Let's talk about Marketing

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?

I’ve sat through hundreds of sales decks. Most of them lost me by slide 3. Here’s the pattern: company logo, mission statement, “we serve 500+ customers”, a product screenshot that’s too small to read, and a pricing slide that shows up way too early. By the time you get to anything that matters, the prospect is checking their email. The best decks do something different. They start with the prospect’s world, not your product.

Every sales enablement tool now claims AI features. Every vendor’s website has an AI section with glowing promises about “intelligent content recommendations” and “AI powered insights.” Half of it is real. Half of it is the 2024 version of “we have machine learning”, which was the 2019 version of “we have big data.” Here’s my honest take on what’s actually delivering value, what requires way more investment than vendors admit, and how to evaluate AI features without getting sold a demo that doesn’t match production reality.

I review a lot of sales content. For our customers, for prospects evaluating Content Camel, for competitive research. And over the last year, something shifted: I started being able to tell which assets were AI generated within the first paragraph. Not because I’m some detection genius. Because they all sound the same. Open any LinkedIn feed and count how many posts start with “In today’s rapidly evolving landscape…” or “Here are 7 ways to…” or “The key to success is…” That’s not content strategy.

Let me save you some time. If you’re Googling “best sales content management tools” you’re probably in one of these situations: Your Google Drive / SharePoint / Box has turned into a content graveyard; folders nested in folders, outdated decks mixed with current ones, and your reps have given up trying to find anything You’re evaluating dedicated tools for the first time because your team just hit the size where “ask Marketing on Slack” stopped scaling You’re on an enterprise platform that’s overbuilt and overpriced for your team, and the recent PE consolidation has you rethinking All valid.

Let me tell you the real reason most B2B teams have fewer case studies than they need. It’s not because they can’t write. It’s not because they don’t have successful customers. It’s because the production process is broken. Here’s how it usually goes: Marketing identifies a great customer story. They ask the account manager to make an introduction. The AM says “sure, let me find the right time.” Three weeks pass.

Confluence: A great wiki, but not a sales content tool I get it. Confluence is already in your stack, your team knows it, and someone thought “why not just use it for sales content too?” Here’s why: Confluence is a wiki built for internal documentation. It’s great for process docs, meeting notes, product specs, and internal knowledge bases. It’s not great for the thing your sales team needs most; finding the right customer-facing content and sharing it with prospects in a way you can track.

Every B2B team thinks their content situation is uniquely terrible. The chaotic Google Drive. The SharePoint nobody can navigate. The Notion database that one person set up and nobody else understands. The “just ask Sarah, she knows where everything is” system. You’re not unique. Everyone’s content organization is bad. The difference between teams that fix it and teams that don’t isn’t ambition. It’s having a model to follow. Want the framework?