Article Summary

The battlecard you spent two weeks perfecting is sitting in a shared drive, unopened, right next to last quarter's version. Fixing that takes matching the format to the moment, making assets findable without a scavenger hunt, and measuring which ones actually move deals instead of counting downloads. Here's what separates content sales reaches for from content that just sits there.

Key Takeaways

• The content sellers skip usually just doesn't match the conversation they're actually having in the room.
• One-pagers, decks, and battlecards solve different problems. Treating them as interchangeable formats is a big part of why so much of it goes unused.
• Tracking whether content moves a deal, not just whether someone opened it, is the only measurement that tells you if enablement is working.

The stat everyone quotes, and why it undersells the problem

You've probably seen the claim that 90% of marketing deliverables never get used by sales. It's been circulating since around 2016, credited to the American Marketing Association, and it shows up in nearly every "fix sales enablement" article written since. The number is old enough that it deserves some skepticism on its own. But the pattern underneath it hasn't gone anywhere: more recent research from Seismic puts unused content closer to 65%, and finds sellers lose roughly 10 hours a week hunting down, comparing, or rebuilding assets marketing already made. Other estimates put the annual toll north of 400 hours a year, per rep, spent searching for the right piece of content instead of selling.

Nobody wakes up excited to rebuild a deck from scratch when one already exists somewhere. The real issue sits in infrastructure, and it breaks down into three separate failures that get lumped together under "sales and marketing don't talk enough": the format doesn't match the moment, the content can't be found when it's needed, and nobody can prove whether any of it worked. Each one has a different fix. Treating them as one soft, cultural issue is why so many alignment initiatives stall out after a few good meetings.

Why enablement gets ignored

Start with trust. A rep who's been burned once by an outdated pricing sheet or a stale competitive claim will build their own materials from then on, even if marketing fixes the problem. That's a slow habit to unlearn, and it's worse in cybersecurity, where a single wrong claim about a competitor's detection capability can get called out by a technical buyer in the first five minutes of a call.

Then there's format mismatch. A widely cited study of B2B sales reps found nearly nine in ten rely on case studies, and more than half use one-pagers or brochures regularly. White papers tell a different story: about one in five reps share them, but almost none believe those reports hold a prospect's attention. Reps still send white papers occasionally, mostly to signal depth or credibility, not because they expect anyone to read past the executive summary. Marketing teams that keep pouring budget into long-form research assets and treating one-pagers as an afterthought are optimizing for the wrong end of that split.

And there's the training gap, which gets skipped constantly. A new battlecard or a refreshed deck doesn't sell itself just by existing. If nobody walks the sales team through when to use it and what it's actually for, it sits in the shared drive next to everything else nobody opens.

None of this means sellers are right to build their own everything. Homegrown decks drift off message fast, and in a regulated, technical space like cybersecurity, inconsistent claims create real legal and credibility exposure. But blaming the sales team for "not using what we give them" skips the more useful question: does what marketing gives them actually fit the conversation it's meant to support?

One-pagers vs. decks vs. battlecards: they're not interchangeable

This is where a lot of cybersecurity marketing teams lose the plot. One-pagers, decks, and battlecards get treated like three sizes of the same asset, when they're built to do three different jobs.

A deck supports a structured motion: discovery, a demo, an executive pitch. It has room for a narrative arc because someone is walking the room through it in real time.

A one-pager is the leave-behind. It has to survive being forwarded to someone who wasn't on the call, skimmed on a phone, and still make the case on its own. If your one-pager needs a verbal explanation to land, it's actually a deck slide wearing a one-pager's outfit.

A battlecard is neither of those. It's an internal reference, not customer-facing content. The moment a battlecard gets shared with a prospect, it's stopped being a battlecard and become something else, usually a comparison page that needed a legal and accuracy review it never got. Good battlecards read like tables, not paragraphs: short labels, checkmarks, blunt claims a rep can scan mid-call without losing the thread of the conversation. The best ones lead with the exact question a skeptical buyer is going to ask, not with a paragraph explaining your positioning philosophy.

In cybersecurity specifically, this mismatch shows up constantly. Marketing builds a beautifully designed 20-slide competitive deck, and what the rep actually needed was a one-page table answering "does your platform inspect encrypted traffic, yes or no" before the CISO on the call moves on to the next vendor. Sophisticated, technical buyers reward speed to a straight answer. Polish can wait.

Findability: the unglamorous fix nobody wants to own

Even well-built content fails if reps can't find it fast enough to use it live. A rep three minutes into an objection isn't going to dig through a folder structure someone set up two reorgs ago. If it's not surfaced automatically or tagged in a way that matches how sales actually searches, and not how marketing organized it, it might as well not exist.

This doesn't require an enterprise platform to fix, though plenty of vendors will tell you otherwise. It requires someone owning the taxonomy: tagging by buyer stage, persona, competitor, and format, and actually maintaining that system when content gets updated or retired. A shared drive with disciplined tagging and a monthly cleanup beats an expensive content management system nobody bothered to configure properly. The tool matters less than whether someone treats findability as an ongoing job instead of a one-time project.

Silence is the real tell. If a new asset launches and nobody mentions it three weeks later, that usually means it never surfaced in front of anyone, not that sales didn't need it.

How to actually measure usage

Most teams that get this far stop at the easy metric: did someone open the file. Around 64% of companies now track content usage in some form, which sounds like progress until you notice that "usage" and "impact" aren't the same thing. A battlecard that gets opened 200 times and never shows up in a closed-won deal is telling you something: reps don't trust it enough to actually use it.

The more useful measurement ties content to what happens after someone engages with it. Research on buying committees found that deals where multiple stakeholders engage with shared content are roughly eight times more likely to advance, with meaningfully higher close rates attached. That's a very different signal than an open rate. It tells you the content did its job: it moved from one person's inbox into an actual internal conversation.

Getting there doesn't require a six-figure enablement platform, though it helps. At minimum, it requires a habit: asking sales which specific assets showed up in deals that closed, and which ones they stopped using. That conversation, done quarterly, will surface more truth than any dashboard.

What to actually do this quarter

None of this is complicated in principle. It's just unglamorous, and it competes for time against the next campaign launch. A short checklist, if you're deciding where to start:

• Split your content library by format function, not topic. Know which pieces are decks, which are leave-behinds, and which are internal-only, and stop asking one asset to do all three jobs.
• Assign one owner to findability. Not a committee. One person accountable for tagging, retiring stale content, and flagging gaps.
• Replace open-rate reporting with a simple quarterly check-in: which assets showed up in deals that closed, and which ones sales abandoned.

None of this fixes sales enablement overnight. But it stops the cycle of building more content to solve a problem that was never about volume in the first place.