If you’re in Sales, you’ve probably told people in Marketing that you can never get enough great content to send out to prospects and buyers and keep them engaged. You’ve probably also given them your own recommendations of what

kind of content would allow you to get that next demo, that next closed sale. And then you’ve probably been bombarded with emails, meetings, and newsletters, as Marketing tries to demonstrate how they’ve listened and produced just the content you were looking for.

Days and weeks—quarters even—have flown by, and then Marketing has likely returned to see how their content has worked for you. It’s only at this point that you’ve realized just how little of that content you’ve actually shared with buyers. You feel guilty. Marketing looks baffled.

And then this cycle repeats itself anew.

But why does this happen? After so much communication, why doesn’t Sales use Marketing’s content? Is it because the content is bad? After all the requesting and the suggestions and then feverish content production, it seems rather odd of Sales not to use the fruits of Marketing’s labor.

In an April 7 webinar, KnowledgeTree revealed, among other things, the reasons why sales folks don’t use Marketing’s content. This one stuck out the most to me:

“Salespeople in general know that marketing and sales enablement are producing content for them. They also generally know that it is stored in repositories that let them search for content. It might be on their website in the resources tab. It could be on the blog. It could be in an internal portal or file sharing tool. Or maybe in the marketing automation platform. In each of these cases, the salesperson is expected to leave what they’re doing, i.e. leave their process, and go to some other tool to access content.’

“That might involve searching for materials or digging through folders to find relevant content. That’s great that the sales team is searching, but do they know what to search for? Searching for a case study could lead to many irrelevant case studies — content that simply doesn’t resonate with a given prospect.”

Could it be that sales teams, as much as they want content, simply don’t have the time or the attention to dig into the treasure trove and pick the exact right content asset for their buyer?

And maybe they shouldn’t have to. Technology is already becoming available which would allow Sales and Marketing to serve relevant content to buyers and other prospects automatically, without any action required on the part of salespeople. These tools essentially take out of Sales’ hands the task of selecting the right content and delivering that content to buyers. The Buyer gets the best content Marketing has to offer. The Salesperson gets back to what they do best—selling.

To see how Consensus lets Sales get back to selling by automating the delivery of video demos and other content to buyers, click on the orange ‘Watch Demo’ button.