Bridging The Sales and Marketing Gap with Content Intelligence

The obstacles that keep sales and marketing misaligned aren’t intentional. It all boils down to a communication gap between teams—and content intelligence is the way to bridge this gap.

Consider the journey of a lead in two scenarios, one that doesn’t use content intelligence, and one that does:

Scenario 1 – Without Content Intelligence

Marta, a Content Marketer, just finished writing a killer whitepaper. Her company uses a form-gating strategy to collect leads, so she sets the form up, hits publish, and waits for the leads to pour in. Marta gets a few email addresses of people who read her blog post, then she tosses those leads over to Sally the Salesperson who takes it from there. That’s it. That’s the scenario.

Marta has no idea if her content can be attributed to revenue or closed deals; she doesn’t even know if her content is helping move people through the buyer journey. When it comes to the lead hand-off, she doesn’t have much information to provide to Sally, other than the email address, name, and company of the person who filled out the form. Neither will ever know if the prospect ended up finishing (or even starting) the whitepaper. Sally is going to take action with very little insight into the hot topic that will resonate with the lead.

Scenario #2 —With Content Intelligence

Marta finishes up her whitepaper, but this time added a conditional form strategy which means only unknown visitors will have to provide their information, while known visitors can read the content freely. Bill the B2B Buyer is looking to purchase some new software and Marta’s company is on the shortlist of software companies he’s researching. He heads over to their website and spots Marta’s new whitepaper. He clicks through and starts reading. Bill’s already been to the site a few times, so he’s a known visitor and doesn’t have to fiddle with a form. Both Marta and Sally have been keeping an eye on Bill and notice that this is the 7th piece of content he’s read this week, and the third visit where he’s read more than one asset.

Using content intelligence, Sally can see that the content Bill’s engaging with are bottom of the funnel pieces, and he’s spending over 5 minutes reading each asset. On top of that, Sally can see that over the past two weeks, two of Bill’s colleagues have started to peruse other blog posts Marta has written. Because of the pace Bill is moving throughout his research stage, Sally receives a ‘fast-moving buyer’ alert which means Bill’s showing sales readiness signals. Sally reaches out to Bill and kicks off the sales conversation.

In the first scenario, marketing is focused on generating MQLs to pass to sales, and sales is just focused on closing the deals. In the second scenario, the two colleagues are working towards the same goals, using the same data, and speaking the same language. The misalignment here is the lack of communication between what the B2B buyers are going through, and how sales and marketing both have valuable insights on the buying process that can help the other team.

Consider the knowledge that’s living inside the brains of sales and marketing teams—then imagine the possibilities if these teams shared information and tools to understand their prospects better. Sounds dreamy!

Content intelligence provides you with deeper insight into every touchpoint your prospect has with your brand—from the first time they land on your page and read a piece of content, to the final purchase stage of the sales funnel.