Sales Enablement Content: What Reps Actually Ask Marketing For

The short answer: reps ask for three things over and over. Proof that matches the prospect's situation, a battlecard they can actually say out loud, and something they can paste into an email. Almost everything else in a typical enablement library goes unopened. The reason proof dominates the list is that buyers have already stopped believing the rest.

Start with what the buyer is doing

Enablement content gets designed around what marketing wants to say. It should be designed around what the buyer is already doing without you.

6sense surveyed around 4,000 B2B buyers in 2025 and found buying groups average 11 members, and that buyers are roughly 61% of the way through their journey before they engage a seller. Most of the evaluation has happened before your rep is in the conversation, and it happened across eleven people your rep will mostly never meet.

TrustRadius, surveying 2,164 buyers in 2024, found 56% spoke to an actual product user before purchasing, rising to 71% among enterprise buyers. But only 27% used a vendor-provided reference. They went and found a user themselves.

And in 2023, across 1,604 buyers, TrustRadius found only 15% consult vendor-driven marketing materials, while 75% of vendors produce them.

Those three numbers, taken together, are the entire brief for a sales enablement function:

• ●Your rep arrives late, to a group, most of whom are not in the room
• ●The group wants to hear from a customer, not from you
• ●They will route around your materials to get there

Enablement content that ignores this produces beautifully designed assets that nobody opens. Enablement content that accepts it produces evidence a rep can hand to a buyer who is already sceptical.

What reps actually ask for

Ask a rep what they want and the answers cluster tightly.

1. "Do we have a case study in their industry?" This is the most common request in B2B software and the hardest to fill on demand, because the answer depends on whether a customer in that segment agreed to a story months ago.

2. "What do I say when they mention [competitor]?" A battlecard request, usually mid-deal and usually urgent.

3. "Can I get a reference on a call?" The highest-weight proof there is, and the scarcest.

4. "Have we got something I can send after this call?" Not a deck. A short thing they can paste into an email without rewriting it.

Notice that three of the four are requests for customer proof rather than for marketing collateral. That is the signal worth acting on. Sales does not want more content. It wants evidence.

Why proof outranks every other enablement asset

A deck explains. A proof point settles an argument.

When a buyer says "this sounds good but I am not sure it works for a team our size," there is no slide that answers it. There is only a story about a team their size. CMI and MarketingProfs surveyed 980 B2B marketers in 2025 and found 75% used case studies, with 53% saying case studies, customer stories and videos delivered some of their best results.

The practical implication is about coverage rather than volume. With an 11-member buying group, one case study cannot serve everyone. The finance member and the operational lead have different objections. What you need is proof mapped to segments and objections, not a bigger pile of stories.

A simple audit that usually produces an uncomfortable answer:

Most teams find one strong row and several empty ones. The empty rows are where deals get stuck, and no amount of new collateral fixes them.

How to build a battlecard reps will open

Battlecards fail in a predictable way: they become feature comparison tables. No prospect has ever been persuaded by a checkmark grid, and no rep says one out loud.

A usable battlecard has five parts.

1. The competitor in one honest sentence. If your description of them is a caricature, your rep loses credibility the moment the buyer knows the product. Describe what they genuinely do well.

2. Two or three situations where you win. Situations, not features. "When the team has no dedicated writer" is a situation. "Superior AI" is not.

3. One or two where you lose. Including this is what makes reps trust the document. A battlecard with no losses reads as marketing and gets ignored accordingly.

4. Discovery questions that reveal which situation you are in. The questions matter more than the claims, because they let the rep find out whether this is a deal worth pushing.

5. A proof point under each win claim. This is the part that is usually missing, and it is the part that makes the rest usable. A rep will not risk an unbacked claim in front of a sceptical buyer. Give them a named customer, a real figure, and its source.

That last section is the connection between your proof library and your enablement library. They are the same asset, formatted differently. If your battlecards have empty proof sections, the problem is not battlecard design. It is that you do not have enough customer evidence.

Produce many assets from one capture

The reason enablement libraries go stale is that each asset is treated as its own project, with its own brief, its own approval, and its own place in a queue.

The alternative is to capture once and derive many. A single recorded customer conversation contains:

• ●A full case study
• ●A pull quote for a landing page
• ●A proof point for a battlecard
• ●A sales email a rep can paste and send
• ●A social post
• ●Material for a reference conversation

Same source. Different formats. One approval.

This is exactly how StoryVoice works, and it is why we treat sales enablement as a first-class use case rather than a downstream one. Your customer talks to a voice AI for about five minutes and describes what changed in plain language. StoryVoice computes the headline figure from the before-and-after they stated, and produces the case study in their own voice plus a sales email, a pull quote, a LinkedIn post and an X post from the same interview. The sales email is not a bonus feature; for a rep, it is often the most immediately useful output of the whole exercise.

The customer then approves the story through a link, so the permission problem is handled in the same flow rather than becoming a separate chase.

See the output before you commit: paste an old call transcript or your interview notes into the free AI case study generator. No email required. If the material is too thin for an honest story, it will say so rather than inventing a result, which is the behaviour you want from anything feeding your battlecards.

Organise by situation, not by feature

One structural fix worth making regardless of tooling.

Most enablement libraries are organised by product area, which is how marketing thinks. Reps do not search that way. In a live deal, a rep is in a situation: a competitor was named, the budget was challenged, a security review appeared, the champion went quiet.

Organise by situation and usage goes up, because the rep can find the asset in the seconds they actually have.

The honest verdict

Sales enablement content is mostly a proof problem wearing a collateral costume. The requests that come in over and over are for evidence, and evidence is the thing that takes two months to produce and cannot be written on demand.

Fix the capture rate and the battlecards, the emails and the reference list fill themselves. Keep producing decks instead, and you will keep building a library that nobody opens while your reps improvise the proof they needed.

Next: customer proof: the six types and how to capture them, and how to repurpose one case study into a month of content.

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Sources: 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report (~4,000 buyers); TrustRadius 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect (2,164 buyers); TrustRadius 2023 B2B Buying Disconnect (1,604 buyers); CMI and MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks 2025 (980 marketers).