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The Insights Committee: How To Align Sales And Marketing With Content

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

Sales Marketing Insights Committee

Sales and marketing alignment is necessary for organizations to achieve Social Selling success. But it’s not going to happen overnight. However, it’s important to get the ball rolling, and start taking actions towards that goal. But where do you start? Here are some tactical things that you can do as the business to start driving towards sales and marketing alignment.

Get sales involved in the content creation process.

First and foremost, as a sales leader, you need to involve sales in your content creation process. There are two reasons sales needs to be involved.

Sales pros don’t see the value in content.

For the most part, sales professionals don’t see the value in content, nor do they see the value it offers customers. They don’t see the ROI in sales or inbound leads coming in through content.

It’s not their story.

Let’s face it. When sales isn’t involved, it’s not their story. Because they weren’t part of the content creation process, there’s a huge disconnect between what they believe the customer wants to read and needs to read, and the content marketing is providing.

How can sales leaders work towards sales and marketing alignment? You need to create an Insights Committee.

What is an Insights Committee?

The Insights Committee is a group of four or five sales professionals that are chosen to be the voice of your buyer. Each member from the sales team is going to be responsible for thinking about the pitfalls, challenges, and best practices they’ve learned from the market.

They’re out in the field, talking with buyers, and hearing first-hand what buyers are looking for. So once a month, they’re going to get together as a committee and talk about those problems and ideas, and help marketing develop content ideas. The Insights Committee fills in the content gap that marketing has.

The Intellectual Property Loop—the Insights Committee in action

Here’s how the Insights Committee works to create an Intellectual Property Loop (IPL).

  1. Committee members from the sales team collect all the intellectual property they’re hearing about in the market.
  2. They then share that information with marketing, giving them blog ideas.
  3. Marketing then develops those ideas, and creates content.
  4. Sales pros then receive the final product. They Like, Share, and have conversations with buyers about that content.
  5. Sales receive new feedback from buyers.
  6. Next month, they bring this new feedback to the committee, and the process begins again.

This process is a continuous loop that repeats itself every month.

Bottom line

Creating an Insights Committee achieves sales and marketing alignment because it gets sales involved in the content creation process—and ensures that marketing is always creating content buyers need.

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