After
the send.The 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report
Your content has a life
after the sales conversation.
What 27,000 shared links, 50,000 buyer opens and 1,460 hours of viewing time reveal about how medical device, diagnostics and life science buyers engage with sales content, and what your team can do with those signals.
Median time from share
to first open1
Among matched opened links · Last 90 days
The send is a starting point.
The response tells you more.
Most sales enablement statistics are survey data: someone asked a few hundred reps how they think buyers behave. This report is built from recorded behavior instead. Every number comes from a logged event on the SoloFire platform: a link a rep shared, a buyer opening it, a file viewed, a file downloaded.
We pulled the data on 30 September 2026 and asked one question of it: what do buyers actually do when a field rep sends them something? Seven findings stood out. Some confirm what experienced reps already suspect. A few should change how your team sends content next week.
Key findings: sales content engagement statistics for 2026
- Median time from share to first open is 4.7 minutes. 75% of first opens happen within an hour and 90% within 24 hours (n = 2,828 matched links, last 90 days).
- 62% of shared sales content links are opened. Opened links average 2.97 opens and 50.8% are opened more than once (26,966 links, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026).
- 49.6% of opened links lead to a download, which is 31.0% of all links shared.
- Video is 7.2% of library items and 28.8% of buyer views. Average view: 161 seconds for video, 95 seconds for PDF, 273 seconds for web links.
- Reps share most at 18:00 UTC; buyers open most at 15:00 UTC. Weekends are 4.4% of shares but 6.8% of opens.
- 39% of sends go through the rep's native email client (Outlook or Gmail), up from 23% of all recorded sends since 2018.
- 12.9% of library items were shared with a buyer in twelve months. Among viewed items, the top 10% drew 67.7% of views.
median time from share to first open; 90% of first opens within 24 hours.1
02 / RETURN VISITS ↗62%of shared links opened; half of those opened more than once.2
03 / DOWNLOADS ↗49.6%of opened links had at least one content download.2
04 / FORMATS ↗28.8%of buyer views went to video, which is 7.2% of library items.3
05 / WHEN BUYERS READ ↗3 hoursbetween the peak hour for shares and the peak hour for opens.4
06 / THE INBOX ↗39%of sends go through the rep's own email client, up from 23%.5
07 / UTILIZATION ↗12.9%of library items were shared with a buyer in twelve months.6
These are descriptive, activity-weighted observations from one platform, not a representative industry survey or a controlled experiment. Links, opens, views and people are different units and are kept separate throughout. Where a finding suggests a change in practice, it is framed as something to test against your own accounts. Measurement windows vary by finding and are noted on each chart.
Buyers open shared content
in minutes, not days.
Among links with a matched first open, the median time from a rep sharing to the buyer opening was 4.7 minutes.
Three quarters of those links were opened within the hour and 90.3% within 24 hours. The tail is small: only 0.5% were first opened more than 30 days after they were sent. Among links that do get opened, a day-one open is the overwhelming norm.
This matters for follow-up cadence. The habit of waiting a week before checking in assumes buyers slowly get around to reading. The observed pattern is different: if the content lands, it lands fast. That makes the first screen the buyer sees when they tap the link the thing worth the most attention. Can they tell why the material matters? Is the promised asset the first thing they find?
Check engagement the next morning rather than next week. If the link was opened, follow up while the content is fresh. If it was not opened within a day, do not assume it is still in the queue; use what you know about the account to decide whether a different angle or a different contact is the better next move.
Quotable: The median time from a rep sharing sales content to the buyer's first open was 4.7 minutes. 75% of first opens happened within an hour and 90% within 24 hours. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
The first hour matters.
FIG. 01Cumulative share of matched opened links
opened within the first hour
Where first opens fall
One shared link gets
opened again and again.
Of 26,966 links shared in the twelve months to September 2026, 62.4% were opened. Half of those were opened more than once.
Opened links averaged 2.97 opens each, and 50.8% recorded more than one open. The single most-opened link in the period recorded 912 opens. A tracked link sent by a known rep to a known contact, the kind of shared content Space SoloFire reps use, behaves very differently from a marketing email.
