Ask most companies where their marketing messages come from and you get some version of: we tested. We worked with a consultant. Brought in an agency. Or just took a stab at it.
Which is fine. Except the people who actually know what your customers think were not in that room.
Your sales team hears the same objection forty times a month. They know where a deal stalls, what makes someone finally say yes, and which competitor keeps coming up.
Your support team knows what people get stuck on. The question that comes in every week. The part of your product nobody understands until someone walks them through it.
None of that makes it to marketing.
So marketing writes from assumptions. Educated ones, maybe. Still assumptions. And then everybody wonders why the content isn’t landing.
I see this in almost every company I walk into. Not because anybody’s doing anything wrong. Sales isn’t hiding the objection, they handled it and moved on to the next call. Support closed the ticket. It’s Tuesday, everyone’s busy, and nobody’s sitting around thinking “the marketing person would want to know this.”
But it’s the difference between content that resonates and content that has good intentions.
If your marketing is being made by an agency, they aren’t on your sales calls. They can’t be. They get a brief, maybe a quarterly check-in, and they build from whatever you managed to explain in an hour.
If it’s a junior person on your team, they’re often not invited either. They’re getting handed tasks, not context. A lot of them have never listened to a full sales conversation.
That’s not a talent problem. It’s an access problem. You cannot write from a conversation you never heard.
And it’s the quiet reason so much marketing feels generic. It was made by someone who’s never heard your customer say a word.
It shows up in a few places, and none of them look like a communication issue on the surface.
Your messaging describes what you think is valuable instead of what buyers say is valuable. Those are rarely the same thing.
Your content answers questions nobody asked, while the question support fields every week is nowhere on your site.
Your sales team quietly stops using the materials marketing made, because they don’t reflect the conversations they’re actually having. Then marketing wonders why nothing gets used.
And your objection handling lives entirely in your reps’ heads, which means every new hire relearns it from scratch.
None of that reads as “we have an internal communication problem.” It reads as “marketing isn’t working.”
Not a new tool. Not a Slack channel. Nobody reads the Slack channel.
Get whoever makes your marketing into the sales conversation. Listening is enough. One call a month, or recordings if that’s easier, or fifteen minutes with the sales team where the only question is “what are people saying right now.”
Then ask support the same thing. What did people struggle with this month. What did you have to explain more than once.
Write it down somewhere the marketing person can actually get to it.
That’s it. It’s not sophisticated and it’s not expensive and it’s easy to miss.
If you work with an outside partner, this is a reasonable thing to build into how you work together. Give them access to recordings. Put them on a call once a quarter. Most will take it, and the ones who don’t want it are telling you something.
This is the part that determines whether any of it happens.
Nobody’s job description says “make sure marketing hears what customers are saying.” Sales owns closing. Support owns resolving. Marketing owns output. The space between them belongs to no one, so it stays empty.
That’s usually a leadership gap, not a process gap. Someone has to decide this matters, ask for it, and keep asking until it’s normal.
Every company I work with was sitting on a pile of customer intelligence they weren’t using. It’s in call recordings, support tickets, and the heads of people who talk to customers all day.
Your competitors are guessing too. That’s the opportunity.
The company that actually listens to its own front line ends up sounding like it gets people, because it does. That’s not a clever campaign. That’s just paying attention.
If your marketing feels generic and you can’t figure out why, this is usually where I’d start looking. Let’s talk.
Alignment usually means agreeing on lead definitions and handoffs. This is narrower and more practical: getting what customers actually say in front of the people writing your marketing.
Then a standing fifteen minutes with the sales team does most of the work. The point is regular access to what buyers are saying, not the technology you use to capture it.
Share call recordings, or put them on a quarterly call with your sales team. Most partners want it. If yours doesn’t, that tells you something about how they work.
Monthly is plenty for most businesses. Consistency matters more than frequency. Once a quarter still beats never.
Founder, Tara Lilly & Co. · Fractional Marketing Leader
Tara Lilly is the founder of Tara Lilly & Co. and a fractional CMO for B2B companies. She leads strategy and brings a senior team of specialists who use AI to execute. Before starting the company, she spent 15+ years leading marketing teams across credit unions, agencies, and startups, including work on Volvo Trucks North America.
