Marketing! Sales content creation can’t be “fire and forget”!
If you work in marketing and build content for sales, you’ve probably lived this.
You put serious hours into a new deck. The story is right, the slides look good, proof points are in, pricing is correct, legal is happy. You publish it in Teams or SharePoint, announce it, maybe even run a quick internal launch.
Then it goes quiet.
Not because the file is missing, but because you can’t see what happens next. Did anyone use it in customer meetings, did they skip half of it, did it get shared after the visit, did the buyer open it. Most of the time you’re left with the same input you had before: a few comments, and a lot of silence.
That’s why sales content creation can’t be fire and forget.
Why sales content disappears after you publish it
In most companies, content operations are built around availability. Make it accessible, store it centrally, give everyone permissions, and call it done. From an internal governance point of view, that’s responsible.
But sales work doesn’t start from a library, it starts from a situation.
A rep has a customer meeting tomorrow, they have ten minutes to prepare, and they choose whatever helps them feel confident fast. That usually means reusing what they already know, grabbing the last deck that worked, or sticking to the story they can present without thinking. New content competes with habit and time pressure, and habit usually wins.
There’s also a structural mismatch. Content teams often build for completeness, a full story, every use case, every slide for every scenario. Sales teams build for momentum. They want the shortest path to a good conversation. If a deck feels heavy, or if it isn’t obvious how it maps to the meeting they’re walking into, they’ll avoid it, even if it’s good.
Then there’s the reality of versions. If sellers have ever been burned by outdated pricing, wrong promo dates, or a slide that “was updated but I’m not sure where”, they start protecting themselves. They keep local copies. They stick with what they trust. They do not take risks in front of customers to help your content governance.
None of this is because marketing is bad at content, or because sales is lazy. It’s because storage and distribution tools don’t solve the moment of use. They solve “where it lives”, not “how it gets used”.
So content doesn’t really disappear. It just fails to become a default behaviour.
The real issue is the missing feedback loop
When you can’t see usage, you can’t improve. You can only produce.
That’s why so many content teams end up in a cycle that feels productive but isn’t: publish, announce, hope, then build something new because you don’t know if the last thing worked.
The questions you actually need answers to are simple, but most setups can’t answer them:
Was this content used in customer conversations, not just downloaded once
Which parts got used, and which parts were skipped
Did it get shared after the meeting
Did the buyer open it, and what did they spend time on
Which teams adopted it, and which ignored it
Without that signal, you’re left with indirect measures. “It has 300 views in SharePoint” or “someone reacted with a thumbs up in Teams”. That might mean something, but it doesn’t tell you whether it helped sell.
And because you don’t have the signal, you compensate with volume. More decks, more PDFs, more variations, more “short versions”. The library grows, clarity drops, and now you’ve created another problem for the field team. Too much choice feels like no choice at all.
This is where the phrase fire and forget is perfect. You fire content into the organisation, and you forget what happens, because the system doesn’t let you see it. That’s not a content problem. That’s an instrumentation problem.
How to stop fire and forget without turning your life into reporting
You don’t need a data project. You need a practical loop.
Start by separating warehouse from front door. Keep Teams or SharePoint as the backend where content is stored, approved, and archived. Then add a field friendly layer where sales actually builds, presents, and shares content in a consistent way. That’s what Salesframe is for. It’s not competing with Microsoft, it’s the layer that makes content usable in the moment, and visible after the moment.
The key is that the workflow itself creates the signal.
If reps build decks from a curated library, you can see what gets picked. If they use templates, you can see what meeting types repeat. If sharing happens as one link instead of random attachments, you can see what buyers opened and what they spent time on. And because it’s part of the normal flow, you get the feedback without asking reps to fill in forms or write “usage reports”.
If you want a low effort way to start, do this for one month:
Pick one story that actually matters, a seasonal promo, a category push, a new launch. Curate it tightly so it’s obvious what to use. Create one or two templates so reps can build a deck in seconds. Make sharing the default as a single link. Then review only a few signals:
Which deck or template was used most
Which slides were consistently skipped
How often it got shared after meetings
Whether buyers opened it, and what they engaged with
Which team adopted it fastest
After a month, you’ll have more truth than you get from a year of “any feedback on the new deck”.
Sometimes that truth is uncomfortable. The content might be good, but it’s too hard to use. Or it doesn’t match the conversations sales is actually having. Or the story is too long for the first ten minutes of a buyer meeting. The point is, you can finally see it, and fix it.
That’s how you stop producing more content and start producing better content.
TLDR: If your sales content is fire and forget, you’re forced to guess what works. Put a loop in place where usage and buyer engagement becomes visible, and you’ll improve faster with less content, not more.