It is one of the great ironies of modern B2B sales.
Marketing teams spend approximately eight percent of total company revenue generating content. They produce whitepapers, case studies, battlecards, one-pagers, and ROI calculators at an industrial scale. Yet, when you ask a sales representative what they need to close their current deal, the answer is almost always the same: “We need more content.” Marketers are nodding along reading this..
The data backs up this disconnect.
According to research from Forrester and SiriusDecisions, between 65 and 70 percent of all B2B content created by marketing goes completely unused by sales teams (I would link here but it is a paid Forrester study).
At the same time, I also read a Seismic study which found that 95 percent of salespeople actively want more content to help them in their sales process. I mean, Seismic, a company that sells enablement software (i.e. content) outlines that sales people want more content isn’t difficult to predict, but still, interesting.
We (royal we) have built a system where marketing is drowning in production, sales is starving for resources, and the buyer is left entirely to their own devices. The mainstream solution to this problem has been to buy expensive sales enablement platforms (Hi, Seismic). These digital filing cabinets promise to organise the chaos, but technology cannot fix a fundamentally broken philosophy.
The problem is not that we lack content. The problem is that we are creating the wrong content, for the wrong people, and storing it in ways that defy human psychology.
Part I: The Great Content Delusion
The prevailing wisdom in sales enablement is that more content equals better enablement. The goal is to arm the sales representative with a piece of collateral for every conceivable objection, competitor, and feature request. This has led to the creation of massive, sprawling content libraries that require dedicated librarians to maintain.
The “Less is More” Contrarian View
The contrarian view argues that this sheer volume of content is actively counterproductive. When a sales representative is presented with fifty different case studies, the cognitive load required to select the right one creates analysis paralysis. Rather than spending twenty minutes searching for the perfect asset, the representative will simply use the one they saved to their desktop six months ago, regardless of its relevance.
This phenomenon is rooted in Hick’s Law, a psychological principle stating that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. Sounds kind of obvious as a law, but certainly plausible.
By providing too much content, we are mathematically guaranteeing that reps will make poorer, slower decisions about what to send to prospects.
Furthermore, Miller’s Law suggests that the average human can only hold about seven (plus or minus two) items in their working memory. When a content repository has dozens of folders and hundreds of tags, it exceeds the cognitive capacity of the user.
The solution is not better search functionality; it is ruthless curation.
The Buyer Enablement Shift
The second major delusion is who the content is actually for.
For the last decade, the focus has been on “sales enablement”, which means creating content that helps the representative sell - this fundamentally misunderstands modern B2B purchasing.
I’m not the first to point this out but feel it should oft be repeated, because people are listening.
Today, 61 percent of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, and they are often 57 to 70 percent of the way through their research before they ever speak to a salesperson, according to Gartner.
When buyers finally do engage, the representative is rarely the person making the final decision. The representative’s job is to arm an internal champion to sell the solution to a buying committee.
Most sales content fails because it is designed for the representative to read, not for the champion to forward.
A battlecard helps a rep handle an objection on a call, but it does nothing to help a champion defend the purchase to their CFO. The shift from sales enablement to “buyer enablement” requires creating content that speaks the internal language of the buying committee.
This means business cases, implementation timelines, and risk mitigation strategies.
If your content cannot be forwarded by your champion to their boss without translation, it is not buyer enablement. It is just internal marketing.
Part II: The Content Lifecycle (New vs. Experienced Reps)
The way a representative interacts with content changes dramatically as they mature in their role. The mainstream approach is to treat onboarding as a distinct phase, front-loading foundational content in the first 90 days, and then transitioning the representative to a general content pool.
The contrarian approach views content consumption as a continuous spectrum, often referred to as “everboarding.” (I did bring this term up in a previous article and still don’t like the term, but it does work in this context). However, the type of content they need to access quickly shifts based on their tenure.
The New Representative: Guardrails and Scripts
In their first 90 days, a new representative does not need a library of 400 assets. They need extreme constraint. Their cognitive load is already maxed out learning the product, the CRM, and the company culture.
For new hires, content should be prescriptive rather than descriptive. They need, by way of example:
Talk tracks and scripts: Exactly what to say when the prospect asks about pricing
Core battlecards: The top three competitors and the single best differentiator for each.
The “One-Pager”: A single, comprehensive overview of the value proposition.
What Good Looks Like Call List: a library of carefully curated call recordings that can be listened to (1st prospecting calls especially)
Giving a new representative access to the entire content library is a recipe for disaster. They will inevitably send an outdated, highly technical whitepaper to an early-stage prospect because they do not yet understand the nuance of the buyer’s journey. The goal for new reps is to provide them with the “Core 10”, which are the ten essential pieces of content they need to survive and execute basic plays. The number here is arbitrary, I am using the number 10 for illustrative purposes.
The Experienced Representative: Nuance and Acceleration
Experienced representatives have internalised the foundational knowledge. They do not need scripts; they need ammunition for specific, complex scenarios. Their content needs are highly situational.
For tenured reps, content must be searchable by highly specific metadata. They need:
Niche case studies: “Show me a case study for a mid-market healthcare provider who migrated from Competitor X.” Arranging by industry and cross-referencing by use case/outcome is a great way of doing this
Technical deep-dives: Security architecture documents to satisfy procurement.
