65% of your sales content is never used

Open your content library. Sort by last used. Scroll to the bottom.

That long tail you're looking at (the battle cards nobody pulled, the decks with one download, the "updated messaging" from two launches ago) is the content graveyard. I've run this exercise with a lot of teams, and the bottom of that list is always longer than anyone in marketing wants to admit. It's probably most of your library. The number everyone quotes is 65% of sales content goes unused, from Forrester, back when it was SiriusDecisions. Worth knowing: they have never published the study behind it. The figure that does come with a method says the same thing. In Forrester's 2018 State of B2B Content study, a survey of 316 B2B marketers, only 18% said they had used more than three quarters of their assets in the previous two years.

Here's the sharper number. Mindtickle looked at content activity across more than 400 customer organizations and over a million users, and found that 10% of assets drove 50% of all engagement. One asset in ten is doing half the work. The question that should keep your marketing lead up at night isn't "do we have enough content?" It's "which ten percent is ours, and does anyone know?"

How the graveyard fills up

Nobody sets out to build unused content. The graveyard fills for three ordinary reasons:

• Content gets built for the launch, not the deal. It answers "what do we want to say?" instead of "what does a seller need at this stage of this deal?" So it's accurate, on-brand, and useless on a Tuesday call.
• Nobody measures usage. Production is counted: assets shipped per quarter. Consumption isn't. So the team keeps shipping what the calendar demands, not what the floor pulls.
• Sellers can't find it anyway. Most of a rep's week is not spent selling. Salesforce has put non-selling work at 60% or more in every edition of its State of Sales report since 2022, and hunting for the right deck is a steady slice of it. Past a certain search cost, reps stop looking and rebuild it themselves. Now you have a graveyard and a shadow library.

From graveyard to working playbook

The fix is not a bigger library or another platform license. It's a different operating rule: every asset earns its place by the deal stage it serves and the usage it gets. In practice, four moves:

• Map everything to a deal stage. Discovery, evaluation, negotiation, expansion. If an asset can't name the stage and the conversation it belongs to, it doesn't go in the playbook.
• Instrument usage. Track what sellers open, send, and reuse, plus what prospects actually engage with. This is the scoreboard for content, and it ends the opinion war about what's "good."
• Promote the 10%. Find your workhorses and put them one click from the deal. Update them first at every launch. These assets are revenue infrastructure; treat them like it.
• Kill on schedule. Every quarter, anything untouched for 90 days gets fixed, merged, or archived. A playbook that only grows becomes a graveyard with better navigation.

What changes when you run it this way

The first quarter of usage data is usually humbling, and clarifying. Marketing stops producing on volume and starts producing on demand signal. Sellers stop hunting and start pulling. Launches ship with the five assets the motion needs instead of the twenty the plan promised.

And the measurement question, "is content helping us win?" finally has an answer with numbers in it: which assets touch forecasted deals, which stages are starved, what the working 10% has in common.

I ran the other side of this at Apple. BizWeb was our internal B2B communications platform, and we ran it like a product, not a library: editorial cadence, clear ownership, usage as the scoreboard. It reached about 25,000 sellers a month, and they came back by choice, not because compliance made them. The content got good enough that it became the first Apple sales content used to train an LLM. None of that came from producing more. It came from measuring what got used and cutting what didn't.

This is one of the three disciplines North of Quota runs on subscription, and it's the one with the fastest visible payoff. In the Uptick suite, an agent called Compass does the daily lifting: keeps the playbook current, points sellers to the right asset for the deal stage, and flags what's going stale before it hits the graveyard.

You already paid for the content. Make it work, or make it gone.