A Content Stack is a best practice strategy developed by salesXchange. It is a compilation of carefully chosen sales and marketing material for B2B Technology, SaaS and Services companies, presented in a sequential order, that educates a prospect about your products and services and helps them buy from you — without involving salespeople. It enables your company to promote at scale, so that all initial enquiries can be dealt with by self-service, in any geographic area, before a salesperson needs to make contact.
Contents
- Introduction
- Digital Selling – The Big Picture
- The Right Order of Business
- Getting Prospects to Think "I Like This Company"
- Educating Your Prospects
- Removing Blockages and Making it Easy
- The Content Stack Logic
- Building Your Content Stack
- The Prospect's Stages
- Stage 1 – How Promotion and Engagement Deliver the Best Experience
- Stage 2 – Review Your Website to Maximise Conversions
- Stage 3 – Live Show
- Example Content Stack
- The Live Stream Stage
- FAQs
- Takeaways
- Conclusion
Introduction
Most B2B businesses either use marketing automation or are desperate to start using it, convinced it is the backbone of digital marketing and the answer to generating leads. On the surface it looks logical. After more than a decade of widespread use, though, it has not delivered what was promised. Big Tech and MarTech told B2B companies to buy into automation software that was designed for B2C businesses — not for selling complex technology or services to other companies.
Consumer businesses wanted to grow email databases. The bigger the database, the higher the lifetime value calculation, and the more attractive the company looked to investors. Persuading a consumer brand follower to sign up to a newsletter was always straightforward. Persuading a B2B CEO to do the same thing was always a different matter entirely.
The numbers make the problem clear. Gartner research shows that B2B buyers now complete around 80% of their buying process before they ever speak to a vendor. A 2025 6sense study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers found that 95% of the time, the vendor who wins the deal was already on the buyer's shortlist before first contact was made. The decision happens in the dark. By the time your salesperson gets the call, the buyer has usually already decided. Most marketers will tell you there is no problem getting MQLs. Converting them to pipeline is where it falls apart.
The whole premise sounded persuasive at the time. Prospects were supposed to fill in forms because they wanted to learn. Marketing was supposed to earn KPI bonuses on the back of enquiry volumes. Salespeople were supposed to receive more leads than they could handle. None of it happened at the scale that was promised.
The reality is that every business owner wants to keep their plans private. The last thing any CEO wants to do is tell a salesperson or a vendor what they are working on — because doing so broadcasts to every other sales operation that they are now in the market for a particular type of product. We cover this conflict in detail in our B2B Marketing Strategy Examples article.
So how does a vendor actually connect with potential new businesses and have the conversation that matters?
Digital Selling – The Big Picture
Digital Selling is about fixing a broken new business system. It is not primarily about the friction between sales and marketing, though that friction is real. It is about the failure of both functions to adopt the right technology and use it for the benefit of the business. That means deciding for yourself what works — not being told by a MarTech vendor what to buy. When new business fails to come in, MarTech points the finger at sales or at the technology. Marketing rarely takes the blame. That has to change.
The Right Order of Business
From the prospect's point of view, their experience starts with you promoting your business. That leads to them reviewing your content. Then they decide whether to buy from you. From your side as the vendor, the order of work is this:
- Get your content right first
- Make sure your website converts — through Content Stacks and clear Calls-to-Action
- Only then do you promote what you do
Most businesses do this in reverse. They spend on promotion before the website is fit to receive traffic and before the content is capable of educating anyone. Read our guide on Planning Digital Content to understand how to approach this in the right sequence.
Getting Prospects to Think "I Like This Company"
The Content Stack must be comprehensive and transparent. The objective is to get a prospect to reach this conclusion on their own: "I want this company as my supplier. They have demonstrated, from start to finish, that they understand their product, they can explain what it will do for my business and they know how to work with my team."
Think about how an ecommerce site like Amazon works. Video, product explanations, customer stories, ratings. Everything you need to make a decision without speaking to anyone. B2B has had that same opportunity for years and most businesses have ignored it. The average B2B website is still a digital brochure, treated as an automated prospecting platform with about as much expectation as leaving a compliment slip after cold calling someone's reception desk.
That is not good enough. Buyers are making decisions anonymously, before you ever know they exist. If your website cannot educate them and hold their attention through that process, you have already lost.
Educating Your Prospects
The starting point is to reclassify your content so it matches what the prospect actually needs at the stage they are at — not what your persona model says they should want. Our Marketing Strategy articles go into this in detail. The key is to stop getting bogged down in personas and start thinking about where someone is in their research when they land on your site.
Once you have restructured your content into Primary, Secondary, General, Product and How to Buy categories, tagged correctly with Open Graph, you then ensure you are providing a variety of media types — video, podcasts, written articles, webinars. Different people absorb content in different ways. Give them options.
