There’s a reason so many marketing campaigns aimed at automotive retailers fall flat.

They’re clever, creative and full of potential - but they miss the mark because they weren’t built with sales insight baked in from the start.

In the world of automotive B2B, your sales team isn’t just an end user of your campaigns - they’re one of your most valuable sources of intel. The people on the front line of supplier–retailer conversations. The ones hearing the real objections, the unexpected pain points and the language that actually resonates.

So why do so many campaigns get created without them?

Sales Knows What Marketing Needs to Know

If you're trying to connect with automotive retailers, you need more than personas and assumptions - you need the voice of the customer, filtered through someone who’s had to win their attention, build rapport and close deals.

Ask your sales team and they’ll tell you things like:

• What phrases turn automotive retailers off
• Which pain points are cropping up right now
• What the most common barriers to a deal really are
• How different job roles in the same dealership group think and behave

These insights can shape everything from subject lines and landing pages to ad copy and LinkedIn outreach. If you want to sound like you understand the sector, your sales team is your shortcut.

Collaboration Beats Handover

Too often, marketing and sales operate in sequence rather than side by side.

Marketing builds the campaign. Then sales gets the leads. Simple enough - but not particularly effective.

When you flip this and bring sales into the planning stage, everything sharpens up. Messaging becomes clearer. Campaigns feel more grounded. And the assets created (case studies, one-pagers, emails, etc.) are far more likely to actually get used.

If your sales team doesn’t want to send your campaign follow-up email because “it’s not quite how we’d say it” - that’s a problem. Getting them involved earlier avoids that disconnect.

A Campaign Is Only As Good As Its Follow-Up

Even the best marketing activity will fall flat if it isn’t backed by a smart, timely, human follow-up.

That’s where sales comes back into the spotlight.

What’s the plan after someone downloads your guide or visits your stand at Automotive Management Live? What’s the tone of that first outreach message? Is it personalised, relevant and confident - or is it a generic “just checking in”?

Build the follow-up into the campaign strategy from day one.

Start Small, Win Big

If your sales and marketing teams currently work in silos, this doesn’t have to mean a full restructure. Start small.

• Bring one or two salespeople into your next campaign brainstorm
• Sense-check your draft messaging with someone who talks to retailers every day
• Get feedback on the one-pager before it goes out
• Build a bank of “sales-ready” snippets they can drop into emails and LinkedIn messages

It’s this kind of collaboration that turns a campaign into something sales actually want to use - and automotive retailers actually want to respond to.

The Bottom Line

In automotive B2B, campaigns that connect are built on insight - and your sales team is sitting on more of it than you might realise.

Don’t wait until the leads come in to loop them in. Get them involved early, build campaigns with them, and you’ll not only sharpen your messaging - you’ll boost your results across the board.

At Drive Agency, we specialise in creating automotive campaigns that both marketing and sales can get behind. If you want help bridging the gap and building something that actually works, we’re always happy to chat.

Drop us a line - let’s turn insight into impact.