Let's talk about Marketing

Something happened in the last twelve months and I don’t think we have the right words for it yet. Everyone keeps saying “AI is changing work.” It’s on every keynote slide. Every LinkedIn carousel. And what they mean is: AI does the task faster. OK, sure. We get it. But that’s not what’s actually going on. Not for the people I talk to who are building companies right now, anyway.

I’ve been building sales enablement tools for years, so I feel qualified to say this: most “sales enablement content” is built for the wrong person. It’s built for the sales rep. Battlecards they reference before calls. Talk tracks they memorize. Internal training docs they skim during onboarding. Decks they present in demos. All useful. All necessary. All completely useless when the rep leaves the room and the buyer has to sell the deal internally.

I’m going to be honest with you. I’m still figuring this out. Not in a “nobody knows anything” way. In a “the ground is shifting under our feet and the teams that figure it out first will have a massive advantage” way. I’ve been building content management tools for B2B teams for years, and what I’m seeing right now is the biggest shift since we moved from printed collateral to digital.

Every sales rep has the same experience at least once a week: the prospect says “we’re also looking at [Competitor]” and the rep has to decide, in real time, what to say. The best reps handle this with confidence because they know the competitive landscape cold. They acknowledge the competitor’s strengths, articulate real differentiators, and plant questions that expose weaknesses without sounding like they’re trash-talking. The worst reps fumble. They say something vague like “oh, they’re a good company but we’re different because…” and then list three features that mean nothing to the prospect.

Revenue enablement is having a moment. Gartner’s talking about it. Forrester’s publishing frameworks. Every enterprise sales platform has rebranded from “sales enablement” to “revenue enablement” in their marketing copy. It sounds important. It probably is important. But the part nobody wants to talk about is the foundation that makes any of it work. Because I’ve watched companies spend six figures on revenue enablement platforms and then fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the platform.

I’ve seen a lot of sales playbooks. The good ones fit in your back pocket (metaphorically). The bad ones are 47-page PDFs that start with the company mission statement and end with an org chart nobody asked for. The thing about playbooks: the word itself is borrowed from sports, where a playbook is a collection of specific plays for specific situations. The quarterback doesn’t flip through the team’s founding story before calling a play.

There’s a stat that gets cited in every B2B content marketing article: “buyers are X% through the process before they talk to sales.” You’ve seen it. The number changes depending on who’s publishing it. Gartner says 67%. Forrester says 75%. The point is always the same: buyers are doing a lot of research on their own. But nobody talks about this part. If buyers are doing all this self-directed research, then the content they find during that research IS your sales process.

There’s a workflow gap in every B2B company that nobody owns. Marketing creates content. They’re measured on traffic, leads, and brand awareness. They publish to the blog, send to the email list, and promote on social. Job done. Sales needs content. They’re measured on pipeline and revenue. They need case studies for specific deals, one-pagers for specific stakeholders, and competitive comparisons for specific situations. They need it findable in 30 seconds and shareable with tracked links.

You spent two weeks on that case study. Your designer made it beautiful. Your customer gave you a quote with real numbers. It’s genuinely good. Six months later, exactly three people have read it. Your marketing manager, your CEO (who skimmed it), and one sales rep who remembered it existed because they were on the call when the customer agreed to participate. That case study could have unblocked a dozen deals.

Here’s something that should keep you up at night: your best deal is being sold right now by someone who doesn’t work for you. Your buyer champion. The person inside the account who actually believes in your product and is trying to convince their boss, their boss’s boss, the CFO, legal, IT, and whoever else showed up uninvited to the review meeting. And they’re doing it with… what exactly? That PDF you emailed three weeks ago?