“Isn’t it obvious?”
How many times have you asked this question? How many times have you heard it asked?
In a work setting, this phrase often comes out when you realize some request or suggestion you thought you conveyed wasn’t acted on.
This signal amplification bias (as psychologists call it) explains how some miscommunication happens. People routinely overestimate the quantity (and quality) of the information they communicate.
In other words, people believe they conveyed a lot more than they really did.
Remote work no doubt 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 close team shares some kind of mental shorthand. Researchers found that miscommunication happens more frequently among people in close relationships. (My wife just held up her hand to say something.)
As people use AI and other technology to automate even more content — including inter-office communication — I’m seeing more challenges arising from miscommunication (or under-communication) between marketing teams and the rest of the business.
The failure to communicate
For example, a B2B technology client I worked with last month asked me to help streamline its content by aligning its 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 still requested new content from the marketing team, causing a backlog of requests and conflicting priorities. Should the marketing team continue its existing thought leadership plan (and risk sales ignoring it) or accommodate the sales requests for content that didn’t fit into the marketing plan?
This kind of challenge is well documented in sales enablement and B2B content marketing circles. Interestingly, research firm Gartner found that the No. 1 reason for sales and marketing team misalignment is that each group has its own ideas about what moves a customer to action (i.e., they see the funnel differently).
CMI research found that the top three situational challenges marketers mention are related to this misalignment:
- A lack of resources (58%)
- Aligning content with the buyer’s journey (48%)
- Aligning content efforts across sales and marketing (45%)
Wait a minute, you might say. If both teams agree that using the best content is problem No. 1, why not just get everybody 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 did try it.
The sales team said it needed “better” content. Marketing agreed to produce what sales asked for but delivered this message, “You’d better use the new things we create.”
But the problem didn’t go away. If anything, it got worse.
As it turns out, the teams didn’t suffer from a content quality problem. 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 up-to-date and compelling content is the biggest challenge. But that challenge means different things to each group.
And that insight offers the key to solving the problem.
For sales, the challenge of using the most up-to-date content comes from struggling to find the right pieces and (most importantly) understanding how to use them.
In other words, you might create an excellent technical market guide or complex thought leadership paper. But if the salesperson doesn’t understand it or know how to speak to it, they can’t determine when to put it into a potential customer’s hands.
For the marketing team, the challenge arises from trying to create content that the sales team would use. In other words, when marketing prioritized creating new pieces to attract the sales team’s attention, it shifted its focus away from the audience.
That made the new content less about thought leadership and more similar to what the company’s competitors put out.
When salespeople used the new pieces, they found they didn’t work because they didn’t differentiate the brand. So they’d stop using them and request something new (again).
Neither team got what it wanted.
The answer might seem obvious to you. But it wasn’t to them.
Sales enablement saves the day
You’ve probably heard my bumper-sticker slogan: 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 enable the sales team to use the right content pieces in the ideal way.
Every time the marketing team developed thought leadership content (a white paper, presentation, a bylined article, etc.), it would also develop instructions on how to present the piece, how to sell it, and, ultimately, what it all meant. That way, the sales team would understand when to apply it. Marketing also offered training to help the 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. They jointly built a process to identify a prospect’s main pain points, choose the right content to help them, and measure how well the offered content resonated.
This company stopped looking at sales as the final distribution channel of sales materials. Instead, sales became an opportunity for a personalized, intelligent, content-driven experience that delivered value to a potential or existing customer.
Did you make yourself clear?
It’s easy to assume you’ve effectively relayed all the expectations, responsibilities, and processes your content strategy requires. After all, you work in it. Every. Single. Day.
But business moves fast today. And the prevalence of remote teams means asynchronous communication is the norm. Oversights and inefficiencies easily go undiscovered.
Not long ago, I worked with a client at a Fortune 100 insurance company. I discovered that updating one critical part of the company website required a lengthy, manual process with many potential points of failure.
Someone would email the necessary change to a freelancer, who then returned a formatted package of HTML files. Those files were uploaded to a server in the IT department and then moved to the web server to go live.
I asked the person in charge of the process how long he’d been doing it that way. “10 years,” he replied.
“Who knows that you do it this way?” I asked.
He shrugged and said, “I assume everybody knows. I’m not doing this in secret. It goes without saying that this is a critical part of the website.”
Turns out, no one knew.
If you find yourself saying, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “That goes without saying,” pay close attention to the rest of your sentence. Chances are, whatever you think could go without saying needs to be said.
Obviously.
It’s your story. Tell it well.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute