1. Fighting Back Against Unused Content
How over-creating and under-utilizing
content impacts your bottom line

2. www.bigtincan.comFighting Back Against Unused Content White Paper
Visibility Into the Utilization of Content
Houston, we have a content problem. Today, as much as 70 percent of content churned out by
marketing sits unused, even though a majority of the content is created specifically for sales enablement,
and research from IDC reveals that 41 percent of sales reps don’t know what content to use, how to use
it effectively or when to use it. That means that marketing teams are continuing to crank out content
that isn’t getting used, when they should be delivering content that enhances the sales cycle and
improves performance.
This is happening for a number of reasons, including
marketing’s lack of insight into what sales needs
and sales teams lacking the time to sift through files
and folders to find the right content – often on a mobile
device – at the right time.
So how is this content problem impacting business?
For starters, when sales and marketing operate
in silos, disconnected from one another, the result
is often lost revenue and poor customer service.
But beyond that, when an organization allocates
resources toward creating content that goes unused,
both the marketing and sales teams pay the price. For
marketers, this means content libraries are being clogged
with collateral that is not useful in customer interactions,
and sales teams are being forced to spend time
searching for content that they need or recreating
content that already exists. In fact, an EMI Industry
Intelligence Report revealed that in an average week, a technology sales professional spends eight hours
developing client presentations, five hours looking for marketing collateral, and four hours searching for
customer information outside the organization. The sales professional wastes 17 hours a week or 106
sales days a year. And the more time a rep spends not selling, the less revenue they’ll be able to bring
back to the organization.
The primary issue is the lack of visibility into what content is being used, why and when. By utilizing
content analytics, marketers are empowered with greater visibility into the content that sales teams are
actually using, how often and at what point in the sales process. For example, what if marketers could
determine that only three slides out of a 20-slide deck were actually being used to close deals? By
unlocking this type of expert sales behavior and sharing that knowledge across an entire group, both
sales and marketing teams will benefit.
“The sales professional wastes
17 hours a week or 106 sales
days a year. And the more time
a rep spends not selling, the
less revenue they’ll be able to
bring back to the organization. ”
EMI Industry Intelligence Report

3. www.bigtincan.comFighting Back Against Unused Content White Paper
This visibility also enables marketers to finally eliminate unused content and better allocate their
resources and time to developing content that enables the success of sales. Content analysis may even
identify gaps in content, which can provide marketing with better guidance on which content to prioritize
development of to ensure that sales is prepared for each phase of the sales cycle. If organizations stop
creating content for the sake of doing so, time-efficiency and productivity is improved across the board.
In fact, marketing can quantify the value and determine the financial impact of marketing content and
sales tools used during the sales process. Each piece of content can have a measurable purpose,
versus taking up storage.
The secondary issue is content access. Even with less but more effective content, sales still doesn’t have
the time to search and surf through files and folders for the content they need when every second with
a customer or prospect counts. Visibility into content usage plus push technology enables marketers to
push relevant content to a specific sales rep, based on role-based differentiators, enabling reps to have
access to the right content for the right customer interaction at the right stage in the sales cycle. With
access to relevant content, sales can engage more effectively with customers to win new business
and acquire more market share.
Clearly, not being able to find or access the right content at the right times can cost a sale while
creating content that’s not helpful for sales wastes time and effort – both of which can seriously
impact an organization’s bottom line. Instead, by streamlining the content creation process, and
ensuring that sales and marketing work together to remove the clutter and create content that
closes deals, organizations can be smarter about allocating marketing resources, improve overall
productivity and support the sales team with relevant and useful content.
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