The CEO of PandaDoc shares his best tips in "How to Enable Sales with the Right Content"
Hello everyone! I’m Mikita and I am the CEO of PandaDoc, the future of business documents. We help thousands of companies deliver better quotes, proposals, contracts, and other kinds of sales collateral.
The goal of every sales organization is increase revenue. There are two ways this could be done: by improving the skills of sales reps or improving the sales process.
PandaDoc has been a part of many success stories where sales and marketing worked together to increase revenues by 5, 10, 20, 30 and even 50%. This collaboration improved both the skills of the reps as well as the sales process. And this success didn’t require a lot of work or resources. The answer was empowering sales with the right content.
I’m excited to share with you my tips and tricks on how you can increase your revenue by arming your sales team with the right content. During the next 60 minutes I’ll be posting my insights in 3 parts and will be here live in the community answering your questions. Please post your questions below (don’t forget to login). If you’ve had success previously in enabling sales with the right content, I would love to hear from you!
In order to make this a successful effort by both teams, they are going to have to work together. Sales enablement is an area in which sales and marketing can work together and build a long-lasting partner relationship. In order to do this, there are some pieces of content that sales can help marketing with and vice versa.
Let’s take a look at what types of content sales must have and would benefit from involving marketing:
- Sales Playbook: This is an essential piece of content for any sales organization. A sales playbook details the sales process, the tactics or methods a sales rep should use to close deals and also outlines their objectives and metrics for measurement. The Aberdeen Group reports (2015) that organizations with a sales playbook have a 67% team attainment of quota and a customer retention rate of 56%. The key benefits of this piece of content for sales is that reps will be onboarded faster and marketing will be happy that the messaging sales reps are delivering aligns with the organization’s brand. Marketers need to make sure the sales process is smooth because they have to control the buying journey. Interaction with sales is an important part of it. Marketing can also assist sales by shaping up the playbook with appropriate visuals, elaborate on products or services, the value proposition, etc.
- Exit Surveys: These are essential in learning more about your sales process and organization. Exit surveys can give you deeper insight into delays in your sales cycle and what messaging is working and what’s not. You should always be asking your prospect or, hopefully, your customer if the deal closes, about the rep who did the demo or deal, their experience throughout the entire sales process, and the reasons why they bought or didn’t. These surveys will give you deeper insight into where your sales process could improve, thus bettering your process and product for a smarter overall business.
Each of these pieces of content not only enable sales reps to be better, but are also key components of shortening sales cycles, increasing deal sizes and closing more business. Does your organization currently have any of these pieces of content in your arsenal of content? If yes, that is not all your organization needs. In the next part we’ll talk about the type of content marketing must do for sales.
There are vital pieces of content every sales team should have but are unable to build themselves. They simply don’t have the time or skills.
For the second part of our discussion, let’s chat about which pieces of content marketing teams absolutely must provide sales with:
- Quote, Proposal, Contract Templates: Every rep needs to send a quote, proposal, or contract in order to close a deal. Often times the process and results can be very messy. The messaging may not align or the design is ugly. By allowing marketing to provide sales with the ‘must-haves’ of a quote, proposal and contract templates, your sales team will be sending out collateral that contains less errors and looks beautiful.
- Battle Cards: Sales reps must know what sets their organization apart from their competitors. Battle cards are a great way to for reps to gain confidence when speaking with a prospect and give your products or services a stronger position. Marketing must stay ahead of the competition to better market your products or services and sales can assist by communicating what prospects are telling them about the competition. This improves your overall messaging and helps increase deal sizes and close rates when you have a leg up on the competition.
- Case Study Library: Case studies are crucial. It allows your prospect to put themselves in the shoes of your customers. The likelihood of a prospect becoming a customer when the case study directly relates to them is much higher. Sales can help marketing identify customers who are champions of your product and marketing can spend time with the customer telling their story which speaks to your audience. By having a library of case studies at the hands of your sales reps, it helps them build credibility with the buyer and gives them a better understanding of your organization’s buyer personas.
- Presentation Templates: Sales reps are not designers. Some are, but this is as rare as a Zebra without stripes. Marketing can save sales tremendous amounts of time by building a bank of slides sales can choose from thus assembling perfectly tailored presentations, instead of creating them from scratch. Moreover, marketing can ensure that sales won’t add copyright images from Google search, which they are notorious for doing.
When you have marketing enable your reps with these types of content, your reps can spend more time selling. I’m curious to know if any of you have any of these content items currently in their library or have considered implementing them within your organization? If so, what tools are you using to provide sales with that content?
Now that you know which pieces of content are needed to better align sales and marketing and increase your sales, you need the tools to put this content into action.
Some of you attending today’s session already have Insightly, which is a great CRM. If you don’t have a CRM, I’d highly encourage one so that you can better your sales process. Your sales playbook should be a reflection of the sales process you have set up in your CRM.
A great compliment to a CRM is PandaDoc. We can help with the organization and tracking of sales content. With PandaDoc, you can create a content library, quote, proposal, and contract templates, and measure which content performs the best. And since we integrate with Insightly, implementing both our tools should help you bump revenues by 5, 10, 20, 30, and even 50%. That is what our clients report.
