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“Isn’t it obvious?”
How many times have you asked this question? How many times have you heard it?
In the workplace, this phrase is often used when you notice that a request or suggestion you thought you had made has not been implemented.
This signal amplification effect (as psychologists call it) explains how some misunderstandings arise. People regularly overestimate the quantity (and quality) of the information they are communicating.
In other words, people think they have conveyed much more than is actually the case.
This phenomenon is undoubtedly exacerbated by remote work. Email, texting, Slack and Zoom create conditions that increase the potential for misunderstandings.
And don't think you're safe just because your team shares some kind of mental shortcut. Researchers have found that miscommunication is more common among people in close relationships. (My wife just raised her hand to say something.)
As more and more content—including intra-office communications—becomes automated through AI and other technologies, I see increasing challenges created by miscommunication (or lack of communication) between marketing teams and the rest of the company.
The failure of communication
For example, a B2B technology client I worked with last month asked me to help them optimize their content by aligning their sales and marketing teams.
The sales team didn't use much of what the marketing team had created. Instead, sales reps turned to ChatGPT to create their own content for email and social media.
Worse, they still requested new content from the marketing team, creating a backlog of requests and conflicting priorities. Should the marketing team continue with their existing thought leadership plan (and risk sales ignoring it) or accommodate 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 that the main reason sales and marketing teams are misaligned is because each group has their own ideas about what motivates a customer to take action (i.e., they view the funnel differently).
According to CMI surveys, the top three situational challenges marketers cite are related to this misalignment:
- A lack of resources (58%)
- Aligning content with the buyer's journey (48%)
- Aligning content efforts between sales and marketing (45%)
Wait a minute, you might say. If both teams agree that using the best content is problem #1, why don't they just get everyone together and let the numbers tell the teams which content is the best?
I mean, isn't it obvious?
Well, it seems obvious. And my client tried it.
The sales team said they needed “better” content. Marketing agreed to provide the content they requested, but sent the message, “You should use the new things we’re developing instead.”
However, the problem has not gone away. In fact, it has gotten worse.
As it turned out, the teams didn't have a problem with the quality of the content. They didn't have a 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 is the biggest challenge. But that challenge means something different to each group.
And this insight offers the key to solving the problem.
For sales, the challenge of using current content is finding the right elements and (most importantly) understanding how to use them.
In other words, you can create a great technical market guide or a complex thought leadership paper, but if the salesperson doesn't understand it or doesn't know how to communicate it, they can't decide when to put it in the hands of a prospect.
For the marketing team, the challenge is to create content that the sales team would use. In other words, when marketing prioritized creating new content to grab the attention of the sales team, it shifted its focus away from the audience.
As a result, the new content became less focused on opinion leadership and more similar to the publications of the company's competitors.
When the salespeople used the new parts, they realized that they didn't work because they didn't highlight the brand, so they stopped using them and asked for something new (again).
Neither team got what they wanted.
The answer may seem obvious to you. But to her, it wasn't.
Sales Enablement saves the day
You probably know my slogan on my bumper sticker: “90% of a content strategy has nothing to do with content, it has everything to do with communication.”
For my client, the way forward turned out to be better communication and sales enablement. In other words, they started creating guidelines and instructions to help the sales team make the most of the right content.
Every time the marketing team developed thought leadership content (a white paper, a presentation, an article with an author credit, etc.), they also created instructions on how to present the piece, how to sell it, and ultimately what it means. That way, the sales team knew when to use it. Marketing also provided training to help sales team members act as informed storytellers.
As a result, the 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 pain points, select the right content to help them, and measure how well the content they offered was received.
This company stopped viewing sales as the last channel for sales materials and instead viewed sales as an opportunity for a personalized, intelligent, content-driven experience that delivered value to a prospect or existing customer.
Have you made yourself clear?
It would be easy to assume that you've effectively communicated all of the expectations, responsibilities, and processes your content strategy requires. After all, it's what you work in. Every. Single. Day.
But business today is fast-paced. And with many teams working remotely, asynchronous communication is the norm. Oversights 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 website was a lengthy, manual process with numerous potential points of error.
Someone would email the required changes to a freelancer, who would then send back a formatted package of HTML files. These files would be uploaded to a server in the IT department and then pushed to the web server to go live.
I asked the person in charge how long he had been doing this. “10 years,” he replied.
“Who knows you do that?” I asked.
He shrugged and said, “I assume everyone knows. I'm not doing this in secret. It goes without saying that this is an important part of the site.”
It turned out that nobody knew.
When you say, “Isn't that obvious?” or “It goes without saying,” pay close attention to the rest of your sentence. Chances are, anything that you think is obvious needs to be said.
Apparently.
It's your story. Tell it well.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
