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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: your marketing team is creating plenty of content, but you’re not sure how it’s actually impacting your sales results. It feels like there’s a disconnect somewhere, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
The truth is, many B2B companies don’t realise just how powerful content marketing can be when it’s designed to directly support sales goals. Marketing and sales often work separately, which means marketing efforts might not be driving the sales outcomes they could.
With years of experience helping businesses bridge this gap, I’m going to introduce you to the idea of aligning your content marketing strategy with your sales goals. By the end of this article, you’ll understand how to create content that truly supports sales and helps your business grow — even if you haven’t thought about content this way before.
Why Aligning Marketing & Sales Matters
If marketing and sales are working towards different goals, your efforts won’t add up to much. Marketing might be creating content to build brand awareness or generate leads, but if those leads don’t fit what sales needs to close deals, your revenue suffers.
Marketing content isn’t just about attracting attention… It plays a crucial role throughout the sales process. The right pieces can educate potential buyers, build trust, and answer questions that come up during sales conversations. When done well, content becomes a tool sales teams use to guide prospects closer to a purchase.
But here’s the catch: this only works if marketing truly understands the sales goals. Without knowing what sales needs — the challenges buyers face, the key objections, the stages in the buying journey — marketing content can miss the mark. It might attract the wrong leads or fail to address what prospects really care about.
Aligning your content strategy with sales means producing targeted, useful content that supports each step of the sales process. This connection creates a smoother experience for buyers and gives your sales team better tools to close deals faster.
Here are some key ways content supports the sales process:
- Educate prospects about your product or service and the problems it solves
- Build trust by sharing case studies, testimonials, or expert insights
- Answer common objections buyers have before they speak to sales
- Provide sales enablement materials like one-pagers or demos to help sales explain value
- Nurture leads with targeted content that keeps prospects engaged over time
- Help buyers make informed decisions by clearly outlining benefits and ROI
When both teams share the same goals and understanding, you reduce wasted effort, increase lead quality, and ultimately boost your bottom line. It’s not just about producing content; it’s about producing the right content that drives results.
Understanding Sales Goals and Your Buyer
The foundation of aligning your content marketing with sales is understanding exactly what sales is trying to achieve and who your buyers really are.
Sales goals are often about hitting targets like revenue numbers, deal size, or sales cycle length. To support these goals, marketing needs to know what kinds of prospects sales wants to prioritise, what objections they commonly face, and which parts of the buying journey are most challenging.
One of the best tools to achieve this shared understanding is a customer journey map.
A Customer Journey Map is a visual or written representation of the steps your potential customers take from first learning about your business to making a purchase decision.
Comprehensive Guide: Creating a Customer Journey Map for Sales Enablement
Here’s an example of what a customer journey map might look like:
To view this image in full size see here.
By creating and agreeing on a customer journey map, sales and marketing teams can identify:
- The content and messaging prospects need at each stage
- Common objections or concerns to address
- Key moments when sales should step in
This shared understanding helps marketing create targeted content that supports sales exactly where it’s needed, guiding prospects smoothly through the buying process.
If marketing isn’t clear on these points, it’s hard to create content that really helps sales. Getting sales and marketing together to clarify goals, buyer personas, and journey stages is critical. This shared understanding ensures your content is designed with a purpose: to support sales in closing deals.
How exactly can marketing get clear on these sales goals?
It starts by forming a Revenue Team.
What is a Revenue Team?
A Revenue Team is a combination of your sales and marketing teams and is made up of key players from both sales and marketing. All activities, regardless of individual roles, are focused on the shared goal of increasing company revenue.
What Is a Revenue Team & Why Do You Need One?
Research has found that when marketing and sales are aligned, there are exceptional benefits, including higher sales close rates, increased revenue, and increased retention rates.
How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams Using HubSpot
You might be thinking “If a Revenue Team combines marketing and sales to focus on revenue generation, then does that not distract them from their sales and marketing duties?”
Here’s the thing – in a revenue team, marketers and salespeople both work towards the same goal of trying to generate more revenue, however, each department still continues to work on their designated tasks.
For example, the marketer may be responsible for the development, implementation and oversight of content strategy, as well as the management of your content team or resource. That won’t change when the marketing team joins the Revenue Team.
Instead, what happens is that the marketer now approaches their role with the conversations and mindset that come from being a part of The Revenue Team.
In other words, rather than producing content for the sake of producing content, the marketing team is now producing content with purpose – to generate revenue.
When every piece of content is produced with the goal of generating revenue and with the influence of sales on its ideation and production, everything changes, hence the number of benefits that arrive from having a Revenue Team.
