the sales team to find the right content, at the right time, for their specific prospect. But more on that later.

This brings me to my next point...

2. Hold an internal meeting to explain new content releases

Treat content (especially the big assets and campaigns) as you would a product update or a pricing change. Make sure everyone knows exactly what’s coming, and what they need to do about it. Cover the five W’s by explaining:

• Who the content is being created for. Which buyer persona(s) should it appeal to?
• What type of asset it will be. Is it a blog post, an infographic, etc.?
• Where they can find it. Where will it live? (On your blog? On your CMO’s LinkedIn profile? In your resource center?)
• When it’s being released. Is there a specific launch date?
• Why it’s being created. What’s the end goal, and how will it contribute to your ongoing content strategy?

You don’t have to cover this for every single blog—ain’t nobody got time for that. If you’re consistently creating bigger content assets, like ebooks and webinars, you can save time by documenting the process, or sharing an internal brief or synopsis (see below) that provides more detail.

Or, if you’re not into the idea of adding more documents to your to-do list, tack it onto the agenda of your regular sales and marketing meeting. Our monthly must-attend meeting is very effective for exchanging ideas between sales and marketing, and getting everyone on board with what’s coming down the content pipeline.

3. Build a content library that’s optimized for sales engagement

I’ve provided a couple of ideas for keeping up with new and upcoming content, but they don’t really solve the problem of getting more use out of existing content assets.

Salespeople and marketers are different breeds. Marketers might spend hours writing and optimizing a blog post, but if the end result is not easy to sift through and pick out the relevant pieces, salespeople will become easily frustrated and spend time elsewhere. (Sorry!)

Make content easily discoverable for your sales team. One great way to do this is to organize your content into very specific, targeted categories. That breakdown can be by buyer persona, industry, vertical, or customer pain point. Once your sales team can easily discover your content, they can put it into action to reach prospects.

[Warning: Shameless plug ahead!] At Uberflip, we worked hand-in-hand with our Marketing team to create a tagging structure for content that was geared to our needs. That allows us to easily find assets within our Uberflip platform to create tailored streams of content that speak specifically to a particular prospect's objections and pain points. Our platform also allows us to implement customized calls-to-action to allow prospects to easily email our sales reps.

And remember that Sales Assist feature I mentioned earlier? Here's where it comes into play. You've organized all your content with tags to make it easy to find the content you need. But you still have problems with sales accessing that content easily, and sometimes they still pull the wrong version. Sales Assist connects your sales team's email (Gmail, Outreach, Salesloft, Outlook) directly with your library of approved content assets, letting them intuitively and quickly find the content or stream they're looking for, embed that content in an email, and send personalized experiences to their prospects.

When content is this easy to control, it's a game changer for your sales engagement.

4. Include content links within email templates

Want to give your sales team absolutely no excuse to not use the awesome content you’re creating? Provide templates for campaign follow-up.

Our marketing team here at Uberflip creates email templates for our sales team to use, complete with links to relevant content. It makes my life so easy, and it allows the marketing team to use the messaging they want (they’re kind of good at that).

We have several marketing-created email templates in SalesLoft to guide our sales nurtures with recommendations on what content to send along with it.

5. Save time with synopses

For your longer-form content like webinars and ebooks, save your sales team some time by providing a written synopsis or summary deck.

Given that I work for a company that creates a ton of great content, I often find it difficult to keep up with some of the longer-form pieces—hour-long webinars and 50-page ebooks just don't always fit into my schedule, as much as I’d like them to.

The reality is you want your sales team to spend as much time selling your product as they can, but you don't want them to ignore your marketing content.

Give them a helping hand by providing a summary of the content that includes both the target persona and why a prospect might care about this topic.  

6. Run an internal content assessment

If your sales team still isn’t putting your content to good use, it’s time to ask them why.

• Is your content easily accessible?
• Is it tagged by persona, topic, industry, or stage of the funnel?
• Do they know how and when to use content in the sales nurture process?

You may uncover a deeper issue or opportunities to improve the process, so never stop trying!

We’re in this together

Like any symbiotic relationship, both teams must benefit in order for it to work. It doesn’t matter how “in the know” sales is about new marketing content if the content isn’t relevant to the buyer.

Similarly, even if marketing is creating great content, it won’t matter if the sales team is serving it up at the wrong time or with the wrong ask.

Empower each other, because after all, sales and marketing are on the same team, working toward the same goal. More leads, more pipeline, more revenue. And that’s something we can all agree on.

Content is for closers! Learn how to build a content library optimized for sales enablement.