“Isn’t it obvious?”
How many times have you asked this question? How many times have you heard this question?
In the work environment, this phrase often comes up when you realize that a request or suggestion that you thought had been communicated has not been acted upon.
The Signal gain distortion (as psychologists call it) explains how misunderstandings occur. People regularly overestimate the quantity (and quality) of the information they communicate.
In other words: people believe They conveyed much more than they actually did.
Remote work undoubtedly exacerbates this phenomenon. Email, text messaging, Slack, and Zoom create conditions that increase the potential for miscommunication.
And don’t think you’re safe because your closest team has some kind of mental shortcut. Researchers found that people in close relationships are more likely to have misunderstandings. (My wife just held up her hand to say something.)
As people use AI and other technologies to automate even more content – including interoffice communications – I see more and more challenges arising from miscommunication (or undercommunication) between marketing teams and the rest of the company.
The failure to communicate
For example, a B2B technology client I worked with last month asked me to help streamline their content by aligning their sales and marketing teams.
The sales team didn’t use much of what the marketing team created. Instead, sales reps turned to ChatGPT to create their own content for email and social media.
Worse, they were still requesting new content from the marketing team, resulting in a backlog of requests and conflicting priorities. Should the marketing team continue with their existing thought leadership plan (and risk sales ignoring it) or honor sales requests for content that didn’t fit into the marketing plan?
This type of challenge is well documented in sales enablement and B2B content marketing circles. Interestingly, research firm Gartner found this out the number 1 reason The misalignment of sales and marketing teams is that each group has their own ideas about what motivates a customer to take action (i.e. they see the funnel differently).
Research from CMI found that the top three situational challenges marketers cite are related to this misalignment:
- A lack of resources (58%)
- Align content with the buyer’s journey (48%)
- Aligning content efforts with sales and marketing (45%)
Wait a minute, you could say. If both teams agree that using the best content is the #1 problem, why don’t we just bring everyone together and let the numbers tell the teams which content is the best?
I mean, isn’t it obvious?
Well, it appears apparently. And my customer tried it.
The sales team said they needed “better” content. Marketing agreed to produce what sales wanted, but delivered the message: “You’d better take advantage of the new things we’re creating.”
But the problem didn’t go away. If anything, it got worse.
As it turned out, the teams had no problem with content quality. They had no usage problem. They had a communication problem.
Two sides of the same problem
Yes, both teams agreed that using the most current and compelling content was the biggest challenge. But this challenge means something different for each group.
And this insight offers the key to solving the problem.
For sales, the challenge of using the most current content is the difficulty of finding the right parts and (most importantly) the right understanding How to use them.
In other words, you could create an excellent technical leader or a complex thought leadership paper. But if the salesperson doesn’t understand it or don’t know how to address it, they can’t decide when to put it in the hands of a potential customer.
For the marketing team, the challenge is to create content that the sales team would use. In other words, when marketing prioritized creating new pieces to capture the sales team’s attention, it shifted its focus away from the audience.
This made the new content less about thought leadership and more about a similarity to what the company’s competitors were putting out.
When the salespeople used the new parts, they discovered that they didn’t work because they didn’t differentiate the brand. So they stopped using them and demanded something new (again).
Neither team got what they wanted.
The answer may be obvious to you. But it wasn’t for her.
Sales enablement saves the day
You’ve probably heard my slogan on the bumper sticker: 90% of a content strategy has nothing to do with content and everything to do with communication.
For my client, it turned out that the way forward was better communication and sales promotion. In other words, they started creating guidelines and instructions activate the sales team to make optimal use of the right content.
Every time the marketing team developed thought leadership content (a white paper, a presentation, a bylined article, etc.), they also developed instructions on how to present the article, how to sell it, and what it all ultimately means. This way the sales team would understand when to apply it. Marketing also provided training to help sales team members act as informed storytellers.
As a result, teams developed a much closer relationship with the content experiences they created for their prospects. Together, they developed a process to identify a prospect’s key problems, select the right content to help them, and measure how well the content offered was received.
This company no longer viewed sales as the final distribution channel for sales materials. Instead, sales became an opportunity for a personalized, intelligent, and content-driven experience that delivered value to a potential or existing customer.
Have you made yourself clear?
It’s easy to assume that you’ve effectively communicated all the expectations, responsibilities, and processes your content strategy requires. After all, you work in it. Everyone. Singles. Day.
But business is moving fast today. And the proliferation of remote teams means asynchronous communication is the norm. Omissions and inefficiencies easily go undetected.
Not long ago I was working with a client at a Fortune 100 insurance company. I discovered that updating a critical part of the company’s website required a lengthy, manual process with many potential points of failure.
Someone emailed the required change to a freelancer, who then sent back a formatted package of HTML files. These files were uploaded to a server in the IT department and then moved to the web server to go live.
I asked the person responsible for the process how long he had been doing this. “10 years,” he replied.
“Who knows you do it like that?” I asked.
He shrugged and said, “I assume everyone knows. I don’t do this in secret. It goes without saying that this is an important part of the site.”
It turned out that no one knew about it.
When you say, “Isn’t that obvious?” or “That goes without saying,” pay close attention to the rest of your sentence. Chances are, everything you take for granted needs to be said.
Apparently.
It’s your story. Say it well.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute