Nine Verticals, No Shared GTM Playbook:
DHL North America supply chain

The bigger the organization, the more places a go-to-market strategy can break down. You have teams covering different sectors, producing content for different buyers, using different languages, and operating without any shared definition of what good looks like. Marketing produces assets. Sales runs their plays. The two don't always connect — and when they don't, both sides feel it.

That was the situation for DHL's North America supply chain marketing team. Nine industry verticals, each with its own audience and purchasing criteria. A marketing and sales organization that needed to speak fluently to sophisticated B2B buyers across all of them. And no shared go-to-market framework for translating sector expertise and proprietary data into content that could actually move prospects or support the sales conversation when it counted.

The Challenge

DHL's North American supply chain operation is not a single business. It's nine distinct verticals, each serving a different industry, a different buyer profile, and a different set of purchasing criteria. That complexity is a feature, not a bug. The ability to serve clients across technology, retail, consumer, industrial, and other sectors with sector-specific depth is exactly the point.

But complexity at that scale creates real content problems.

Each vertical had developed its own content approach, messaging, and relationship with the sales team it supported. Marketing had data. The business had expertise. The problem was that none of it was organized into a framework that could be used consistently, adapted across sectors, or scaled without starting from scratch every time a new campaign or channel came up.

At the core was a go-to-market alignment problem. Without a shared content framework, marketing couldn't build assets that reliably supported the sales conversation — and sales couldn't count on marketing content to speak the same language they were using with buyers. Each vertical was essentially running its own mini GTM motion, disconnected from the others and from a unified story about what DHL does and why it matters.

The sales team needed content that could open conversations and support deals in progress. Marketing needed a content engine that could produce material across nine verticals without reinventing the wheel each time. Both needed to work from the same story — not nine different versions of one.

There was also a translation problem. DHL had proprietary data and sector knowledge that buyers actually wanted. But data doesn't sell itself. Turning supply chain performance numbers into a narrative that lands with a logistics director or a VP of procurement requires a specific kind of framework — and that framework didn't exist yet.

• Nine distinct industry verticals, each with separate content approaches and no shared go-to-market framework
• Marketing and sales operating in silos, without a common content language or coordinated GTM strategy
• Strong sector expertise and proprietary data that wasn't being translated into compelling buyer-facing content
• No consistent process for atomizing content across formats and channels where prospects spend time
• Email programs that weren't converting at the rate the funnel required
• No baseline view of where DHL's content stood relative to direct competitors

The Shift

What had to change was the go-to-market foundation. Not one vertical's content, not one campaign, not one channel — the underlying infrastructure that every vertical was operating without.

That meant working from the bottom up. Establishing where DHL stood relative to its peers. Defining what a shared GTM content framework needed to look like across sectors. Then, building the playbooks that would let marketing and sales work from the same foundation, consistently, without reinventing the wheel for every vertical or every deal.

The shift wasn't about producing more content. It was about building the GTM content infrastructure that would make every piece of content more intentional — and give every team a shared starting point they could actually execute from.

The Work

The engagement covered a full arc from competitive assessment and strategic foundation through sector-specific playbook development and team activation.

Foundational Recommendations and Competitive Maturity Map

The engagement opened with a clear-eyed assessment of where DHL's content program stood and what it needed to become. A competitive maturity map benchmarked DHL against five direct competitors, evaluating content mix, channel presence, messaging sophistication, and how well competitors were translating sector expertise into buyer-facing content.

That competitive picture established the baseline and surfaced the specific gaps that mattered most: where DHL was leaving positioning on the table, where content was working and could be scaled, and where the go-to-market infrastructure was simply missing. The foundational recommendations defined what the shared GTM content framework needed to look like — not as a brand exercise, but as a functional system that marketing and sales could both operate from.

• Competitive maturity map across five direct competitors, scoring content mix, channel strategy, messaging quality, and sector-specific execution
• Gap analysis identifying where competitors were claiming positioning DHL's content wasn't challenging
• Foundational recommendations defining what the GTM content program needed to look like across all nine verticals to support a coordinated sales and marketing motion

Data Storytelling Playbook

DHL had data. The challenge was turning it into content that buyers would actually engage with — stories, not spreadsheets. The data storytelling playbook gave the marketing team a repeatable process for doing that.

The playbook defined how to identify the data worth building a story around, how to frame it for different buyer profiles and stages of the decision journey, and how to translate supply chain performance numbers into narratives that land with the procurement leaders and operations executives DHL needed to reach.

• Framework for identifying which data points carry the most story potential for B2B supply chain buyers
• Buyer persona alignment: how to frame data differently depending on whether the audience is a logistics director, a procurement VP, or a C-suite decision-maker
• Format and channel guidance for data-forward content across long-form, short-form, and social formats
• Templates and examples the team could apply immediately across all nine sectors

Content Hub Audits (Nine Verticals)

Before building forward, the team needed an accurate picture of what existed. A content hub audit was conducted across all nine industry verticals, evaluating what content was live, what was performing, where gaps existed, and where coverage of priority buyer topics was thin or missing entirely.

This wasn't a high-level inventory. Each audit went deep enough to identify specific content opportunities by sector, flag messaging inconsistencies, and surface the strongest existing assets that could be built on or repurposed.

• Content inventory and performance review across all nine verticals
• Gap mapping by sector: where buyer questions and priority topics lacked content coverage
• Messaging consistency review: identifying where language, framing, and positioning varied in ways that created confusion rather than differentiation
• Identification of highest-potential existing assets by vertical for repurposing and atomization

Atomization Playbooks and Workshop (Nine Verticals)

With the audits complete, the work moved forward. An atomization playbook was developed for each of the nine verticals, defining how cornerstone content could be broken down and distributed across formats and channels without losing the core message or requiring a full production cycle for every piece.

The playbooks gave each vertical team a clear process: start with the anchor asset, identify the components that work across formats, map each component to a channel and audience, and execute from the same core content rather than building from scratch each time.

To activate the playbooks in practice, a hands-on atomization workshop was built around live exercises, giving the marketing team direct experience working through the framework with their own content before applying it independently.

• Atomization playbook developed for each of the nine industry verticals, tailored to sector-specific content formats and buyer channels
• Framework for identifying cornerstone content and mapping derivative formats: short-form social, email, sales enablement, video scripts, and sector-specific one-pagers
• Workshop exercises built around real DHL content, giving the team hands-on practice with the framework before deploying it
• Channel prioritization guidance by vertical: where each sector's buyers spend time and what content formats they engage with

Email Conversion Workshop

Email was a specific GTM gap. In a complex B2B sale, email is often the connective tissue between marketing content and the sales conversation — and it was the channel where conversion happened or didn't. The email conversion workshop gave the marketing team a framework for writing email content that moved prospects through the funnel rather than just filling inboxes.

The workshop covered message hierarchy, subject line strategy, CTA structure, and how to sequence email content for B2B buyers who take months to make complex purchasing decisions. The goal was a team that could write email content that served the sales motion at every stage — not just checking the campaign box.

• Framework for email message hierarchy: what goes first, what earns the next click, what closes the loop
• Subject line and preview text strategy for B2B buyers in complex, high-consideration purchasing environments
• CTA structure for different funnel stages, from early-stage awareness to late-stage sales support
• Sequencing guidance for multi-touch email programs tied to the supply chain buyer's decision timeline
• Workshop format with exercises built around DHL's own sectors and buyer profiles

The Outcome 

By the end of the engagement, DHL's North America supply chain marketing team had something it didn't have at the start: a shared go-to-market foundation.

Nine verticals that had been operating independently now had common frameworks, common language, and common playbooks. Marketing and sales were working from the same story. The marketing team could produce content across sectors without starting from scratch each time — and the sales team had assets that supported the buyer conversation rather than running parallel to it. The organization also had a clear picture of where it stood relative to competitors and a framework for closing the gaps that mattered most.

The GTM content system was designed to compound. Atomization playbooks built on content hub audits. The data storytelling playbook connected to content atomization. The email workshop connected to the broader content motion. The more the team used any one piece, the more useful the rest became.

• Competitive baseline established across five direct competitors, with clear gap identification by sector
• Data storytelling playbook giving the full team a repeatable process for turning proprietary data into buyer-facing content
• Content hub audits completed across all nine verticals, with specific gap and opportunity maps for each
• Atomization playbooks for nine verticals, giving each sector team a process for deriving multiple content formats from a single cornerstone asset
• Email conversion framework with workshop exercises the team could apply directly to their programs
• A connected GTM content operating system: frameworks that built on each other and gave marketing and sales the shared infrastructure to execute consistently at scale

The Takeaway

Large enterprise go-to-market problems are rarely a creativity problem or a talent problem. They're a coordination problem. Expertise exists. Data exists. The teams are working. What's missing is the shared infrastructure that connects all of it, so that marketing and sales can move in the same direction, and so that one strong piece of content becomes ten instead of running once and disappearing.

That's what a GTM content framework is for. Not to constrain the creative work, but to make it possible to do that work consistently across nine sectors, at scale, without burning out the team producing it — and without leaving the sales team to fend for themselves when they need content that actually matches the conversation they're having with buyers.

If your content operation spans more than one team or one vertical, the highest-leverage question is: what does everyone agree on? Not at the campaign level. At the go-to-market foundation level. Once that's in place, everything built on top of it compounds.

If your teams are working hard but still not working from the same story, we can help.

Let's build the go-to-market framework that connects your expertise to your sales motion.