In 2009, Simon Sinek stood up at a TEDx event in Puget Sound and drew three circles on a flip chart. The talk that followed has been watched more than 70 million times, and its central claim has survived seventeen years of business-book fashion cycles: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
The golden circle puts why at the centre, the purpose or belief an organisation exists to serve. Around it sits the how, the distinctive way the organisation goes about it. On the outside sits the what: the products, the features, the specification sheet. Sinek’s observation was that everyone can describe their what, some can describe their how, and remarkably few can articulate their why, so most companies communicate from the outside in, leading with the thing that differentiates them least.
Seventeen years on, there’s a corner of the modern organisation where that mistake has been industrialised: sales enablement.
Key takeaways
- Enablement content defaults to the “what” by design, not by accident. Battlecards, one-pagers and demo scripts are the easiest content to brief, build and approve, while the “why” tends to sit in a different department entirely.
- Buyers genuinely can’t see the difference enablement is selling on. CEB and Google’s landmark B2B buying study found only 14% of buyers perceive enough difference in supplier business value to pay for it.
- The “why” isn’t a soft add-on in B2B, it’s commercially decisive. The same study found buyers who saw personal value in a supplier were eight times more likely to pay a premium.
- Sellers rarely get face time to fix a bad first impression. Gartner found buying groups spend only about 17% of their journey talking to suppliers, and 6sense found 81% of buyers already have a preferred vendor in mind before first contact.
- Corporate communications already owns the missing skill. Making the narrative credible to sceptical audiences is comms’ core craft, yet it rarely reaches the enablement content sellers actually carry.
- The fix is structural, not another training day. A binding messaging hierarchy, comms involved in enablement planning, sellers trained to tell the story in their own words, and win-loss reviews that ask whether buyers ever heard what the company believes.
Why enablement defaults to the 'what'
None of this is a criticism of enablement teams, who have one of the harder jobs in the go-to-market machine. But look at what the function is asked to produce: battlecards, product one-pagers, demo scripts, competitive comparisons, pricing guidance. Enablement is measured on seller readiness and content usage, and the content that’s easiest to brief, build and approve is content about the what.
Too often, features are documented and purpose is somebody else’s department. The famous brand messaging example is the ad copy differences between the iPod “every song you’ve ever owned in your pocket” and competitor leading with how many gigabytes of music their device could store. One focused on emotional liberation, rather than confusing technical data.
Failing to implement a similar approach leads to sellers being armed with facts and starved of story, and the evidence says buyers can tell. SiriusDecisions found that 60 to 70% of B2B marketing content goes unused by sales, a figure that hasn’t meaningfully improved in a decade. Forrester’s research with executive buyers found only one in five salespeople achieve buyer expectations and create value in meetings, with the rest reciting the outer ring of the circle to people who had already read the website.
And here is the awkward commercial fact underlying it all, from CEB and Google’s landmark study of B2B buying: only 14% of buyers perceive enough difference in the business value offered by suppliers to be willing to pay for it. If your enablement content is a well-organised library of whats, you are competing on the one dimension where buyers literally cannot see a difference.
The cost of misalignment
The same study found something stranger and more useful: B2B buyers turn out to be more emotionally attached to the brands they buy than consumers are, not less. Buyers who saw personal value in a supplier, confidence, pride, belief in what the supplier stands for, were eight times more likely to pay a premium. The why isn’t soft decoration on a rational purchase. In B2B it does more commercial work than the what, because the stakes for the individual buyer, professionally speaking, are higher.
Now add the shape of the modern buying journey. Gartner’s research found buying groups spend only about 17% of their journey talking to potential suppliers, a share that keeps shrinking; by the time a seller enters the room, the buying group has largely formed its view from what the company has said publicly. 6sense’s buyer research completes the picture: 81% of buyers arrive at first sales contact with a preferred vendor already in mind, and 94% of buying groups have a ranked shortlist before anyone picks up the phone.