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Thank you everyone for attending today’s discussion. This is a great topic that a lot of sales and marketing folks have a lot of knowledge and experience about that is difficult to cover in one discussion. Therefore if you only take three things away from this discussion it should be:
- Sales and marketing must work together.
- Marketing must invest in more bottom-of-funnel content.
- Investing in the right combination of tools such as a CRM coupled with document automation will likely increase your revenue.
Does anyone have any other tips on content enablement? I enjoy a healthy discussion so any additional points are welcome!
Thank you!
Mikita
Comments
Bengt, I bet you have more than one person in sales. How about your CEO? :)
I'd suggest to build all of the content pieces I'm going to talk about today. They shouldn't be too complex though as the business is going to evolve a lot.
Everyone - If you'll refresh your screens, Part 2 with of Mikita's discussion has been posted. More insights to come at 9:40 am PT. Thanks!
Ha! Good point, Mikita. Thanks. Good stuff so far. Anxious to read more.
I'm currently evaluating Pandadoc to see if I will transition away from Docusign, I got it all working EXCEPT that I can't open Panda from the Insightly Opportunity Screen. It's from the Opportunity that my sales rep works and when an Opportunity is closed we need to be able to generate the sales agreement. It works from Contacts, Leads and Projects but if I can't open Panda from the Opportunity then it's not going to work. I opened a help ticket 5 days ago and all I got was an I'm sorry from the tech saying that they didn't have a Panda account so they couldn't trouble shoot my problem...
you guys should really set up a go to meeting or something similar.... this isn't working to well for your customers...
Thomas,
The questions really depend on your business. But here are a few examples of questions I'd ask:
1. How would you rate your experience interacting with our website on the scale of 0 to 10? Was our messaging clear? Was it easy to navigate?
2. How would you rate your experience interacting with our sales team on the scale of 0 to 10? What should we improve on?
3. We want to do better. What is the main reason you decided (not) to do business with us?
What exactly are Battle Cards?
Hi Rich,
Thanks for making us aware of your situation. Now that we have a few Insightly Insider discussions under our belt - with great response from our customers too - we are considering moving this to a different platform so your feedback is helpful to us. Thanks!
I love the concept of building a Case Study Library. Thanks!
How often do you recommend we update our presentation templates?
Rich,
You can generate PandaDocs from within Opportunity tab. Sorry for help desk troubles. The partnership is quite new, we're still working the corners.
Battle cards are snippets of content that position you against competitors.
Part 3 is up! Mikita's closing points in just 5 minutes and then final Q&A. Get your last questions in before Mikita leaves!
Thanks for those Mikita.
Mikita - I’m sure you can imagine that there are lots of questions we’d love to ask in a survey, but I know the longer the survey is, the less likely it is that it will be completed. Do you have any best practices for creating an exit survey?
Wendy, I always put myself in customer's shoes. I don't like spending more than five minutes on surveys :)
Last call for questions! As mentioned previously, we'll archive Mikita's discussion along with these comments so you can access this info at anytime.
Hi Mikita,
When you discuss in Part 2 having Marketing create a bank of slides for presentation templates, are you talking about individual PowerPoint slides that can be "mixed and matched"?
Hi Mikita. One last question? By chance are you able to share a link to an example of one or all of the docs you've mentioned.
Brenda, I was never able to access anything on this page.
Lily, we have plenty of proposal / contract templates here: www.pandadoc.com/templates
Here is the library of client testimonials / case studies: www.pandadoc.com/clients We also have this library duplicated in PandaDoc.
Same goes for battle cards, they're stored in our internal PandaDoc account.
Which content example are you most interested in?
Hi everyone! I'm afraid we are out of time. :( A huge thanks to Mikita Mikado of PandaDoc for sharing his tips and tricks with us today!
Hi Linda -- If you'll scroll to the top of this page, you should be able to see Mikita's discussion posted above. Just a reminder that this is an online discussion without a webinar component. Thanks!
Great! Proposals was what I was specifically interested in. I'll take a look at that link. Thanks!
I"m SO glad I can go back and review this discussion (I had a list minute meeting that conflicted!). Thanks!
Thank you all for attending today, I really appreciate it!
As a token of our appreciation, please enjoy a 30% discount on a 6-month subscription to PandaDoc with the code HAPPYPANDA.
Hello,
I would like to complete proposals with PandaDoc, then take data from tables on the proposal and automatically import them into QuickBooks and/or Insightly after the customer signs the document. The proposal will be different every time. Although, there will always be two tables: Payment Schedule & Project Tasks.
How can this work with Zapier?
Thank you,
Micah Feldkamp
Micah,
Sounds like all you need PandaDoc and Insightly integration. It seems to me that we support your use case out of the gate.
Thank you, Mikita.
Just so we're on the same page, the integration not only pulls data from the contact and organization records from Insightly into a Panda Doc template... it can also push data we write into a specific table in the Panda Doc template into:
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you!
Micah
Hi Makita,
I had another question that crossed my mind today:
While Panda Doc and Zapier? are conducting all of those actions at once, can we auto import the Panda Doc signed proposal PDF? into Google Drive pulling the Organization Name to find the corresponding folder name?
Thank you! Thank you!
Micah
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