Corporate Communication · Article 3 of 10

Interview Your Sales Team Before You Write a Word

Every content brief you receive is a translation of a translation. The customer said something to a salesperson, the salesperson summarized it to a manager, the manager compressed it into an email, and the writer received the residue. This article makes the case for going to the source: interviewing your sales team, your channel owners and your colleagues before writing a word. It defines voice of customer research, shows why secondary research produces rewriting instead of writing, and walks through two field cases: an onboarding case study built from three notepads of employee interviews, and a decade of brochures, flyers and video scripts that started outside a sales head’s door. The contrarian argument follows: copying competitor copy never builds a brand. The writers being trained for this discipline were covered in the previous article of this series, and the system they operate inside was covered in the first.

What Is Voice of Customer Research?

The definition draws a hard line between information and insight. Everything available on the internet is good; it is information. Nothing beats primary research. A writer working only from search results is not writing. That writer is rewriting: reassembling what other companies already published, for audiences those companies already understood better.

The line matters commercially because content now carries most of the sale. Gartner research shows B2B buyers spend only 17 percent of their buying journey meeting with suppliers; the rest is self-directed research where the written word does the selling. The words doing that selling should come from the people who hear customers speak, not from page one of a search engine.

Why Does Secondary Research Produce Rewriting, Not Writing?

Secondary research produces rewriting because the source material is already someone else’s output: tried, tested and now blunt. A weapon everyone has copied stops cutting. Marketing, digital or physical, has to evolve with every piece of content, and evolution requires fresh input. Stale content cannot be the primary input for new content.

Editorial quality begins somewhere specific: a set of questions, a chair across from the sales team or the person in charge, and the discipline to listen directly from the horse’s mouth. The information gathered this way is different in kind, not just in degree. It carries the customer’s vocabulary, the objection in its original phrasing, the hesitation the survey never captured.

The cost of skipping this step shows up as inconsistency. Gartner found that 69 percent of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between what a company’s website says and what its sellers say. That gap has one cause: the people writing the website never talked to the people doing the selling. Buyers read the gap as untrustworthiness, and the transaction absorbs the risk.

Case Study: The Day I Shut the Laptop Lid

At a learning and development company, I was leading a content team producing case studies, including video content. One assignment was a case study on best onboarding practices as part of an HR series. Google was open in front of me, the same Google every competitor’s writer was reading.

I shut the laptop lid. I went to the company admin and got three notepads.

The realization was simple: an ocean of primary information was sitting around me. Every current employee was living a corporate journey, across different seniority levels, tenures and experiences. And an employee who had switched companies at least three times carried practical dos and don’ts three times over. My introvert, rewriting writers were happy with Google. I built a questionnaire and went to each and every employee: your best onboarding experience, your worst, what you would improve, what you expected and never got, and any story worth mentioning from your own network.

I scribbled small, and I still needed a new notepad. Three days of interviews produced so much material that I had to re-read all of it multiple times, then batch it, classify it, organize it and blend it organically into the case study. Information, opinions, practical insights, real psychology, none of it available to any competitor, because none of it existed anywhere except in those conversations.

Research gives me a high, I admit it. But giving real value requires the extra mile, and the extra mile is always primary.

It remains the most satisfying project of my career.

Why the Sales Team Will Always Make Time for You

The sales team will make time for a writer because the incentives align perfectly: the writer’s words reach the prospective customer before the salesperson does.

At the same company, whenever the mail arrived to produce sales brochures, flyers, video ad content or talking-head scripts, I knew money was involved at the end of those words. So I sat waiting outside the sales head’s room. To my surprise, he was more eager to receive me than I was to be received, because he knew my words would hit the prospective customer first. Copy is the first point of contact; the salesperson inherits whatever impression the copy already made.

Those conversations taught me a rule about briefs. The email brief is lousy and off-point almost every time, because it is that translation of a translation. Talk to the salesperson and everything changes: the real objection, the phrase customers actually use, the detail that closes and the detail that scares. On the good days, you feel proud to ignore the brief, because the primary source contradicted it and the primary source was right.

Channel owners deserve the same chair. In my current work, while making flyers for travel packages, I contact the person running the PPC campaigns directly to understand what converts. The sales team pushes to put every minute detail on the flyer. The PPC owner asks for the opposite: minimal. Phone screens are not meant to be a thesis for the reader. The job of the flyer is curiosity, not oversharing, and never the clumsy, crowded newspaper look. Two internal sources, two opposing pulls, and the writer who has interviewed both can arbitrate with evidence instead of opinion. A writer who interviewed neither just obeys the loudest voice.

This interviewing discipline is the second half of what the previous article called content team training: training builds the sniper, and primary research supplies the target’s coordinates. Both sit inside the governance layer described in the corporate communication system.

Why Does Copying Competitor Copy Never Build a Brand?

Copying competitor copy fails because it borrows conclusions without inheriting the conditions that produced them. Marketers take the shortcut constantly: what worked well for that company will work for ours. That logic holds under one condition only: your company is a photocopy of that company, including the product, the target customer, the brand voice and, particularly, the brand emotion. No company meets that condition.

The copying strategy has a name: piggybacking. And piggybacking carries a compounding cost. You never learn what actually works for you, because you never tested your own message against your own customer. Organic traffic never picks up, because your content is a rewrite of two or three successful copies that everyone else is rewriting too. Search engines and readers have seen the original; the copy adds nothing worth ranking or remembering. The end state is being a slave to PPC campaigns: paying, forever, for the attention your content cannot earn.

That trade is acceptable for a company with no intention of building a brand, and some companies rationally make it. Building a brand, a legacy and organic traffic takes time. I never said every company can have that brand value. But the companies that want it have exactly one path, and it runs through primary research: your customer’s words, your sales team’s evidence, your own tested message. My copywriting practice is built on that sequence, because copy written from borrowed research sells someone else’s product.

How Do You Research Customer Language for Content?

Research customer language in six steps, sequenced from preparation to publication.

1. Build the questionnaire first. Editorial quality starts with the questions. The notepad above is the base set; adapt it to the subject before the first interview.
2. Interview the incentive-aligned sources. Sales first, because their commission depends on your words landing. Then channel owners: the PPC manager, the email marketer, the person who watches conversion happen. Then colleagues who lived the subject, the way the onboarding case study used every employee’s corporate journey.
3. Capture verbatim, not summaries. The customer’s phrasing is the asset. Scribble small, fill notepads, record where permitted. A paraphrase loses the exact words that make copy convert.
4. Batch, classify, organize, blend. Raw primary research is an ocean. Re-read it multiple times, group it by theme and pain point, and blend it organically into the piece so the reader meets insight, not transcript.
5. Test the brief against the research. Where the email brief and the primary source disagree, the primary source wins. Ignore the brief with pride and with evidence. Compulsions to skip research will arise; make sure they stay occasional, never the process.
6. Keep the research living. Markets move, objections change, yesterday’s insight goes blunt like everything else. Refresh the interviews each quarter or each campaign, whichever comes first.