“I wrote a white paper that tanked an entire quarter.”

My first and last content marketing job, lol. This happened a couple of years ago at a SaaS company. We were trying to break into the enterprise space and leadership was obsessed with becoming known as "thought leaders." Naturally, I got stuck leading the charge with a white paper that was supposed to be our crown jewel. The topic? AI-driven insights for enterprise growth. Very buzzword-heavy, but at the time, that’s what everyone wanted to hear.

We spent months on it. I interviewed analysts, dug through data and reports, and worked with our product team to sprinkle in some use cases. It was overly polished by the time we wrapped — 20 pages, complete with glossy charts and customer stories that read more like product endorsements. Even the title was a cliché: “AI-Driven Insights: The Future of Enterprise Growth.” No one loved it, but no one wanted to fight about it either.

Launch day came, and we pulled out all the stops: email campaigns, LinkedIn ads, gated landing pages, even a direct mail piece for our biggest prospects, which wasn’t cheap. The sales team was briefed to push it hard, and leadership was already calling it a “cornerstone asset.” I didn’t love that phrasing, but I went along with it because what could go wrong?

Well, everything.

For starters, the downloads were a disaster. In the first week, we got maybe a dozen, most of which were internal employees “testing” the form. But the bigger issue came from the leads we did generate. Instead of attracting senior-level folks, we were only getting junior analysts who had no buying power.

Then came the feedback. A couple of prospects mentioned that the white paper felt too much like a sales pitch, which was bad enough. But one of our biggest accounts (the kind of deal the whole company counts on) straight-up told their rep, “This reads like it was written to justify your own product, not help us solve real problems.” And then they ghosted us.

By the end of the quarter, sales was openly blaming marketing for missing their targets. They said the white paper campaigns distracted them from focusing on real opportunities and wasted their time with low-quality leads.

Leadership wasn’t subtle about pointing fingers, either. I spent weeks sitting in painful debriefs where every decision I’d made was dissected. The phrase “total misalignment with the buyer” got thrown around a lot.

I also segmented the email lists wrong so one large group received the wrong email.

The whole thing was a train wreck.

I myself found myself back in sales after that (different company) and I think I’ll stay here. :)