The alignment of sales and marketing is often a hard task, mainly due to time constraints. Below are our account profiling slides that without fail help a sales leader or executive to plan their account and then see the need for a next step with content. 

I can provide more insight into how to use these or simply read this post by Freddy. 

As commented by a senior sales leader this week during a workshop 'This is a much more efficient and simpler Heiman Blue Sheet Overview' (to provide some credability).

In summary the reason this works is because sales want to advance their deal, they also need to know who it is that they know, don’t know, need to influence, need to build relationships with to help influence others etc this is the exact information marketing teams require to be able to put content to work effectively. 

It is important to note here that research (Forrester, Gartner, LinkedIn), marketers, sales and business leaders believe that content should be highly expert, timely, relevant, personalised and delivered by a trusted source to drive business outcomes. 

Therefore a combination of content can then be decided on. For example:

• if your target is 50 CFO’s of leading manufacturers perhaps a roundtable discussion is a good long-term plan.
• Whilst you nurture the CFO relationship and those around them who you need to be champions a use for a digestible, digital and expert content will become of value. 
• This digital content can then form part of your wider employee advocacy plan which will be well received by the wider team since they know it is being used to advance a deal. 
• The digital content can form targeted newsletters and drive inbound enquiries. 

This is just a high-level overview but an achievement is that you have made both sales and marketing engaged in a joint approach with clear business outputs.