Removing Blockages and Making it Easy
Once you have removed the marketing automation forms from your website and landing pages, the next stage is to build your Content Stacks. This is an exercise for your entire web and content team. The goal is to ensure you have sufficient, logically structured content to enable a prospect to understand your products fully — to the point where they are ready to buy — without needing a pre-sales conversation or a salesperson to walk them through the basics.
If a prospect has to ask you to explain what your product does, your content has failed. The Content Stack is the fix.
The Content Stack Logic
Buyers want to evaluate your product and your business at their own pace, in their own time, without announcing themselves. We all do exactly the same when we are considering a significant purchase. In theory, you should already have most of the documentation you need — it is just scattered across different locations. Some online, some offline, some buried in a Sales and Marketing hub on your intranet.
To build your first Content Stack, follow this sequence:
- Create all the necessary headings, starting with the first content type a prospect would normally receive or download
- Select all the required content that fits each heading
- Place the content in a chronological order that mirrors a logical learning process
- Tag each item with the correct hyperlinks to the relevant pages on the website
- Add a Back button on every page or article referenced in the Content Stack to help with navigation
- At the bottom of the Content Stack page, place a prominent Call-to-Action — a clear Next Step button that tells the prospect what to do when they are ready to talk
If you have studied account-based marketing, you will know the principle: each person involved in the buying decision needs content relevant to their role. A CTO, CIO and COO are not looking for the same information. Do not send everyone the same material and expect it to land.
Building Your Content Stack
|
Video for CEO |
Video for COO or CTO |
Below is an example Content Stack for a Digital Transformation, Business Process Management software company.
The first components are two videos, each created for the two main buyers who would typically arrive at or be directed to this Content Stack page. This structure is replicated per solution or vertical market served.
Early-Stage Education – General
- An overview of what information is available
- Introduction to the company and its operations
- Article – include Link
- Video – include Link
- Application Ideas – Business Solutions
- Product Literature, video and recorded webinars
- Benefits of PaaS vs SaaS vs On-Premises Solutions
- Book Review Links, Article Links, Video Links, Podcast Links
- Things to look out for in a supplier
Mid-Stage Investigation – About You
- Meet the Team: CEO, Tech Support, Sales, Customer Success, Professional Services
- An Agile approach to digital transformation
- Digital Transformation Sprints
- Planning for BPM within Digital Transformation Projects
- Case Studies – How other companies have used the software
- How to: Scenario – Build – Challenge – How it will work for your business
- How to: The Learning Workflow to use the software
Late-Stage Evaluation – How They Can Buy From You
- Waterfall Planning and Project Management for Digital Transformation
- Worksheets, Checklists, Questionnaires, Gamification
- How to: Create an in-house Technology Team to implement new systems
- Workshop Description and Content, Workshop Diary Dates
- How to: Write an in-house training course for digital transformation
- How to: Book Professional Services, Scoping, Execution and Training
- How to: Installation Procedure, Gantt and People
- How to: Placing an order
Present all of the above in as many formats as possible to accommodate every type of prospect:
- Articles
- Whitepapers
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Webinars
- Books
- Reports
The objective is simple: give your prospects every reason to stay on your website and no reason to go elsewhere.
The Prospect's Stages
There are three main elements to the structure your Content Stack needs to support, from your prospect's perspective:
Stage 1
How Promotion and Engagement Deliver the Best Experience
- Reclassify your content into Primary, Secondary, General, Product and How to Buy
- Edit and consolidate existing content to educate prospects before they buy
- Use a variety of media — video, podcasts, live streaming, written content
Update your assets and get noticed.
Stage 2
Review Your Website to Maximise Conversion
- Stop using marketing automation forms on your website and landing pages
- Build Content Stacks to increase your conversion rate
- Create clear Digital Selling pathways through well-placed Calls-to-Action
Increase sales because you put the prospect's experience first.
Stage 3
The Live Show
- Live Stream to your Total Addressable Market — enabling anonymous engagement, driving traffic to your website and increasing conversion
- Create recordings and transcripts of each live show and publish them on your website
- Extract the audio from each live show and publish it as a podcast to maximise reach
Live Stream simultaneously on your website and across every social platform at once.
Example Content Stack Layout
Click here to visit the salesXchange Content Stack Page – Go Live
Getting the Live Stream Ready
If you have been following the Live Streaming prospecting strategy, you understand that telling your Total Addressable Market what you do — consistently, week after week — can result in thousands of businesses being reached and potentially hundreds watching your live stream at any one time.
After presenting live online, the call-to-action for every prospect is to visit your website, self-serve and self-educate. That works only if you have given them everything they need and structured the content in a way that guides them clearly toward buying from you.
