One of the biggest struggles in B2B sales, especially for Human Resource consulting firms, is creating great content that sales teams will actually use. It’s a common frustration: the marketing team spends weeks developing a new video or a blog series, only to find that their sales team ignores it.
For business owners and HR consultants, this isn’t just a waste of resources; it’s a missed revenue opportunity. When your sales team doesn’t use your marketing assets, they are often left improvising their messaging, leading to inconsistency in how your value is communicated to prospective clients. This is where many strategies focused on inbound marketing for HR fail to reach their full potential.
Table of Contents
- Content Format vs. Consumption Habits
- Building Stronger Feedback Loops Between Marketing and Sales
- How to Build Content Based on Primary Research
- Training Your Sales Team for Relationship Selling
The reality is that if a sales team is not utilizing the content generated in support of their efforts by the marketing team, it means the content has not been formatted or tailored for the consumption habits of the sales rep’s lead buyer, decision-maker, or key stakeholder.
To fix this, we need to move beyond viewing content as just “marketing” and start treating it as sales enablement.
Content Format vs. Consumption Habits
I have worked on marketing teams both in-house and as an agency owner, and I have worked with directors, sales representatives, and business owners who carry out their own sales efforts. In almost every case where content is being ignored, the issue is not the quality of the information, it is the delivery.
An example I often see is a sales representative sharing a link to a blog article in an email outreach, when the prospective buyer’s consumption habits are strictly through social media. The buyer doesn’t have time to read a 1,500-word article, but they would engage with a concise direct message on LinkedIn. This also means the content marketing team needs to convey their sales representative’s key arguments in social media posts formatted for the buyer’s platform of choice.
Effective inbound marketing for HR requires this specific attention to detail, ensuring that pitch decks, video explainers, and SEO web copy all loop back to the same messaging the company uses online and offline.
Building Stronger Feedback Loops Between Marketing and Sales
In my experience, the best results in the area of new client acquisition happen when there is a strong and recurring communication between the sales and marketing departments.
For this to happen, leaders of both teams need to encourage the active communication of their subordinates amongst each other. But more importantly, you must hold recurring touch-bases where the marketing and sales directors have the opportunity to discuss departmental priorities and concerns without the presence of other department heads. Basically, these directors need to be able to safely compare notes.
The nature of sales and marketing alike is the constant evolution of each team’s understanding of buying behavior and decision-making for different accounts. This means there needs to be agility in the feedback loop.
If a sales rep hears a new objection on Tuesday, marketing needs to know by Wednesday so they can adjust their content calendar and advertising copy.
Read our article, A 2026 Marketing Strategy for Human Resource Companies, for a playbook on how to approach the current changes in demand for human resource technology, AI skills-based hiring, and more.
How to Build Content Based on Primary Research
Many sales and marketing teams have limited experience in scaling content for use in the long-term. They often guess at what topics will resonate without validation that those topics are top of mind among prospective buyers.
Together, marketing and sales leaders need to figure out their primary sales arguments based on two sources:
- Primary Research: Insights derived directly from sales conversations with clients.
- Secondary Information: Insights from campaign data and organic topics and queries.
When working with business owners directly, or in the past with sales managers, I would have conversations with the sales reps to understand exactly what clients were asking. But I didn’t stop there. I also joined many sales calls wherein a rep conducted a virtual demo, and I listened to hours of recorded sales calls.
This is the critical information necessary to compile online topics for:
- Social media content
- Email nurture sequences
- Video content
- Sales pitch decks
- Outbound email scripts
- Phone scripts
This information is also critical for handling objections proactively through online content produced by the marketing team. If you hear a prospect hesitate about pricing on a call, your next piece of content should address the ROI of your services to handle that objection before the next call happens. This alignment is the backbone of successful inbound marketing for HR.
Training Your Sales Team for Relationship Selling
Once you have the right content, you need to train the team on how to deliver it. Sales teams nowadays, depending on your client industry, need training in social selling.
Social selling is the process whereby sales representatives engage with and meet prospective customers online. For B2B, this is critical because it navigates into relationship selling, which for some industries is the most effective approach.
Relationship selling is dependent upon a sales representative’s ability to act in a consultancy role for the buyer. They aren’t just “selling”; they are advising. When marketing provides them with high-value, properly formatted content, the sales rep can share that content to build trust and authority, rather than just asking for a meeting.
Operationalize Your Inbound Marketing Content
We operationalize content marketing strategies tailored for human resource companies, so that your sales team has a repository of highly-engaging content across video, text, image, and audio with validated success online.
Our goal for you: a stabilized sales pipeline both in leads and recurring revenue.
Book a no-obligation, free 30-minute Zoom consultation with me, Laura Bailey-Wickins, GrowthSpurt Strategies agency founder.
