Should I get sales to help with creating content?

You should definitely involve your sales team in copy / content generation. Their insight can give you information on the issues of importance conveyed by your customers. I would also sync with product management as often as possible to ensure the points you focus on in your messaging are those which actually matter to the customer.

If you're not seeking input from anyone who touches prospects and clients, you're missing out on valuable information. As Stephen points out, you need all the information you can get.

And you need the input from other parts of the compnay for more than just their insights into the needs, wants, and motivations of your prospects; those who must react and work with the materials you produce--sales, production, shipping, whomever--must buy into the piece you produce--if they don't, you could end up with more problems than a weak marketing piece.

Even if you need to retain the right to state *what* the content is for accuracy purposes, the sales team can prove invaluable to help you with *how* to craft the content. It makes sense that they would have a better feel for the audience and to what their ears are attenuated. A definite yes for collaboration.

I'm going to take the contrarian point of view here.

In my experience, the sales team is not very good at creating marketing content. They tend to be myopic, focused on what they think the clients want to hear, full of negatives, and very literal in their interpretation of marketing and advertising. So, I don't think they're the best source for marketing conntent.

At the same time, they are an excellent source of information on client needs, objections, and concerns. So, my suggestion would be to use the sales team to help you develop your marketing strategy and communications brief. Then, go develop your content using their input.

Hi Brianna,

The answer is yes, you will get great content from Sales. But here's an angle that I found to be very enlightening and enriching when I was a corporate marketing leader:

The best way to get/see/feel/experience "content" from sales is on SALES CALLS.

Listening and participating in a conversation with a sales rep AND a customer will give you significantly more dimension and context versus, say, a one on one conversation with a rep. Similarly, go to customer service and listen in on client calls. Go to Technical support and do the same. Even experiment with your A/R group as they talk with customers. In all cases, you get a triangulated interaction (a customer, an employee, a specific topic) that will give you more perspective and content.

All the best,
Geoff

The short answer is, "Yes. Absolutely." The smaller the company, the more important input from Sales is. I would add, though, that you want to be selective which sales people you align with. Sales management will often try to pair you with the most junior person. Their reasoning being that senior Sales stars' time is much more valuable and should be spent interfacing with customers. If you have to go on sales calls w/ the stars to get time with them... do that. I've found that the calls themselves may not be terribly enlightening. They typically are either too superficial (early in the buy cycle) or deep in the details (current clients) to offer much in the way of information that can be leveraged for core messaging. BUT... in the car between appointments you can learn a lot about the difference between what Product Management says about your products and services, and how they're perceived by prospects and clients. You want to unearth the questions and objections sales stars hear, and how they answer and overcome them. That's the gold worth digging for.