Opens are events, not people, so 912 opens does not tell us how many readers were behind it. But it is not one person rereading a PDF. The likeliest explanation is a link that traveled: forwarded inside a hospital system, a value analysis committee or a distributor network. A share is the entry point for content that will move through the account on its own.
Build every shared asset for the people the rep will never meet. Clear title, clear claim, clear next step, no dependence on the verbal context from the meeting. Treat repeat opens on a link as a signal worth a question: who else on your side is looking at this?
Quotable: 62% of sales content links shared by field reps were opened. Opened links averaged three opens each, and one in two was opened more than once. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
Built for a second look.
FIG. 02Among links with at least one recorded open
Half of opened links
lead to a download.
Nearly half of opened links, 49.6%, had at least one file downloaded. Measured against every link shared, that is 31.0%.
The denominator matters and both numbers are worth knowing: half of the buyers who engage go on to save something, and roughly one in three shares overall ends in a saved file.
An open and a download are different actions. Opening brings someone to the shared content. Downloading takes an asset out of that session and into the buyer's own drive, email thread or procurement folder, where it can be read again, forwarded and compared against competitors with no rep in the room. In regulated selling this carries extra weight: a downloaded clinical summary or IFU may surface in front of a hospital value analysis committee months later, and the version the buyer saved is the version they will quote.
Assume the downloaded copy outlives the conversation. Keep version control on sales content tight so reps can only share current, approved files, and design PDFs to be understood cold: product name, the core claim, a version date and a contact on the first page, not on page nine.
Quotable: Nearly half (49.6%) of opened sales content links had at least one file downloaded by the buyer. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
From delivery to download.
FIG. 03Distinct links · October 2025 to September 2026
Video is 7% of the library
and 29% of what buyers view.
MP4 video is 7.2% of library items and drew 28.8% of all buyer views, four times its weight.
PDFs are still the workhorse of sales content in this market: 64.0% of library items and 63.7% of buyer views. Buyers engage with both. A short demonstration shows how something works; a document gives the detail that is easier to scan, compare and keep.
Attention points the same way. The average buyer view of a PDF lasted 95 seconds; a video, 161 seconds; a web link, usually a product page or clinical resource, 273 seconds. Duration is one lens, not a verdict: the assets differ in length and purpose, and a longer view does not by itself prove a more effective asset.
This is not an argument to stop making PDFs. It is an argument that every PDF a rep sends should have a short video next to it, because that is where buyer attention concentrates.
Pull your 20 most-shared PDFs. Any without a companion video under three minutes is a gap. Prioritize demonstrations and procedure walkthroughs; in this dataset those are the videos buyers return to.
Quotable: Video made up 7% of sales content libraries but accounted for 29% of buyer views. Buyers spent 161 seconds on an average video view versus 95 seconds on a PDF. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
Two formats. Different roles.
FIG. 04Share of library items vs share of buyer views
MP4 video 4× its library share
PDF documents
Web links
Average seconds per buyer view
Reps send in the afternoon.
Buyers read in the morning.
Sharing peaks at 18:00 UTC, roughly 2 pm on the US east coast. Buyer opens peak three hours earlier, at 15:00 UTC.
That is around 11 am eastern, the window where people clear their inbox before lunch. In aggregate, reps are sending into the quietest part of the buyer's afternoon.
The weekly pattern has the same shape. Tuesday and Wednesday each carry 22% of shares and are the heaviest selling days. Weekends tell the more useful story: Saturday and Sunday account for 4.4% of shares but 6.8% of opens. Buyers catch up on reading over the weekend at a rate that reps do not match.
These are two separate aggregate distributions, not a matched test of send time against open rate, so treat the gap as a hypothesis rather than a rule. It is a consistent enough pattern to be worth testing on your own sends, especially alongside the 4.7-minute median in Finding 01.
Run a two-week test: move your sends to before 9 am in the buyer's time zone and compare open rates with your usual afternoon cadence. For a buyer who is hard to reach during the week, a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning send is worth trying.
