How To Stop Producing Marketing Collateral That Gets Politely Ignored

James De Roche on why most marketing collateral never makes it into a sales conversation, and what to do instead.

James De Roche is the Founder of Practical Revenue, focused on practical RevOps for service-firm founders ready to stop babysitting deals. He contributed written commentary to The Launch That Almost Worked after reviewing the survey findings.

James did not soften his read of the research. When I sent him the findings, he sent back commentary that opened with two words: “Not surprising.” Below are selected insights from that exchange, edited for length and flow.

75% of sales professionals say they could manage without marketing. You called this unsurprising. Why?

This isn’t surprising. Most marketers work in a silo from sales, doing ad hoc tasks with little understanding of buyer or committee needs. They’re busy, but ineffective.

Most marketing collateral gets politely ignored by sales teams. There’s too much at stake for sales in the field to inject something they consider as ‘noise’ (created by marketing) into the conversation.

It’s interesting for the marketer because it’s new to them, but the sales team is having conversations at layers deeper than this with experts and hearing questions that don’t align with these assets. So sharing them would be completely irrelevant — and would betray a lack of expertise that would make the buyer doubt the firm.

Two-thirds of organizations say misalignment has caused a missed opportunity or failed launch. What does that actually cost?

Sales needs proof. Without it, they have to reinvent the wheel on every call and trust their buyer can sell internally. That’s rare. And it’s why most deals go from enthusiastic champion to ghosting.

What’s causing the disconnect is that marketing is often evaluated by activity. The busier they are, the more “valuable” they appear to the business. Taking time to observe sales calls, interview customers, and better understand the market is non-existent in many organizations.

Sales data is non-existent in most orgs too. They use the CRM as a project management tool, occasionally assigning tasks to themselves. They don’t go through the trouble to collect the necessary client data to provide sales insights to the org. So you can’t trust those tools.

You fix this by asking your sales team to capture better insights. You give them clear guardrails for what data they need to add at each stage. With call recording and AI note taking, it’s very easy to drop summaries into your CRM that marketing can read. Bonus points if your team takes ten minutes after a sales call to update the CRM and add relevant quotes from the call.

You also need to give your marketing team time to understand your customers: pain points, blockers, the cost of inaction, risk, urgency, stakes. At the very least, they need time to review sales calls and CRM data. Better firms have their marketers on sales calls with sellers. This will keep them from guessing at what sales teams need.

Both sides have to feed the loop.

Less than half of sales teams get coordinated launch support before go-live. What’s driving that?

Usually, a product will get delayed but the launch date doesn’t move. The org puts 90% of its time and effort behind the go-live. And the window for working on the messaging collapses.

There’s so much pressure on “getting this thing to market so we can start earning revenue” that messaging, proof, objections, and sales prep get compressed.

We were talking with a firm that invested seven figures into an app based on a service. They had a week or two to prep the GTM assets. They were in the hole with the app and needed to start seeing a return. But that meant they had no testimonials, case studies, or other enablement materials ready to support it.

Without voice-of-customer data, you won’t stand out. Your sales and marketing team will rely on generalizations and summaries that sound cool internally, but buyers just don’t care.

We’re seeing more firms cobble together something with GPT. They think it’s unique. They don’t realize ten other firms are doing the same, so their buyer has heard the same stuff before and they’ve learned to tune it out.

The research lists the top assets sales needs: value props, competitive comparisons, decks. What’s wrong with most of them?

Most decks are me-focused instead of expertise-led. We’ve seen firms spend 15–20 minutes of a 30-minute call talking about how awesome they are. You see buyers tune out. They’re checking emails, barely paying attention. They’re polite, but the deal doesn’t go anywhere.

The usual suspects for sales assets — pitch decks, case studies, thought leadership — work. It’s just that the people creating them have forgotten about the buyer. The whole goal of any asset is to make your business the obvious choice while helping your buyer sell internally. 80% of the sales process happens when the buyer leaves the room and tries to convince their team.

Most assets don’t make it easier for the buyer to do that. They lack specific examples of projects, data on impact, granular details, and language the buyer understands.

I was once working with a due-diligence firm where one of the SMEs said, “I’ve been in this field for 20 years. Takes me about three seconds to sniff out marketing collateral. And when I smell it, I skip it.”

Your buyer wants to see your scars. They want to know you’ve helped their firm type solve a similar problem with a repeatable approach, so they’re not paying you to be a lab rat. The more case studies and thought leadership that illustrate that, the easier it is to say yes.

It doesn’t actually take that much to stand out, though. A lot of firms are using GPT to create copy-paste content, trying to pass it off as expertise. And it doesn’t pass the sniff test. So your buyers ignore it.

Customer success stories top the list of what actually closes deals. What makes one work?

We find case studies are the most effective. For products, they’re better told from the buyer’s POV. For services, from the project lead’s POV.

Every case study should start with an SME interview. Your marketing team can’t guess at the project from proposals and emails. They need to speak with someone who oversaw the project. That means a 60-minute interview with someone who understands the business impact of the project.

For product-led companies, you interview your customers. Slightly different questions, but same goal and approach.

Next, your case study needs to follow a different format. It should read like a news article rather than a “Challenge, Solutions, Results” piece.

The format:

• Captivating title that summarizes the business impact with specifics
• Summary that’s 1–2 sentences long
• Challenge
• Solutions
• Process
• Roadblocks
• Tech stack (if applicable)
• Results
• Next steps
• Client overview

This organizes the case study by most important details first. No one cares about the client until they determine whether or not the project is relevant to them. Follow that flow.

Your case studies need to cover urgency, stakes, cost of inaction, and risk. This grounds the project in the buyer’s world. That’s what they’re trying to overcome before they buy from you.

And you need granularity. It’s super easy to fake a sales asset with GPT. You can’t fake granularity. These case studies are 1,000–1,300 words long. They’re specific. It’s clear to whoever reads them that your firm can do the work.

Sales points to marketing execution when launches fail: poor positioning, weak enablement. Only a quarter point to poor product-market fit. What’s your read?

It’s easier to blame marketing than the product. (But sellers still blame the product in my experience — they just do it through resignations rather than trying to convince the team that they need to fix the product.)

That said, most marketing is ineffective. It’s not grounded in any real customer data. And most marketers don’t have sales experience, so they focus on the creative elements as opposed to the sales effectiveness of assets.

Marketers have to take a step back and try to empathize with buyers.

There is always a risk in buying new tech. You can lose your job or a promotion by being someone who pushed for a tool that made the business worse — either due to weak features or adoption. So every time a buyer makes a B2B purchase, they’re betting their career trajectory on success.

There are always competing priorities. You may want to make a change but it ends up at the back of the line because of macroeconomic conditions or other priorities or even your seniority in the firm.

Then there’s most businesses’ biggest enemy: the status quo. A lot of people are afraid of messing up (FOMU). So it’s easy to stick with the status quo and keep your job.

When marketing ignores the buyer’s reality and prioritizes creativity over risk reduction, they’re making cool-looking assets that buyers ignore. They go, “That’s nice, but I have 100 other things I’m dealing with and don’t have time for this right now.”

Sellers know this. But they can’t directly tell marketing. So they politely ignore their assets and create their own — while working 5x harder to close deals because they don’t have the resources they need to do the job.

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