Wayne Cerullo

Great question - great answers. Dave Kong started us with a super framework. As you know, this is not a trivial issue so I would like to add a POV to these answers. (Full disclosure: I am sharing what I have seen as head of a B2B buyer strategy firm. I am so passionate about this, we created an offering to do this called PlaybooksPlus). The Key to Sales Thinking In my experience, sales people are ruthlessly practical - they use what works. So the conversation with them must be ruthlessly focused on 'we know this works'. There is only one way to ensure this -- know in advance what your buyers want. What You Need to Know The way I have seen this work is by knowing things about 'their' buyers they don't know. This might seem impossible but there are some insights that sales cannot know, like why they lose deals, why buyers go dark, and even the real reasons they decide to buy. I believe this comes from doing independent (win/loss) research about the purchase path on deals that went well, went south, and went away (no decision). This can be done well without huge investments of time or budget. What You Need to Do But just knowing this will not change sales outcomes. I believe this insight needs to be handed off from marketing to sales in a framework (a sales playbook) with these characteristics: 1. Buyer-driven: Your content is vetted by your real buyers to address their real concerns in their language 2. Sales-connected: Your content is tuned with input and buy-in from your most successful sales leaders 3. Scenario-targeted: Your content is written for and delivered to your sales team (say, on their Salesforce dashboard) for the specific need state, ICP, and persona they are addressing at that moment I look forward to seeing more candid input on this topic. 

You might check out Playboox.com. Three points I know - they are focused on this (obviously), it includes team training (it's not just a piece of content!), and they integrate with Salesforce.com so your SDR / AE / etc. has the targeted content they need in front of them every day. I'd be interested in your POV on them.