Quotable: Field reps share the most sales content around 2 pm eastern. Buyers open the most content around 11 am eastern. Weekends are 4% of shares but 7% of opens. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
Selling days, reading days.
FIG. 05Share of weekly shares vs share of weekly opens, by day
Reps have moved sharing
into their own inbox.
In the last twelve months, 39% of sends went out through the rep's own email client. Across all recorded sends since 2018, that figure was 23%.
Historically the most common method was copying a tracked link (41%), followed by the enablement app's own email tool (27%). Sending from the rep's native email client, Outlook or Gmail with the enablement tool plugged in, was 23%. In the twelve months to September 2026, native email was the single largest channel at 39%. Tracked links fell to 30%, in-app email to 22%, and text messaging, personal and automated combined, was about 9%.
The explanation is not complicated. Reps already live in their inbox. A tool that asks them to go somewhere else to send something gets used less than a tool that works where they already are. The content platform is becoming infrastructure behind the inbox rather than a destination.
If your enablement platform has no native Outlook or Gmail integration, your reps are working around it. Track share-to-open rates by channel so you know where your team's sends actually land.
Quotable: 39% of sales content shares in the last 12 months went out through the rep's own Outlook or Gmail, up from 23% of all recorded sends since 2018. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
Where the send happens.
FIG. 06Share of sends by channel
Native email (Outlook, Gmail) largest channel now
Tracked link
In-app email
Text message
87% of library content
went unshared in the past year.
Of 59,546 items in content libraries, 7,671 were shared with a buyer between October 2025 and September 2026. The other 87% were not.
Some of that is reference material reps use but do not send, and some is new. Most is the quiet cost of "upload everything": marketing produces it, compliance approves it, and it never reaches a buyer.
The concentration gets sharper the closer you look. Of the 5,317 distinct items buyers actually viewed, the top 10% drew 67.7% of all views. A few hundred assets did almost all of the work. The most-viewed items in the dataset were clinical demonstration videos and short clinical PDFs. Not brochures, not corporate overviews. Buyers go to the content that answers "does this work and how do I use it."
Curate harder than you upload. Pull a shared-in-the-last-12-months report, review anything that has never been sent, and spend the production budget refreshing the top 10% rather than filling the long tail. Reps find the right thing faster in a library of 300 than a library of 3,000. This is the content problem sales enablement for medical device teams exists to solve.
Quotable: Only 13% of sales content library items were shared with a buyer over a twelve-month period. Among content that was viewed, the top 10% of items accounted for 68% of all views. (SoloFire, 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report)
Of every 100 items in the library.
FIG. 07Each square is 1% of the library
shared with a buyer at least once
Among items that were viewed, share of all views
Five questions.
A better follow-up.
Pick one real content share your team sent this week and run it through these with the rep who sent it. Check each as you go.
The opportunity is to make every shared experience easier to understand, return to and use. Start with one share, look at the response, and use what you learn to improve the next one.
Bring the findings
to your next meeting.
The PDF edition includes all seven findings, the charts, the five-question checklist and the data tables behind each figure. Share it with your sales leadership or enablement team.
Download the PDF PDF · 11 PAGES · NO FORM REQUIRED One email with the file, plus the next edition when it publishes. No sequences.Frequently asked questions about sales content engagement
How quickly do B2B buyers open sales content after a rep sends it?
In SoloFire's 2026 data, the median time from a rep sharing a link to the buyer's first open was 4.7 minutes. 75.4% of first opens happened within one hour and 90.3% within 24 hours. Only 0.5% of first opens came more than 30 days after the share. The figures are from 2,828 links with a matched first open in the 90 days to 30 September 2026.
What percentage of sales content links get opened?
62.4% of the 26,966 tracked content links shared by field reps between October 2025 and September 2026 were opened at least once. Opened links averaged 2.97 opens each, and 50.8% were opened more than once.
How much sales content actually gets used?
