According to the Highspot State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, revenue teams spend an average of 440 hours per year - 11 full working weeks - searching for or creating content. At the same time, 65% of materials that marketing produces for sales are never used. Companies with formalised enablement programmes close 49% more forecasted deals - a gap that can no longer be explained by lead quality or salesperson skill.
In EU B2B, the problem compounds: long deal cycles (6-12 months), multiple stakeholders on the client side, the need for localised content across different markets. Our team sees this repeatedly in CRM projects with European companies: salespeople lose time not in negotiations, but hunting for the right case study or an up-to-date battle card before a call. This is not a discipline problem - it is a systems problem.
Below is what marketing specifically must give sales, why it usually breaks down, and how to build enablement that actually moves win rate, not just the document count.
Why marketing and sales speak different languages
In most B2B companies, marketing and sales work in parallel rather than together. Marketing counts MQLs and impressions, sales counts pipeline and closed deals. At the intersection: mutual grievances - “the leads are low quality” vs “the salespeople can’t sell.”
Sales enablement is the systematic answer to this gap. Not a one-time assist like “here’s a deck for your presentation,” but an ongoing process in which marketing equips sales with tools, data, and content to close deals.
The problem is that most marketing teams understand enablement as creating materials. We made a brochure, recorded a demo video, produced a one-pager - that’s enablement. Reality is more complex.
What sales actually asks for but doesn’t get
Run a survey in your sales team: what prevents closing deals? The answers will be similar regardless of industry.
Current competitive intelligence. Not a general SWOT from last year’s strategy session, but specific answers to objections: “why us and not [competitor X].” The market changes, competitors update products and pricing, and the battle cards in the wiki are two years old. Marketing must update competitive materials at least quarterly.
Case studies from similar companies. “Show me something for a 100-person fintech company in Germany” - that’s not a whim, it’s a legitimate request. The client wants to see themselves in the success story. Marketing often creates generic case studies with anonymized clients that sales can’t use because they’re too abstract.
Understanding what happened to the lead before the first call. Which pages they viewed, which content they downloaded, where they came from. If that’s in the CRM - great. If not - sales calls blind. Integrating marketing automation with the CRM is an enablement task, not just a technical one. If lead behaviour data never reaches the CRM, you are calling blind - more on this in the GA4 vs CRM: where the truth about sales lives article.
Templates for common scenarios. Not a generic “follow-up after demo” email, but specific templates for different situations: follow-up after a demo when the stakeholder “went away to think,” a reactivation email for deals stuck at sixty days, a message for the CFO who wasn’t at the demo but controls the budget.
What marketing creates that nobody uses
The other side: marketing spends resources on materials sales doesn’t use. Why?
First reason - the materials aren’t adapted to the actual client conversation. A beautiful PDF with the value proposition is written in marketing language, not the buyer’s language. The salesperson can’t use it in conversation - too abstract.
Second reason - sales doesn’t know the material exists. A corporate wiki with two hundred documents is not enablement. You need a system where the salesperson at the “demo to proposal” stage sees exactly the materials relevant to that stage.
Third reason - the materials are outdated and sales stopped trusting them. If once it turned out that data in a brochure was inaccurate and the client caught it - the material’s reputation is gone forever.
A practical sales enablement structure
Break enablement down by sales process stage, not by content type.
Prospecting/outbound stage - what’s needed: personalized sequence templates by ICP segment, short (one to two sentence) value hooks for each segment, industry data for creating relevant outreach.
Discovery stage - what’s needed: a list of qualification questions, scoring logic (what makes a lead qualified), understanding of typical pain points by segment.
Demo stage - what’s needed: a demo script adapted for different ICP segments, objections and responses, competitive comparisons.
Proposal/negotiation stage - what’s needed: proposal templates, an ROI calculator, case studies by segment, battle cards against competitors.
Closing/onboarding stage - what’s needed: a clear description of the onboarding process (this eases the client’s anxiety before signing), reference clients available for a call, contract templates.
How to measure enablement effectiveness
The simplest metric: material usage. If email templates are used by salespeople - good. If a document was downloaded zero times in a quarter - either it’s not needed or nobody knows it exists.
A more valuable metric: impact on win rate by stage. If after introducing a specific battle card the win rate at the negotiation stage went from forty-five percent to fifty-five percent - that’s enablement that works.
The marketing-sales connection in B2B is a competitive advantage. Companies where this connection is systematic close deals faster and with fewer losses at the negotiation stage. This isn’t a soft metric - it’s revenue.