sales and marketing Archives

Mention ‘the funnel’ to anyone in marketing, and odds-on they’ll know what you’re talking about. The marketing funnel has been a familiar model for decades, starting with awareness at the top and tapering down to conversion.

But does this accurately reflect the reality of modern B2B marketing?

It’s what’s inside that counts

Back in 1898, when the funnel was initially conceived, purchase journeys were relatively linear. Jump to 2026, and buying journeys are messier, longer and far less predictable than the funnel envisages.

People are engaging with huge amounts of content and information before, during and even after converting. It’s also rare for prospects to encounter and engage with your content in a strict ‘awareness to consideration’ sequence, most will move back and forth, looking over a range of content for many months while they consider a purchase.

And in the B2B context specifically, many purchases involve multiple stakeholders, extended research phases and long periods of inactivity that don’t map cleanly to predefined stages.

Overall, what’s happening inside the funnel is far from straightforward. It’s multiple buyers moving forwards, backwards and sideways, revisiting content, sharing it internally, disengaging and then returning weeks later with new questions.

In short, the middle is messy.

What really happens between awareness and conversion

The middle is also where the most important B2B marketing takes place.

This is where your prospects develop their understanding of your brand, its products and how well you can solve their challenges. It’s not linear, but plenty of high-quality content is key to help buyers shape their knowledge, see their challenges reflected in your messaging, explore how your solutions can help them and refine their understanding of what you can do for them.

Different stakeholders will engage with your brand in different ways, consuming different types of content at different times, each focused on their own priorities and pressures.

Inside the funnel, your marketing matters less for how quickly it moves people on, and more for how effectively you engage different members of your target audience with the messages they care about.

How confidence supports conversion

This is why producing a range of relevant, high-quality content is so important to build confidence in your brand and solutions. In complex B2B decisions, it takes more than a single asset or campaign to move all relevant stakeholders to conversion.

It’s vital that your content provides the information and assurance that will help a purchase decision stand up to colleagues, procurement and leadership, long before formal sales engagement begins. This is all work that happens in the middle of the funnel, as prospects look for clarity, consistency and relevance across multiple touchpoints.

It’s the type of progress that’s hard to quantify. Even though it doesn’t create a neat data point, content sustains momentum by maintaining shared understanding and facilitating internal discussions even when the conversion decision is paused. To support this, effective B2B content strategies should prioritise continuity across core themes, rather than stage-of-the-funnel based assets. Content must work in multiple contexts, be able to stand alone, be revisited and shared internally, all while speaking to multiple stakeholders at once.

Creating content that’s effective

Does your content convey the confidence your prospects need to convert? Get in touch to find out how we help clients elevate current content, create effective new materials and move diverse B2B stakeholders towards purchase.

Everyone knows the theory - when sales and marketing operate in silos, results suffer. Misaligned goals, inconsistent messaging and disjointed customer experiences undermine the goals of both teams.

At the extremes, marketing and sales stop talking and both operate in their own worlds. Marketing crafts content that looks and sounds great but may be wide of the mark in customer terms. Meanwhile, sales do their own thing. They pull together their own materials that are filled with powerful and effective messaging but are off brand, often ugly and may only work when delivered by a talented sales professional.

In organisations with outstanding results, a bursting business pipeline and a customer base that feels understood, sales and marketing make love, not war.

Why B2B sales and marketing alignment matters

Alignment is essential for sales and marketing to feel the love. It begins with everyone laying their preconceptions aside and acknowledging a fundamental truth:

Sales know what prospects are asking. Marketing knows how to tell powerful stories.

Collaborating to give target audiences the information, insights, products and services they want depends on the following four steps:

1. Creating unified buyer personas

Sales and marketing must agree on who the ideal customer is. Co-developing personas ensures both teams target and speak to the same audience with consistency and in the language they respond to best.

2. Jointly develop content

Start by talking to top-performing sales professionals to gather sales insights, find out what content they’d like and how they’d use it. Co-create content that addresses real objections and educates buyers in the context of their motivations.

3. Implementing closed-loop reporting

Establish feedback loops to get hard data on results, measuring how marketing activities influence sales outcomes. Use CRM data to refine strategies and optimise content and outreach.

4. Talking regularly

Target audiences’ pain points and motivations shift with the winds of financial, political and cultural change – and frontline sales teams will understand and keep pace. This means marketing and sales conversations must happen regularly so that marketing content always hits the sweet spot.

Create content that marketing AND sales love

Over twenty years ago, asabell began by creating marketing materials directly commissioned by a sales team [KH1] . Aligning the needs of both B2B sales and marketing teams means everyone benefits and both teams want to use the content. We’ve never forgotten our roots, and always champion getting the sales perspective during a briefing process.

Get in touch to talk through our tried-and-tested processes for delivering B2B marketing content that sales teams will be eager to use.