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There’s a stat that gets cited in every B2B content marketing article: “buyers are X% through the process before they talk to sales.” You’ve seen it. The number changes depending on who’s publishing it. Gartner says 67%. Forrester says 75%. The point is always the same: buyers are doing a lot of research on their own.
But nobody talks about this part. If buyers are doing all this self-directed research, then the content they find during that research IS your sales process. It’s not supporting the sale. It IS the sale.
And for most B2B teams, that content is almost entirely top-of-funnel blog posts and gated whitepapers. The stuff that drives awareness. The stuff that fills the MQL spreadsheet.
Meanwhile, the content buyers actually need to make a purchase decision? It doesn’t exist. Or it’s buried so deep in a Google Drive folder that nobody can find it.
That’s the content gap. Not a lack of content. A misalignment between what you produce and what your buyer needs at the moment they need it.
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Let me be specific because “content gap” is a vague term that gets used to justify creating more of the same stuff.
The gap isn’t at the top of the funnel. Most B2B teams have plenty of awareness content. Blog posts. Webinars. Social content. Maybe a podcast. That part is covered.
The gap is in three specific places:
This is when your buyer has moved past “I have a problem” and “there are tools that solve it” and is now building internal requirements. They’re creating a shortlist. They’re defining must-haves. They’re starting to involve other stakeholders.
What they need:
What most teams have: a pricing page that says “contact us” and a security FAQ buried in the help center.
This is the deadliest gap. Your champion is bought in, but they need to convince 6-13 other stakeholders (Forrester puts the average B2B buying group at 13 people in 2024). Each of those stakeholders has different priorities, different concerns, and about 60 seconds of attention to give this decision.
The kicker from Corporate Visions research: 74% of buying teams experience “unhealthy conflict” during the purchasing process. Your champion isn’t just presenting to a receptive audience. They’re walking into a room where people actively disagree about whether this is worth doing.
What most teams have: zero content specifically designed for internal champion selling. Maybe a case study or two, but they’re formatted for the website, not for forwarding in an email.
The deal is almost done. Budget is tentatively approved. But someone asks a last-minute question and nobody has the answer ready. This happens constantly. Sales cycles have stretched to an average of 6.5 months (up from 4.9 in 2019), and a big reason is these late-stage stalls.
What most teams have: “let me connect you with our customer success team.”
A practical exercise. It takes 30 minutes and it will show you exactly where you’re losing deals.
Map your existing content against five buying phases. Be honest. “We have something somewhere” doesn’t count. If a sales rep can’t find it in 30 seconds, it doesn’t exist.
We have a complete guide on how to do a sales content audit if you want the full template with step-by-step instructions. But the quick version is: anything that scores empty in Phases 3-5 is directly correlated with where your deals stall.
Content teams aren’t ignoring the buying process. They’re optimizing for the wrong metrics.
Most content strategies are measured by traffic, leads, and MQLs. Those metrics reward top-of-funnel content. Blog posts that rank. Webinars that generate email addresses. Gated reports that fill the pipeline.
Nobody gets promoted for creating an IT security one-pager that unblocks a single deal worth $50K. But that one-pager might be worth more than your entire blog’s monthly traffic.
The shift is thinking about content as sales infrastructure, not just marketing output. When marketing builds content that directly enables the buying process, the ROI is measured in closed revenue, not page views.
We wrote about this tension in what content does sales actually want. Spoiler: sales wants the stuff that unblocks specific deal stages. Marketing keeps creating the stuff that drives top-of-funnel metrics. The content gap lives in the space between those two priorities.
You don’t need 50 new pieces of content. You need 5-8 specific pieces that fill the exact phases where your deals are stalling.
One-page executive summary. Take your best sales deck and distill it to a single page. This is the most forwarded document in B2B sales and most teams don’t have one.
Three case studies organized by buyer type. Not your biggest logos. Companies that look like your prospects: same size, same industry, same problems. With specific metrics. We covered the production approach in our case study templates guide (key insight: write the draft first, then get approval).
A business case template. Give your champion the ROI framework pre-built. Let them plug in their own numbers. This removes the single biggest objection in B2B: “we can’t justify the spend.”
Security and compliance one-pager. Every B2B deal gets stuck on security review. A comprehensive, pre-packaged doc that IT can review in 10 minutes saves weeks.
Integration overview. Not full API docs. A one-page summary: “We connect to X, Y, Z. Here’s how. Here’s the timeline.”
Creating the content is half the battle. The other half is making it findable when your champion needs it at 9pm on a Tuesday. Not next week. Not after a Slack message to the AE. Right now.
This is the problem that keeps me up at night as a founder, and it’s why I built Content Camel. Not another file storage system. A system where reps and champions can search for content by buying stage, share it with tracked links, and your team gets notified when a stakeholder engages with it. Because when the CFO opens your ROI doc at midnight, that’s a buying signal your AE needs to act on tomorrow morning.
If your current system is Google Drive folders and email attachments, start with our guide on why shared drives fail sales teams and what the alternative looks like.
The content gap isn’t about creating more content. It’s about creating the right content for the phases where your buyer actually makes decisions, then making sure the people who need it can find it.
Top-of-funnel content drives awareness. Middle-and-bottom content drives revenue. Most teams are over-indexed on the first and starving the second.
Do the 30-minute audit. Find the gaps. Build 5 pieces that fill them. Then organize everything so your champion can find it when the deal is on the line.
That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.
Want the complete B2B Content Audit template? One-page framework that maps your content to all five buying phases. Find your gaps in 30 minutes.
Ready to organize content by buying stage? Try Content Camel free and make your middle-and-bottom content actually findable.
Your buyers need content at every stage. Content Camel helps you organize it by funnel stage so nothing falls through the cracks.
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.