ROI models: Customisable spreadsheets to build specific business cases.
The experienced representative’s primary frustration is findability (sounds like a word Ian Dowie would have come up with!). They know the content exists, but they cannot locate it while on a live call. Furthermore, top-performing experienced reps are often the best creators of content. They are closest to the customer and understand exactly what resonates.
A progressive content strategy should empower these reps to create and share their own “field-tested” content, rather than relying solely on marketing-produced collateral.
Part III: The Findability Framework
If you cannot find a piece of content in under thirty seconds, it effectively does not exist. The solution is not a better search bar; it is a better taxonomy.
A robust content taxonomy should be built around the buyer’s journey, not the marketing department’s internal filing system. When a representative searches for content, they are usually trying to answer a specific question for a prospect at a specific stage of the deal.
The Content Camel Funnel Framework
A highly effective way to structure content is by funnel stage, as outlined by Content Camel. This aligns the content with the specific goal the representative is trying to achieve:
By organising content this way, you shift the representative’s mindset from “What piece of content should I send?” to “What does the prospect need to move to the next stage?”
The AI Illusion in Content Management
It is tempting to believe that Artificial Intelligence will solve the findability problem. Vendors promise that AI-powered search will magically surface the right asset at the right time. However, AI is only as good as the underlying data structure. If your content library is filled with outdated, poorly tagged, and irrelevant documents, AI will simply surface bad content faster.
Furthermore, while AI can generate first drafts of content quickly, it cannot replicate the nuanced, opinionated, and highly specific insights that build trust with B2B buyers. AI should be used to automate the tagging and categorisation of content, not to replace the strategic thought required to create it.
Part IV: The Governance Model (Who Owns What)
The final piece of the puzzle is governance. Content libraries become graveyards because content is created and then abandoned. Without a clear ownership model, outdated pricing sheets and legacy product decks linger in the system, creating confusion and risk.
The most effective way to manage this is through a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) model, combined with a strict operational cadence.
The Content RACI Matrix
Responsible (The Creator): Product Marketing or Content Marketing. They write the words and design the assets.
Accountable (The Owner): Sales Enablement or RevOps. They own the taxonomy, the platform, and the ultimate success or failure of the content library.
Consulted (The Subject Matter Experts): Top-performing Sales Reps and Product Managers. They provide the raw insights and validate that the content reflects reality.
Informed (The Users): The entire Sales Team. They need to know when new content is available and when old content is retired.
If you’re a smaller business you may not have the luxury of having 4 different departments or people across the RACI, it is more applying a well understood matrix to content management which I have found helps elevate the whole process.
The Operational Cadence
Content management is not a project; it is a continuous operational rhythm. As an Operating Partner, this is the kind of thing you can install:
The Weekly Huddle (15 mins): Enablement highlights one new piece of content and explains exactly when and how to use it in a deal. This is not a broadcast; it is a tactical briefing.
The Monthly Review (60 mins): Marketing and Enablement review search data. What are reps searching for that yields zero results? That is the content creation backlog for the next month. What content is highly rated by reps but never sent to prospects? That content needs to be rewritten for the buyer.
The Quarterly Audit (Half-Day): A ruthless purge. Any asset that has not been viewed or shared in the last 90 days is archived. Any asset with outdated branding or pricing is flagged for immediate update or deletion. This audit should be non-negotiable.
Yes, But How Do I Use This in My Business Now?
Theory is useless without execution. If you are a Marketing Leader, RevOps professional, or Enablement owner, here is how you fix your content graveyard this week.
1. Execute a “Big Purge” Do not try to organise the chaos; delete it. Run an analytics report on your shared drive or enablement platform. Identify every piece of content that has not been opened by a sales representative in the last six months. Move it all to an “Archive” folder. You will likely reduce your library by 60 percent instantly, making the remaining 40 percent infinitely easier to find.
2. Build the “Core 10” for New Hires Stop giving new hires access to everything. Identify the ten most critical pieces of content a representative needs to survive their first 90 days (e.g., the master pitch deck, the top three battlecards, the pricing cheat sheet). Put these in a dedicated, restricted folder. They do not get access to the wider library until they have mastered the Core 10 or whatever number is the key number for your firm.
3. Shift One Asset to “Buyer Enablement” Take your most popular internal battlecard and rewrite it for the buyer. Remove the internal jargon and the “how to trap the competitor” tactics. Rewrite it as an objective, professional comparison guide that a champion would feel comfortable forwarding to their CFO. Watch how much more frequently it gets used.
4. Implement the “Search Failure” Metric If you use a dedicated platform, start tracking failed searches. If you use Google Drive or Notion, create a Slack channel called #content-requests. When a representative asks for something that doesn’t exist, log it. This list, generated by actual sales friction, should dictate 80 percent of marketing’s content creation roadmap.
5. Empower Your Top Performers Identify your top three sales representatives and give them a mandate to share their “field-tested” content. Whether it is a custom email template or a specific ROI spreadsheet they built themselves, create a “Peer-to-Peer” section in your content library. Often, the best content is not created by marketing; it is created by the people actually selling the product.
Content should be the bridge between your sales team and your buyers. Right now, for most companies, it is a wall. By reducing volume, shifting to buyer enablement, and implementing ruthless governance, you can turn your content graveyard into a revenue engine.