Why Your Sales Team Is Your Most Underused Marketing Channel

And how to arm them with the right story

Sustainability companies tend to have a lot to talk about! Maybe your product has a lower carbon footprint. Maybe you've spent years developing better materials, collecting environmental data, earning certifications or building technology that helps companies meet increasingly complex sustainability requirements. You know the acronyms, the standards, the regulations and the technical details inside and out.

But eventually, someone has to explain why any of that matters to a customer. And very often, that person is in sales.

We spend a lot of time thinking about marketing channels, websites, email, LinkedIn, events, webinars, PR… but we don't always talk about the people who have actual conversations with prospective customers every day.

Your sales team may be one of your most important marketing channels. And in many companies, it's one of the least strategically used.

Your sales team is telling your story, whether you've equipped them to or not

Think about what happens after marketing does its job. Someone sees your company at Greenbuild, downloads a report, reads an article, and maybe, eventually, schedules a call.

Now the marketing message becomes a conversation. What does your salesperson say when the prospect asks what makes your product different? Can they explain why a sustainability director should care about it? What about a procurement lead, architect, facilities executive or CFO? Can they connect the environmental benefit to the business problem that a particular person is trying to solve?

The people inside the company know so much about their product that they naturally explain what it is rather than what it does for the customer.

So the conversation quickly becomes about carbon calculations, certifications, dashboards, material attributes, APIs, reporting frameworks or whatever else the company has spent years developing.

Those things are important but they aren’t necessarily the reason someone buys.

A contractor may care about embodied carbon, but they may also care that their team is spending hours chasing documentation across dozens of projects. A manufacturer may have an excellent EPD, but the architect needs to understand why specifying that product helps them meet a project requirement. A sustainability platform may support five different reporting frameworks, but the executive buying it may really care about getting reliable portfolio data without adding more work for their team.

The technical story and the buying story aren't the same thing and Marketing's job is to help sales connect the two.

Give your sales team a story, not another stack of marketing collateral

When companies talk about sales enablement, the solution is often more stuff: another deck, another one-pager, another case study or another folder of marketing materials.

Those things are only useful if there's a clear story underneath them. Your sales team should understand the customer's problem, why that problem matters now, what happens if they don't solve it and what becomes possible when they do. They should know which outcomes matter to different buyers and have the proof to support those claims.

This looks like making sure that whether someone talks to sales, visits your website, sees you at a conference or hears your CEO speak, they encounter the same fundamental story.

This matters particularly in sustainability because buying decisions often involve multiple audiences with very different priorities. You don't need a completely different story for every single audience, but sales needs to know how to connect the same value proposition to what each person actually cares about.

Sales also knows things marketing needs to know

The relationship shouldn't only run in one direction. Marketing can give sales a stronger story, but sales has something equally valuable to give marketing: direct access to what's happening in the market.

Your sales team hears the questions prospects ask over and over. They know which claims make someone lean in and which ones get no reaction. They know where buyers get confused, which competitors come up, what causes deals to stall and what prospects need in order to get internal approval. That's incredibly valuable marketing intelligence!

If every prospect asks how your solution will work with their existing systems, that question probably belongs on your website. If buyers consistently struggle to justify the investment internally, they may need an ROI story or an executive business case.

And if sales discovers that customers are buying your product for a reason you barely mention in your marketing, pay attention.

Create marketing that sales actually wants to use

One of the simplest ways to evaluate marketing content is to ask whether a salesperson would voluntarily send it to a prospect.

There's no shortage of content explaining why climate change matters or announcing another sustainability commitment. But buyers often need much more practical help. If marketing creates useful answers, sales suddenly has a reason to keep showing up in a prospect's inbox without saying, "Just checking in."

Instead, they can say, "You mentioned this was something your team was struggling with. We put together something that might help." That's marketing doing its job.

Don't overlook sales as a distribution channel

Your sales team also has something most corporate marketing channels don't: actual relationships. This doesn't mean turning every salesperson into a LinkedIn influencer or requiring them to repost everything the company publishes; rather, it means giving them useful ideas worth talking about.

If your company publishes new research on embodied carbon, give sales the two findings their customers will care about most. If there's an important change coming with LEED v5, explain what it means for the people they talk to. If you've learned something interesting from working across 500 projects, turn that insight into something they can share.

Marketing brings the insight and the story. Sales brings the relationships and the context.

The real opportunity is creating a feedback loop

The strongest sales and marketing teams aren't simply "aligned." They continuously make each other better. Marketing gives sales a clear story and useful tools. Sales takes that story into the market and hears how customers respond. Those conversations come back to marketing, where they inform better messaging, stronger content and sometimes even product strategy.

Then sales goes back into the market with a better story.

That feedback loop is particularly important right now in sustainability, where the market is changing quickly. New standards, regulations, technologies and reporting expectations are constantly shifting what customers care about. Messaging that worked two years ago may not reflect what buyers are worried about today.

Your sales team knows when that happens because they're hearing it in real time.

Before you spend more money reaching buyers, make sure you're ready for the conversation

Companies spend a lot of money trying to generate awareness and leads. But getting someone's attention is only the beginning. Eventually, a real person has to explain why your sustainability solution is worth buying.

If that story is overly technical, inconsistent or disconnected from the customer's actual priorities, adding another campaign or marketing channel isn't going to solve the problem. Sometimes one of the biggest marketing opportunities is already sitting inside your company, talking to your customers every day. Give your sales team a story they can use. Give them marketing that helps them sell. And just as importantly, listen to what they're hearing in return.