I once worked with an organization where the editorial team truly ran the show — and I mean completely. It was a publishing company, so that level of influence made sense up to a point. But editorial didn’t just shape the content; they had the final say over sales and marketing as well. I recall situations where ads were pulled from one of our publications and the advertiser’s money was refunded because the placement was deemed inappropriate next to our commentary. For a while, every piece of sales and marketing copy had to go through editorial approval. They stripped out nearly all the benefits and persuasive language to maintain what they saw as an unbiased, non-partisan stance (this was a scholarly political publication). Fortunately, that policy was relaxed before the business collapsed. Those are admittedly extreme cases. Most companies don’t have editorial teams shutting down sales, marketing and advertising. But every organization has something in the driver’s seat. Sometimes it’s editorial. Sometimes it’s marketing. Sometimes it’s sales. At various points in my consulting work, I’ve partnered with clients where sales is obviously calling the shots. In those situations, the content marketing workflow looks like this: a sales rep encounters an objection on a call, flags it internally, and suddenly we “need” a blog post addressing it… this week. The brief? A few lines from marketing and maybe a quick conversation with the sales team. That’s the whole system. On the surface, it appears agile and customer-focused, even.…