It sometimes feels that some B2B organisations still think of content as something that happens before sales get involved. Awareness, consideration, nurture, etc. Then the baton is passed to sales and content becomes background noise.
That is not how buying actually works in reality.
Gartner’s Buying Group research has shown repeatedly that complex B2B purchases are made by groups of six to ten people, each with different concerns, risks, and success criteria. Progress doesn’t really stall because the buyers lack information but because they lack confidence and internal alignment.
Content is one of the main tools buying groups can use to try and nudge that alignment along. Between meetings, in internal threads, and in private preparation.
How buying groups actually use content in live deals
Once a deal is active, content is used to:
Sense check what sales has said
Prepare for internal conversations
Build a shared understanding of the problem
Reduce personal and professional risk
Validate that a choice is safe and defensible
This is what Gartner calls ‘sense making’. It is the process by which groups interpret information, align their views, and become confident enough to commit.
Content that does not help with sense making rarely helps close deals and probably just irritate the buyer.
Map content to real buying group roles
Gartner’s Buying Group model identifies several roles that appear consistently in complex purchases. For practical purposes, they can be grouped into three clusters.
The economic buyer
The senior executive accountable for business impact. They care about strategic fit, financial outcomes, and whether the decision looks sensible to their peers and board. For them, content must articulate commercial logic, market context, and long-term direction. If you can get them to read it.
The technical and functional evaluators
The people who will live with the solution. CIOs, Heads of Ops, Architects, Practitioners. They care about feasibility, integration, trade-offs, and whether your organisation truly understands their reality. They value depth, realism, and evidence from the field.
The risk and governance influencers
Procurement, Legal, Security, Compliance, Finance. They care about exposure, process, and personal accountability. Their job is to stop bad decisions, not to enable bold ones. They look for reassurance, standards, proof, and precedent.
Reality check
If your content only speaks to the economic story and ignores technical or risk concerns, consensus could collapse later in the deal.
Align content to deal stages, not funnel stages
In live opportunities, content plays different roles at different moments.
Early stage
Reframing and problem definition.
Content that helps the group agree what the real issue is and why change matters.
Mid stage
Evaluation and comparison.
Content that explains approaches, options, trade-offs, and implementation realities.
Late stage
Validation and risk reduction.
Content that proves safety, credibility, and that others have succeeded without disaster. Are you the safe pair of hands? Are you going to pick up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday if the shit hits the fan?
Most B2B content strategies are heavily weighted to early stage and dangerously thin where deals are actually won or lost. Marketers often struggle to go deep into the sales cycle but you could argue that’s where sales need us most.
What content sales actually use
Content that supports deals typically has these characteristics:
It addresses real objections raised in meetings
It is written in the language prospects use, not internal product language
It contains practical detail, not just positioning
It shows what good and bad look like, not just success stories
It is easy to share internally and easy to quote
This is not brand storytelling, the high-level guff that adds value to no one. It is commercial reassurance.
A simple example in practice
Imagine a complex technology services deal in financial services.
The CIO is concerned about transformation risk and a key part of their plan falling over.
The Head of Ops worries about disruption and knock on effects of not doing things fast enough or doing things badly.
Procurement focuses on contractual exposure.
Security wants proof of maturity.
A content set that genuinely supports the deal might include:
An executive brief on how similar firms managed change without destabilising operations
A practical integration guide written by delivery leaders, in their language
A case study that openly discusses what went wrong and how it was fixed
A security and compliance overview mapped to regulatory language
Each piece speaks to a different fear. Together they help the group say yes.
How to organise content so sales can actually use it
The strongest organisations:
Map content to buying group roles
Tag assets by objection and decision stage
Train sales on when to use what, and why
Review which assets appear in progressing deals
Retire or rewrite content that never features in real conversations
This turns content from a library into a decision support system.
How to measure contribution without pretending attribution
You will not get clean last click revenue attribution. That is not how complex buying works.
Instead, we need to look for:
Content presence in progressing opportunities
Stakeholder engagement across buying groups
Reduced repetition of the same objections
Shorter time between deal stages
Sales feedback on prospect confidence and preparedness (key internally!)
This is what influenced pipeline and opportunity velocity look like in practice.
Reality check
If your best content never appears in live sales conversations, it is not doing the job you think it is.
The simple rule to remember
In our B2B world, content does not exist to generate traffic.It exists to reduce risk, build confidence, and help groups of people make hard decisions together.
If it does not support sense making and consensus, it is noise. And the one thing our buyers and marketing in general, need is yet more noise.
Call to action
If you want content to help win deals, stop planning around formats and start planning around decisions.
Map your buying groups.
Map their fears, questions, and internal politics.
Map where confidence breaks down.
Then build content that helps them make sense of what they are about to commit to.
If you want help turning your content into a system that supports real commercial decisions rather than a publishing machine, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
