Key takeaways

• The famous "60–90% of sales content goes unused" statistic traces back to a 2013 conference presentation with no public methodology, and the 90% version traces to nothing at all.
• The verifiable 2025–26 data tells a different story: buyers now run most of their journey without reps, so much of that content was never going to be touched by anyone.
• The fix is producing less content with sales and real buying jobs in the room, then governing what remains, rather than buying a bigger library for the pile.

You've seen the number. It anchors sales enablement decks, tooling pitches, and conference keynotes: 60 to 70% of B2B content goes unused by sales. Sometimes it inflates to 80%. In its boldest form, the one in this headline, it reaches 90%.

Before building strategy on it, it's worth asking a rude question: where did it come from?

The audit nobody runs

The traceable origin is a presentation at the SiriusDecisions Summit in 2013, where analyst Marisa Kopec told the audience that 60 to 70% of content produced by B2B marketers goes largely unused. The underlying deck and methodology were never published. SiriusDecisions was absorbed into Forrester in 2019, and Forrester doesn't maintain the figure. The statistic guiding 2026 content budgets is a thirteen-year-old conference slide.

The 90% version is worse. It circulates attributed variously to the American Marketing Association, an e-book, and a marketing agency's video, and none of those trails reaches a primary source. A writer at CustomerThink dissected this exact genre of number in a piece whose title does the work: "78% of All Sales Statistics Are Made Up." The famous "$50 billion wasted on unused content"? That was a 2015 blog post multiplying two other estimates together, honest arithmetic, openly labeled, that hardened into a fact through repetition. And the "$1 trillion lost to sales-marketing misalignment" figure that often rides alongside has no identifiable primary source whatsoever.

To be clear about what this means and doesn't mean: nobody is claiming your content library is secretly well-used. The vendor research that exists points the same direction, with Highspot's 2025 data finding 39% of go-to-market organizations say their salespeople don't effectively use content, and Seismic's survey finding 97% of teams without enablement tech struggle to locate content during customer interactions, though both companies sell the remedy, so calibrate accordingly. The waste is real. What the zombie stat does is misdiagnose it, because it frames the problem as reps failing to use good content, which points the budget at findability: better tagging, better portals, a bigger library for the same pile.

The verifiable 2026 data suggests the pile itself is the problem.

The buyer your content was made for doesn't exist

Look at what independent research says about how B2B buying actually works now.

Gartner's March 2026 survey of B2B buyers found 67% prefer a rep-free buying experience, up from 61% a year earlier, and 45% used AI tools during a recent purchase. The accompanying analyst comment reads like a verdict on the traditional content library: sellers "can't rely on static collateral to carry influence." 6sense's large-sample buyer research adds the timing: buyers now make first contact with a seller around 61% of the way through their journey, arriving with a shortlist already ordered, and the vendor leading at that point wins roughly four times out of five.

Now re-read the unused-content problem in that light. A large share of the classic sales content library, the leave-behinds, the rep-carried decks, the battlecards for conversations that increasingly never happen, was built for a journey where a rep escorts the buyer from awareness to signature. That buyer is mostly gone. The content wasn't abandoned by lazy reps. It was born unused, made for a workflow that no longer describes how your customers buy.

The buyers themselves have been saying so. In Demand Gen Report's content preferences survey, 56% of buyers said they're overwhelmed by the volume of vendor content, 54% said it's too much of a sales pitch, and 51% called it too generic. That reads less like a findability gap and more like an audience reviewing the product and declining it.

Make less, with sales in the room

If the diagnosis is overproduction for an imaginary buyer, the fix inverts the usual playbook. Three moves, in order of impact.

Produce against buying jobs, not funnel stages. Gartner's buyer enablement research reframes purchases as six jobs the buying group must complete: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation. Most content libraries are heavy on solution exploration and nearly silent on consensus creation, which is where deals involving ten-person buying groups actually die. Before commissioning anything, name the job it helps a buyer finish. If nobody can, that asset is joining the unused pile on day one. This works best as a standing session with sales in the room, not a quarterly survey of them; the alignment conversation fails as a document and works as a habit.

Build for the rep-free majority, with a rep-assisted payoff. The same Gartner research contains the most encouraging number in this article: buyers who use supplier digital tools alongside a rep are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal. Self-serve content and sellers aren't substitutes; the content does the escorting the rep no longer can, and the rep closes the gap the content can't. Buyers told DGR what that content looks like: short-form (67% value it), organized by pain point (74%), and findable without a form-wall, since 89% of downloaded assets were ones buyers found themselves.

Then, and only then, govern the library. Consolidation, tagging, and retirement schedules matter, and Foleon's own piece on why content libraries work against you covers that ground. But governance applied to an overproduced library just organizes the waste. Shrink first, govern second.

One honest caveat: none of this yields a clean replacement statistic. Nobody can currently tell you what percentage of B2B content goes unused, because no recent independent study measures it, and any vendor number you see deserves the same provenance audit this article started with. The absence of a defensible figure is itself the finding. If your content strategy needs a scary percentage to justify itself, it's resting on the wrong foundation.

Retire the stat, keep the lesson

The unused-content statistic survived thirteen years because it flattered everyone. Marketing got a reason to buy tools, vendors got a headline, and nobody had to ask whether the content should have existed. The 2026 evidence is less comfortable and more useful: buyers run their own journey, they're drowning in generic collateral, and what sales teams actually need is a smaller set of assets that do a specific buying job well enough to work without a rep standing next to them.

So retire the slide. In its place, one question for every asset in next quarter's content plan: which buying job does this finish, and would a buyer who never talks to us still find it worth their time?

The content that survives that question won't need a statistic to defend it.