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“Marketing says one thing, sales says another” is so common it’s become a joke.  The old-school stereotype of sales thinking marketing is out of touch and marketing thinking sales doesn’t understand marketing is old and tired—and it’s your biggest sales hurdle. What Happens When Sales and Marketing Tell Different Stories Marketing and sales folks approach things differently. Generally, sales professionals are gifted at peopling. They can read rooms, facial expressions, and co

Effective ways to build, protect, and keep writers in environments that aren’t built for them Agencies and in-house teams struggle to retain copywriters. It’s not because writers are flaky or precious—we’re actually pretty dang tough and dependable—but because the environments we’re placed in often work against how creative work actually gets done. One company I worked for cycled through 11 writers in eight years on a three-person team. That’s not a hiring problem. That’s a s

Feel like the results from your content are a little meh? Or worse—they went from working to tanking? The content efforts that worked in the past are starting to fall flat and wane. Get yourself out of the keyword laser focus, and learn how to tell your company’s unique story across all of your channels. Why Storytelling Is the Marketing Strategy You Need to Improve Sales Throughout the roughly 5 billion years I’ve been in the working world, I’ve been in the content world. I

Branding is messy. Brand messaging is messier . Words are personal. Opinions are strong. And how you talk to your customers is one of the most important drivers of your business’s success. Yet too often, ego, inertia, groupthink, and a fixation on features derail what could have been a transformative messaging exercise. Let’s get real about reasons your B2B brand messaging isn’t working—and how to get out of your own way so your brand can finally sound as good as the value yo

If you are using or planning on using generative AI to create marketing content, be especially careful: So much can go wrong. Here are some of the problems you might encounter that can waste time and damage your organization's reputation.

As the term “fractional” has emerged as a legitimate and important talent strategy, confusion about what it really means has also increased. Have you heard—or thought—this: “Isn’t fractional the same as freelance?” My short answer to this question (buckle up, the rest of the article will cover the long answer): No! Yes, fractional is technically freelance work. When you hire fractional creatives, you are contracting them—instead of hiring them permanently—to complete tasks fo

You may be doing everything correctly from the strategy side with your content but still not see an ROI. Could a problem reside in the content itself? Here are five more things that might be holding your content back, with strategies on how to overcome those issues:

Nothing is more frustrating for marketing and sales teams than putting resources and effort toward a content strategy, only to not get a...

Generative AI often gets a bad rap as a tool to help produce written content. Unfortunately, some of the bad rap is warranted .  However,...

"Fractional" is more than just a trendy term—it's a real strategy to help in-house marketing teams, SMBs, and agencies expand their...

Be especially careful when using generative AI to write content. Here are 13 perils to consider when using LLMs to help with copy.

We started Unretained with a simple belief: content should work harder and smarter to drive more sales through your pipeline.