Put those together and the cost of sales and marketing alignment failing at the level of story becomes visible. The buyer has spent months absorbing the company’s public narrative. The seller arrives with a deck built from the product roadmap. When the two don’t match, the precious 17% of face time is spent re-establishing basic coherence, and a buying group that needed a shared belief to rally around gets a feature list instead. Estimates of the revenue cost of this kind of misalignment run from 10% of annual revenue upwards; the oft-cited figure for the US economy is a trillion dollars a year.
What corporate communications brings to the middle of the circle
Here’s the thing: every organisation already employs people whose entire craft is the middle of the circle. Corporate communications owns the company narrative, the purpose, the values, the executive voice, the proof that the organisation means what it says. Communications professionals spend their careers making the why credible to sceptical audiences: journalists, investors, employees, regulators.
That is precisely the muscle sales enablement is missing, yet in most organisations the two functions barely – or infrequently – meet. Communications reports one way, enablement another, and the shared artefact between them, the company’s brand messaging, gets translated into sales content third-hand, if at all. The value proposition sellers carry is usually written by marketing from product inputs, with the corporate narrative – or creative storytelling – nowhere in the room.
How do communications and sales enablement work together?
Making the connection operational takes less machinery than you might expect. Four practices do most of the work.
Build one messaging hierarchy and make it binding. A single architecture that runs from purpose (comms-owned) through positioning and value proposition (marketing-owned) down to product claims (enablement-owned), so that a battlecard traces visibly back to the why. If a piece of sales content can’t be connected to the top of the hierarchy, that’s the signal it’s describing a what nobody asked for.
Put comms in the enablement content cycle. Not approving every one-pager, but present at planning: shaping the narrative arc of sales kick-offs, contributing the corporate story to pitch decks, and pushing thought leadership into sellers’ hands as a first-meeting asset rather than a press-office trophy.
Equip sellers with the story, not just the slides. Sellers repeat what they can retell. Kaplan and Norton’s old finding that 95% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategy applies with painful force to salesforces; training sellers to tell the company’s why in ninety seconds, in their own words, does more for differentiation than another feature matrix.
Close the loop through win-loss reviews. Ask not just “did we lose on price?” but “did the buyer ever hear what we believe?”. The answers tend to be clarifying, and they give comms something it has historically lacked: a direct line of sight to revenue.
Selling the belief
Sinek’s line about the goal being to do business with people who believe what you believe can sound romantic when your pipeline review is on Thursday. But the research above says it’s the hard-headed reading of how B2B buying now works: buyers form belief before they form a shortlist, they can’t tell your what from your competitor’s, and they pay premiums for a why they can share. Sales enablement without corporate comms produces sellers who know everything about the product and nothing about the point. Connect the two, and the organisation finally sells from the middle of the circle outwards: the belief first, and the product as proof.
FAQs
- Why does sales enablement content usually focus on features rather than purpose? Because product content is the easiest to brief, build and approve, while purpose-led messaging typically sits with corporate communications, a function that rarely feeds into enablement’s content cycle. The result is battlecards built entirely from the product roadmap rather than the company’s broader narrative.
- Does a strong company “why” actually affect B2B sales outcomes? Yes, measurably. CEB and Google’s B2B buying study found buyers who saw personal value in a supplier, confidence, pride, belief in what the supplier stands for, were eight times more likely to pay a premium, while only 14% of buyers perceive enough difference in supplier business value to justify paying for it at all.
- How much of the B2B buying journey happens before a seller is involved? Most of it. Gartner found buying groups spend only around 17% of their journey talking to potential suppliers, and 6sense found 81% of buyers already have a preferred vendor in mind, with 94% of buying groups arriving with a ranked shortlist before first contact.
- What’s the simplest way to connect corporate comms and sales enablement? Build one binding messaging hierarchy that runs from purpose through positioning to product claims, so every piece of sales content traces back to the company’s why. Pairing that with comms involvement in enablement planning and win-loss reviews that ask whether buyers ever heard what the company believes covers most of the gap.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Junior Digital Account Director
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
