As Rebecca Spary says in Smart Selling Tools, "the current content cycle is fundamentally broken."
Like food in America, millions of tons of fresh content are being shipped every day, only to wind up in the landfill (or what Gary Slack calls the "brandfill").
Salespeople—three in four, anyway—blame marketers: they produce content that looks tasty, but is irrelevant to buyers. In reality, that assessment is baseless, because nine in 10 companies don't own a searchable CMS. No one can search for content based on relevance.
And it doesn't help that most salespeople are numbskulls. Only:
- 62% understand their own companies' products
- 25% understand their buyers' businesses
- 22% can position themselves as trusted advisors
- 21% believe they have relevant content to share with buyers
CMOs are supposed to align the two parties.
That's no mean feat, considering each is rewarded for different things (marketers for accumulating vanity metrics like traffic, likes and followers; salespeople for closing business at any cost).
Until CMOs can hold both parties to new standards—marketers for their efficient contribution to pipeline and sales for closing profitable deals—little will change.