Some of those benefits include:
- Attracts higher quality leads
- Saves your sales rep time as they use content to answer commonly asked questions
- Increased sales and shorter sales cycle
- Better alignment leads to less employee churn and happier teams
- Visibility around which content produces ROI
In order for a revenue team to be successful, there are a few prerequisites that must be met.
First, the entire company must be committed to becoming the number one teacher in their industry, with a focus on answering all of the questions that their ideal buyers have.
The sales team must also adopt a strategy called assignment selling, where they assign homework to prospects in the form of content that answers common questions that come up during the sales process.
What is Assignment Selling? The Comprehensive Guide
Aside from that, there are some key activities that can help a Revenue Team be successful:
- Weekly or fortnightly revenue team meetings where they discuss the content that has been published and its value, the content that is currently in production, and the performance of previous content for sales.
- Brainstorming sessions to come up with new content ideas by answering questions such as “What do your buyers have the biggest doubts or worries about?”
- Measuring the quality of sales enablement content by asking follow-up questions such as “Why are they asking this question?” and “When are they asking this question in the sales process?”
- Fortnightly Team Reports to update the team on what was done last and what’s next.
- Monthly Newsletter to showcase content wins and sales wins from the efforts of the Revenue Team.
When you successfully build dialogue between your marketing and sales teams through the formation of a Revenue Team, you can ensure your content strategy is aligned with sales goals.
But how do you create content that specifically helps sales close deals?
Aside from that, there are some key activities that can help a Revenue Team be successful:
- Weekly or fortnightly revenue team meetings where they discuss the content that has been published and its value, the content that is currently in production, and the performance of previous content for sales.
- Brainstorming sessions to come up with new content ideas by answering questions such as “What do your buyers have the biggest doubts or worries about?”
- Measuring the quality of sales enablement content by asking follow-up questions such as “Why are they asking this question?” and “When are they asking this question in the sales process?”
- Fortnightly Team Reports to update the team on what was done last and what’s next.
- Monthly Newsletter to showcase content wins and sales wins from the efforts of the Revenue Team.
When you successfully build dialogue between your marketing and sales teams through the formation of a Revenue Team, you can ensure your content strategy is aligned with sales goals.
But how do you create content that specifically helps sales close deals?
Creating Content That Helps Sales Close Deals
To effectively support your sales team, it’s crucial to understand the Five Stages of Customer Awareness. This model, developed by marketing expert Eugene Schwartz, breaks down the buyer’s journey into distinct phases:
- Problem Unaware: The prospect doesn’t realise they have a problem.
- Problem Aware: They recognise they have a problem but aren’t aware of solutions.
- Solution Aware: They know solutions exist but aren’t familiar with your specific offering.
- Product Aware: They’re aware of your product but need more information to decide.
- Most Aware: They’re ready to purchase and just need the final nudge.
By aligning your content with these stages, you can guide prospects through their journey and support your sales team more effectively.
Here’s how:
- Problem Unaware: Create educational content that highlights common industry challenges, helping prospects recognise issues they might not have identified yet.
- Problem Aware: Develop content that discusses the implications of these problems and introduces potential solutions, positioning your offering as a viable option.
- Solution Aware: Provide detailed comparisons, case studies, and testimonials that showcase how your product stands out among alternatives.
- Product Aware: Offer in-depth product demos, FAQs, and user guides to address any remaining questions and build confidence in your solution.
- Most Aware: Present clear calls to action, special offers, or limited-time promotions to encourage immediate purchase decisions. Answer bottom of funnel questions that might come up in sales calls.
While understanding the Five Stages of Customer Awareness provides a solid framework, it’s crucial to go deeper and tailor your content to the specific questions and concerns your buyers have at each stage.
This is where close collaboration with your sales team becomes invaluable. Salespeople have firsthand insight into the objections, doubts, and information gaps prospects raise during conversations.
By tapping into this knowledge, you can create content that doesn’t just follow the awareness stages but directly addresses the real issues buyers face.
This targeted approach builds trust, answers questions before they become blockers, and ultimately smooths the path to a sale. When marketing content reflects the true concerns of your prospects, sales teams are armed with stronger tools and your business benefits from higher-quality leads and faster deal closures.
Simple Steps to Get Started Today
Aligning your content marketing with sales goals might feel like a big challenge, but you can start making progress right now with these simple steps:
- Set up regular meetings between marketing and sales to share what real customers are asking in the sales process.
- Create content that answers the real questions coming up in the sales process.
- Map out your sales goals and buyer journey together to create a clear, shared understanding, following our Customer Journey Map guide.
Starting small and building a habit of collaboration and alignment will help you create content that truly drives sales results over time.
Next, read our article on the best sales enablement tools.
The Best Sales Enablement Tools
