We asked 300+ sales leaders what makes reps use marketing's materials

Today, we're talking "smarketing": the essential interplay between sales and marketing (and a top-three most insufferable buzzword in the corporate lexicon). 

In the spirit of misalignment between these departments, we're using a different data source for this send than we usually do. 

Instead of our typical base of 200 B2B decision-makers, we're pulling from a survey of over 300 sales leaders.

Hopefully, we can make your interdepartmental frenemy dynamic a little smoother.

The Receipts

Olivia Heller / Marketing Against the Grain

Receipt #1 The assets reps actually use are the ones tied to a moment in the deal.

We asked, "What does marketing do that makes enablement material reps actually use?"

Marketers often lean towards producing chic, refined, and thoughtful work.

We want other stakeholders to look at our output and say, "Wow. Look how chic, refined, and thoughtful this is," and learn to leverage it properly. However, sales is less form-oriented.

They want content specific to a moment in a deal: relevance over presentation.

A marketing asset can be as brilliant as a brilliant marketing asset can be, but sales won't adopt well-crafted but unfocused material. 

An adequate asset that connects to a given stage — one that speaks to the exact conversation a sales rep is having with a prospect — gets used every time. 

Where your content fits in a deal is more important than its quality.

Receipt #2 Only 7% of sales leaders say your material fits a live deal out of the box.

We asked, "When you head into a live deal, how well does the material marketing gives you fit what you actually need?"

93% of sales leaders will see a marketing asset you hand them as unfinished — regardless of how much internal scrutiny it faced or how much hair was lost over it — and 11% rarely think anything from marketing is worthwhile. 

The real story is the 82% of respondents said some version of, "Marketing provides the starting point, not the finish line."

First passes at marketing materials generally fit some moments, but sales almost always thinks those assets need more love. 

Insisting everything you ship should be "done" solves the wrong problem. 

It would be cool if sales immediately gave your work a resounding "hell yeah" whenever it came through, but you can't bank on that. 

Planning on tailoring your material to their specs is more realistic. 

What does this mean for...

Social

Stop optimizing for production value nobody asked for. Tie each post to a specific stage of awareness, then judge it on saves and shares — signals of relevance — over impressions on your prettiest asset.

Email

Map each campaign to a specific moment — onboarding, renewal, re-engagement — before you design it. Relevance to the trigger drives clicks. Template polish doesn't. Build the sequence around timing, then make it look good.

Paid and Performance

Mine sales call recordings for your next ad angles. If 93% of assets need to get reworked, let the reps doing the reworking tell you what converts. Build creative around the objections they already answer live.

Content and Brand  

Shift your creative brief from "what's the topic" to "what moment does this serve." Relevance to a journey stage — not thought-leadership polish — is what earns adoption. Build the map before you build the asset.

This week's email was brought to you by Jay Fuchs, using data sourced through Panoplai. Respondents were asked to select all options that apply, so totals do not always add up to 100. Editing by Laura M. Browning.

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