12.9% of the 59,546 items in SoloFire content libraries were shared with a buyer at least once in the twelve months to September 2026. Among the 5,317 items buyers viewed, the top 10% accounted for 67.7% of all views.
Do buyers engage more with video or PDF sales content?
PDFs are 64.0% of library items and 63.7% of buyer views. Video (MP4) is 7.2% of library items but 28.8% of buyer views, four times its share. The average view lasted 161 seconds for video and 95 seconds for PDF. Web links held attention longest at 273 seconds.
When is the best time to send sales content to buyers?
In aggregate, reps shared the most content at 18:00 UTC (about 2 pm US eastern) while buyers opened the most at 15:00 UTC (about 11 am eastern). Tuesday and Wednesday each carried 22% of shares. Weekends were 4.4% of shares but 6.8% of opens. These are separate aggregate distributions, not a matched test, so SoloFire recommends testing morning sends against your own open rates.
What share of sales content shares come from the rep's own email?
39% of sends in the twelve months to September 2026 went through the rep's native email client (Outlook or Gmail with the enablement tool connected), up from 23% of all recorded sends since 2018. Tracked links were 30%, in-app email 22% and text messaging about 9%.
Where does this data come from?
From anonymized, aggregated engagement events on the SoloFire sales enablement platform, used by field sales teams at medical device, diagnostics and life science companies. Data was extracted on 30 September 2026. Links, opens, views and people are counted as separate units. Full definitions are in the methodology below.
A note on the data.
This report uses anonymized, aggregated engagement data from the SoloFire sales enablement platform, which field sales teams at medical device, diagnostics and life science companies use to share approved content with buyers through tracked links and to see how that content is engaged with. Data was extracted on 30 September 2026.
The primary analysis window is the twelve months from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026 (Findings 02 through 07). The time-to-first-open analysis in Finding 01 uses the most recent 90 days and the 2,828 links where a share and a first open could be matched. Library composition in Findings 04 and 07 is a snapshot at extraction. The channel comparison in Finding 06 sets the last twelve months against all sends with a recorded channel since August 2018.
No individual customer, user or buyer is identified. The report describes observed engagement, not sales outcomes; none of these figures establishes purchase intent or revenue impact.
| Dataset, October 2025 to September 2026 | Count |
|---|---|
| Distinct content links shared | 26,966 |
| Buyer link opens | 50,002 |
| Individual content views inside opened links | 77,207 |
| Buyer downloads | 23,642 |
| Total buyer viewing time | 1,460 hours |
| Distinct content items shared | 7,671 |
| Library items at extraction | 59,546 |
| Share events (per item, used for day and channel analysis) | 174,233 |
Definitions, units and interpretation
Units. A link can contain several assets and can record several opens. Links, open events, content views and people are different units and are never combined. "Links shared" counts distinct tracked links. "Opens" counts recorded buyer opens of those links. "Views" counts individual content items viewed inside an opened link. "Downloads" counts files saved by the buyer. Download percentages use opened links as the denominator unless stated otherwise; the 31.0% figure in Finding 03 is 8,348 divided by 26,966. The video ratio in Finding 04 is 28.8% divided by 7.2%.
Scope. These are descriptive, activity-weighted observations from one platform's usage, not a representative industry survey and not a controlled comparison. Customer mix and content mix influence the aggregates. Recorded opens are not verified unique human readers, and the source does not document filtering of automated opens.
Time. All timestamps are recorded in UTC. US time-zone conversions in Finding 05 are approximate and do not adjust for the buyer's location or daylight saving.
Extraction. Read-only aggregation of session, event, library, user, company and contact records. Soft-deleted library, user, company and contact records are excluded; events are counted regardless of deletion flag. Percentages are rounded to one decimal place.
Cite this report.
Quote any figure in this report with attribution and a link. Suggested citation:
SoloFire (2026). After the Send: The 2026 Sales Content Engagement Report. https://solofire.com/research/sales-content-engagement-report/
Journalists, analysts and researchers: for the underlying tables, chart files or a custom cut of the data, contact info@solofire.com.