Few businesses could cope with a sudden influx of enquiries. That is precisely why Content Stacks act as a buffer — letting prospects learn at their own pace before they feel compelled to call you. But do not lose sight of this: BDRs and salespeople are hired to speak to new prospects. The more inbound calls the better.
FAQs
What is a Content Stack?
A Content Stack is a carefully compiled sequence of sales and marketing materials that educates prospects about your products and services. It is structured to let them make an informed buying decision without needing a salesperson to guide them through the process.
What are the key stages of Digital Selling?
Digital Selling has three stages: Promotion and Engagement, Website Conversion, and The Live Show. Each stage builds on the last. Get the content right first, then make the website convert, then promote.
How do Content Stacks improve conversion rates?
Content Stacks give prospects a transparent, comprehensive and self-directed learning experience. They can move through your content at their own pace, understand your business fully and reach a buying decision without friction or pressure. That produces better quality pipeline than a form-fill ever will.
What are the benefits of live streaming in Digital Selling?
Live streaming lets you present your business to large numbers of potential buyers simultaneously, anonymously and without any gate. It drives traffic back to your website, supports Content Stack engagement and creates a library of reusable content — articles, recordings, podcasts — from a single broadcast.
How do I reclassify my content for better targeting?
Classify your content into five categories: Primary, Secondary, General, Product and How to Buy. Each category serves a different point in the prospect's research. Match the content to where the reader actually is, not to a persona profile built in a workshop three years ago.
Takeaways
-
Marketing automation was built for B2C. Applying it wholesale to B2B new business has not worked. The numbers back this up. Gartner data shows 80% of the buying process now happens before any vendor contact, and 6sense research confirms that 95% of winning deals were already on the buyer's shortlist before first contact. The approach needs to change.
-
Content Stacks provide the structured, transparent learning experience that B2B buyers are already demanding. They let a prospect evaluate your business fully, at their own pace, without filling in a form or speaking to anyone before they are ready.
-
Digital Selling fixes the broken new business model by using the right technology in the right order — content first, conversion second, promotion third. Not the other way around.
-
Live streaming extends your reach to your entire Total Addressable Market. It drives traffic back to your website, supports anonymous engagement and generates a continuous supply of repurposable content from a single broadcast.
-
By restructuring your content, removing the gatekeeping forms and building proper Content Stacks, you shift from a one-to-one selling model to a one-to-many model. That is how you scale without simply adding headcount.
Conclusion
Everything above is about giving your prospects the information they need to make a decision — before they speak to you, not after. That is the shift. Stop treating your website as a lead capture device and start treating it as the best salesperson you have.
In my experience, when a prospect can see that you have taken the time to articulate everything — every stage, every objection, every "how does this work for my business" question — their reaction is almost always the same: "You clearly know what you are talking about. You do not need to convince me. Come in and get started." That is what good content does. It removes the sales barrier entirely.
The statistics around demand generation, lead generation and ABM are not encouraging for most businesses running those strategies. We have our own research on the numbers — 95% of your market is not actively buying at any given point, 83% of B2B buyers define their requirements before speaking to anyone in sales, and cold calling alone requires around 400 calls to find a single interested party. Running a business on those odds when there is a better approach available makes no sense.
Our approach can seem harsh on marketers and BDRs. That is not the intention. The point is that digital selling, done properly, extends the reach of every person in your GTM team. It does not replace them — it gives them a much better starting position.
Whether you own the business or you are responsible for new business generation, the shift from one-to-one selling to one-to-many is what this entire site is about. The Content Stack is where that shift starts.
Everything in this article comes back to the same diagnosis: the content and structure your website needs to do the selling before a salesperson enters the picture. Most B2B businesses have the raw material already — it is in the wrong order, behind forms, or simply missing. The GTM Reset course shows you exactly how to build the Content Stack model from scratch, reclassify what you already have, remove the friction and put a selling system in place that works while your team focuses on closing.
The course is 20 modules, CPD certified, built on sales fact and not marketing theory. Most CEOs go through it with their VP of Sales, aligning on the diagnosis together before involving the rest of the GTM team and implementing the new strategy.
Review The Reset Today
Nigel Maine is the founder of salesXchange and the architect of the sX Operating System — a B2B commercial framework built from three decades of running technology sales, not from marketing theory.
His work is grounded in a single conviction: that most B2B growth models were designed for consumer buying behaviour and have never been corrected. salesXchange exists to fix that. Nigel works directly with CEOs and commercial leadership teams across Technology, SaaS and Professional Services to rebuild their GTM infrastructure from first principles.
He is a published author, public speaker and hosts a weekly B2B live show broadcast across LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Contact: 0800 970 9751 or
