The number you’ve read, and the one you can measure
You’ve read that most B2B marketing content goes unused by sales, with a percentage attached. Some version of that figure is quoted in vendor blogs, conference decks and pitch documents, usually without a link. We’re not going to add another copy of it here.
Not because the problem isn’t real. It is, and any marketer who has watched a rep build their own one-pager at 11 at night knows it. The reason is that no industry percentage is a measurement of your company. The only version worth having is the one you can count in your own sent mail. That takes 1 week rather than a citation, and the rest of this post is how we’d do the counting, and what to do with what it shows.
Unused rarely means rejected
Your sales team doesn’t hold a vote and reject the content. Three quieter things happen instead.
They can’t find it. The piece exists, it’s on the site somewhere, and nobody remembers the URL during a live conversation.
It doesn’t fit the moment. A rep on a second call needs one page about implementation risk. What exists is a 4,000 word overview of the category.
It can’t be sent as it is. It’s behind a form, it’s a 12MB attachment, or it names a competitor in a way that legal hasn’t cleared.
None of the three shows up as a complaint. They show up as silence, and then as a rep writing their own version in the evening.
The forwarding test
A piece travels or it doesn’t. Three conditions decide it. We run them on our own pages, and you can run them on anything you’ve already published.
It reads cold. Someone who wasn’t on the call opens it and understands the point in a minute. No context from the rep, no preamble.
It answers one question. A buyer forwards a document to settle a specific argument inside their own company: cost, risk, timeline, who else did this. A piece that covers eight questions settles none.
Nothing stands in front of it. A form stops the chain at the first person, and your reader will not ask nine colleagues to register for a PDF. That’s where most gated assets die: the lead capture works on the first reader and blocks the other nine in the buying group.
What actually travels
The formats that get sent are short, and they are not designed.
A one-page customer story, which has its own collection job before anyone writes it. A criteria list for choosing between vendors. A plain explanation of how pricing works. A comparison that admits where you’re weaker. A short technical spec someone’s engineer can check.
Match them to the moment your rep is in. On a first call the question is whether you solve this class of problem at all, so a criteria list or a comparison travels. On a second call it’s implementation risk and cost, and a customer story with a timeline does that work. When your buyer goes internal to defend the choice, they need one page with numbers on it and a source beside each one. Three moments, three pieces. Plenty of sites publish for the first moment and stop.
Marketers who have made the switch describe the same turn on their own forums. They stopped pitching and started publishing 1-page customer stories, in plain text rather than designed PDFs, built in 3 parts: the problem, what we tried, what changed. And then the stories started coming back to them, quoted by prospects on sales calls.
Buyers report the same preference from their side. Ask them why they picked the vendor they picked and 3 reasons sit at the top of the list: knowledge of the buyer’s own company, knowledge of the problem area, and content that made it easier to show a return or build a business case internally. That 3rd one is the forwarding test, stated by the person doing the forwarding.
We publish all 3 of our portfolio pieces in full rather than behind a form, including the case study, for the same reason.
What doesn’t travel, and shouldn’t be blamed for it
A 4,000 word white paper fails all three conditions. It was never built to pass them.
A white paper runs 2,500 to 5,000 words. Nobody pastes it into a thread with “thoughts?”. It gets read once, by one person, usually the technical evaluator, and it earns its place at that stage. Judging it by forwards is measuring a bus by its cornering.
The same goes for the category overview and the industry trends piece. They do early work, and we sized that work in how much B2B content is enough.
The material we’d call genuinely wasted is different: the piece nobody can name a moment for. If you can’t say which conversation it belongs in and which question it settles, no rep will find that moment either.
Why the polished version loses
Design gets in the way more often than teams expect.
Ask the marketer who makes the case studies how long each one takes and where the time goes. The answer on every forum thread about it is the same: about 4 hours each, most of that layout rather than writing, all of them built on 1 reused template out of exhaustion. Sales wants slides for the deck and the site wants a PDF, so both get made. Updating either one when a number changes is painful enough that it doesn’t happen.
Run the arithmetic on that. 4 hours a piece, in 2 formats each, over a year of ten case studies, is 80 hours. Two full working weeks spent on layout instead of on the argument.
Those hours of layout buy nothing a buyer values. Worse: a designed PDF is expensive to update, so the number in it goes stale and the piece quietly stops being sendable.
A web page beats a PDF for this, which is why we publish our own work as pages. It has a URL, it opens on a phone, and it can be corrected in 10 minutes.
What to ask your sales team this month
Put this to 2 or 3 reps. It takes 20 minutes, and we’d want the answers before commissioning anything.
Start with the links they’ve actually sent a customer in the last 30 days, pulled from sent mail rather than from memory. Then ask what they made themselves: a rep who builds their own one-pager is naming the piece that’s missing. Then ask what a customer asked for that you didn’t have. That last answer is the topic list for the next quarter, and it arrives with the evidence attached.
Write the answers down as they come. The URLs tell you what your sale actually runs on, and the homemade one-pagers tell you what you’re paying for twice: once when a rep builds one in the evening, and again when nobody else on your team can find it.
Then compare the answers to what you published last year. The gap between the two is the real version of the number this article opened with: the share of your content that goes unused, measured in your own account rather than borrowed from a slide.
What to do with the pages nobody sends
We sort them into two piles before deleting anything.
Pile one is findable but wrong: the topic doesn’t match a conversation that happens in your sale. Those are candidates for removal, and pruning has its own arithmetic.
Pile two is right but invisible: nobody knew it existed. That’s a distribution problem, not a content problem, and the fix costs a paragraph in your onboarding rather than a rewrite.
If pile two turns out to be the bigger one, that’s the good outcome. It’s cheaper to make 5 of your pages findable than to write 5 more.
Ask your two best reps those questions. When you know which piece is missing, send us the format and the deadline, and a price comes back within one working day.