SALES CONTENT How Do You Get Sellers to Use


Marketing Content? Behavioral Science Has the Answer


BY LEFF BONNEY, PH.D., RESEARCH DIRECTOR, B2B DECISIONLABS, AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SALES AND MARKETING, FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY SALES INSTITUTE


It’s an ailment that afflicts even the best revenue teams: Marketing creates content for sales, but sellers don’t use it.


Over the years, there have been countless theories about why this happens. Is the content misaligned with sellers’ needs? Is marketing’s message fundamentally flawed? The rallying cry of “sales and marketing


alignment” still reverberates as a best practice from nearly 20 years ago. Yet, for all the proposed solutions to collaboration challenges, organizations continue to struggle to get sellers to use the content that marketing provides. Sellers and marketers have more access to shared customer data than ever before. Enablement platforms such as Allego and others give sellers easier access to content and training


7 6.35 6 5.25 5 4.3 4 3 3 2 1 0 Senior Sales Leader Basic Overview Marketing Staff Basic Details + Case Study High-Performing Seller


Basic Details + Demo SPECIAL EDITION 2023 SELLING POWER | ALLEGO.COM


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in the moments they need it most. So, what’s really going on? B2B DecisionLabs recently partnered with


Allego to learn the answer. Working with an enterprise-level sales organization, we conducted a behavioral research study of sellers’ willingness to use a new piece of marketing collateral.


PRESENTING CONTENT 3 WAYS For the study, we worked with over 300 sellers from 11 different regions at a large capital equipment company in the healthcare industry. Sellers split into nine groups and watched a recorded video of a sales manager, a product marketer, or a high-performing seller introduce a new piece of marketing collateral. Each group watched one of three different


presenters share the content using one of three different story methods. Every presenter followed the same scripts and used the same piece of content.


Impact of Presenter x Message on Likelihood of Use


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