How to Equip a Sales Team (Without Becoming an Order Taker)
This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.
There is a way for marketing and sales to work together – really well. Marketing identifies what sales needs, puts together a selection of helpful resources, and regularly supplies them to support closing deals. Sales trusts what marketing creates, makes good use of the resources, and gives feedback to improve the next set. Both groups work toward the same aim and feel that they matter.
However, most marketers’ experiences are very different.
Sales sends a Slack: “Hi, could you create a one-pager for this client by Thursday?” Marketing stops what it is doing and makes one. Then, a week later, another request. And another. All of them urgent, all individual, and all pulling the marketing team away from the planned, bigger jobs they ought to be doing. Marketing becomes a design service, but still with the title of ‘strategy’. The forward-thinking work stops. The content plan falls further and further behind. The campaigns don’t move.
This isn’t a sales issue; it’s a systems issue. And the solution isn’t to push back on sales – it’s to build an enablement system so valuable that one-off requests become the exception, not the norm.
Why does the reactive cycle begin?
The reactive cycle generally begins for one of three reasons:
The resources marketing has already made don’t fit what sales truly needs. The one-pagers are too broad. The case studies don’t address the right sectors. The competitor comparisons are out of date. The demo presentation tells a marketing story, not a sales story. When the standard resources aren’t useful, sales finds ways around them – meaning individual requests to marketing or, even worse, creating their own resources without marketing’s help.
There isn’t a shared understanding of what is in the resource library. Marketing has created helpful materials, but salespeople don’t know they’re there or can’t locate them. The resources sit in a folder structure that makes sense to marketing, but not to a representative who needs something during a call. Being able to find things is a problem people don’t give enough thought to. If sales can’t find a resource in 30 seconds, it doesn’t really exist.
The feedback system is not working. Marketing makes resources based on what it thinks sales needs. Sales uses them (or doesn’t) but rarely says what is working, what’s missing, or what is out of date. Marketing keeps producing assets without any real understanding. The gap between what’s available and what’s useful grows over time.
The forward-thinking enablement system
The alternative to passively taking orders is a forward-thinking enablement system – a deliberate, planned approach to understanding sales needs, anticipating them in advance, and keeping everything up to date.
Here’s how I create one:
Step 1: Audit what already exists and what is used. Before making anything new, find out what is already in the library and whether sales actually uses it. Speak to representatives directly – not just their managers. Ask them: Which resources do you send to clients? Which ones do you avoid? What do you wish you had? What questions do clients ask that you don’t have a good answer for?
This discussion is often surprising. You’ll discover that half the library isn’t used, a few resources are heavily relied on, and there are large gaps the marketing team didn’t know about.
Step 2: Build the main library around the sales process. Map the sales process and identify what is needed at each point:
Early stage (awareness/discovery) – company summary, sector-specific benefits, thought leadership content to build trust.
Mid stage (evaluation/comparison) – product one-pagers, competitor comparisons, case studies with results data, demo resources.
Late stage (decision/close) – ROI calculators or proofs, implementation guides, details of client companies who would be happy to be contacted, and plan templates.
Each stage has specific needs. Structuring the library to match the sales process – not product details or promotions – ensures the materials fit how sales actually proceeds.
Step 3: Make the library easy to search. Arrange items by where the sale stands, not by promotion or when they were made. Use names sales understands – not “Q3_Campaign_OnePager_v4_FINAL” but “Product X – One Sheet – Enterprise.” Think about where the library lives: a shared folder, a sales enablement platform, or part of the company intranet. Wherever it is, the sales team should be able to find the right item in less than a minute.
Step 4: Set a schedule for updates. The library isn’t created once and left; it’s a living system. Plan a quarterly review to find out-of-date items, add new pieces based on recent product changes or market shifts, and remove anything that is no longer accurate. This schedule prevents the slow decline in usefulness that makes sales stop believing in the library.
Step 5: Establish a way to collect feedback. Make a simple, easy method for sales to tell marketing what works and what doesn’t. This could be a quarterly meeting, a shared feedback form, or a Slack channel. The format matters less than the frequency. The aim is to ensure marketing builds for actual needs, not assumptions.
Dealing with special asks
Even with a strong library, special requests will occur. A potential buyer has a particular situation that doesn’t fit the usual one-sheet. A deal needs a custom competitor comparison. A presentation for leaders needs to be tailored to a specific account.
These asks are fair. The problem isn’t whether to meet them – it’s how to stop them from consuming all of marketing’s time.
Sort by impact. Not all special asks are the same. A request linked to a six-figure deal in the final phase gets priority. A request for a slightly different version of an existing slide gets a polite pointer to the asset that already exists. Having a clear hierarchy of importance – even a rough one – helps marketing allocate effort without defaulting to “everything is urgent.”
Turn recurring custom work into templates. If the same sort of special ask comes up again and again – one-sheets for a certain industry, collections of case studies for a certain type of buyer, tailored demo decks – that’s a signal to create a template. A version with blanks to fill in that sales can customize themselves (within brand guidelines) is faster for everyone and reduces marketing bottlenecks.
Set expectations. Marketing should have a clearly stated turnaround time for special asks – not to be rigid, but to be reliable. Standard requests take five working days. Urgent requests take two and need a manager’s approval. This stops the pattern where every ask is framed as urgent because there’s no cost to doing so.
The line that protects planning
The reason this matters beyond the daily work is planning. When marketing is consumed by last-minute enablement requests, the work that sets direction stops. The content plan stalls. The campaign calendar slips. The long-term brand-building work – the work that creates demand and position in the market – is repeatedly postponed in favour of the next ask from sales.
This isn’t sales’ fault. Sales is doing its job – trying to close deals with the best materials it can get. The responsibility falls to marketing leaders to build a system that serves sales well while protecting time for strategic planning.
The best sales enablement doesn’t wait to be asked. It anticipates what sales will need and has it ready before the deal gets to that stage. And when the system is strong enough, the last-minute asks shrink – not because marketing is saying no, but because the planned library is already saying yes before the question is asked.
