The article below quotes a Salesforce stat saying that 85% of marketing content is never used.  This is of no surprise to me as we see this everyday within organisations where there is a disconnect between sales and marketing.

Marketing will say "share this superb piece of insight we have produced".  Sales will reply "I'm not sharing that, it's totally irrelevant to my clients, it's not topical and so it will simply be random if I share it with them."

The best content is produced, when the Sales and Marketing teams come together.  Anyone who is client-facing can much more easily understand a client's pain, what it is they are worried about and what they want to be educated in.  If the client facing team can feed back this information, then everyone can work together to create insights that the sales team want to share back with the client.  Sales will be delighted to do this because it will help advance the next deal.   We recently built a little process called: Listen, Create, Engage.  Very simple and very effective.

Doing all the above sounds very simple but it's amazing how many firms get this wrong because the marketing team and client-facing team are not working in tandem.  Marketing teams should always have one question in the back of their head before rolling out any activity "will doing this advance the sales of our organisation and deliver return on investment".  If the answer is no then it's time to start again.