The Smarketing Library The smarketing library the content assets every sales & marketing team need to collaborate on

1. 1
v.1.0 San Francisco, CA
The Smarketing Library:
eBook • PandaDoc Academy
Content Assets Every Sales & Marketing Team
Need To Collaborate On
PandaDoc © 2016

2. 1As the worlds of sales and marketing collide, it’s become
increasingly critical that these teams align and make the
effort to collaborate closely on strategy, campaigns,
and content.
This ebook will provide marketing and sales pros with
a framework that they can use to build a ‘smarketing’
library: multipurpose content assets that can serve both
sales and marketing teams’ needs.
The key to creating successful smarketing content is
that both the sales and marketing organizations must
work closely together and foster mutual respect for both
teams’ needs and goals for each content asset.
To facilitate this level of collaboration means involving
both teams during content strategy sessions, ideation of
assets, and all the way through the content production
process. It also means that teams need to get creative
about how to accomplish differing objectives for the
same piece of content.
63% of high-performing marketing teams “are excellent
at collaborating with other business units.” (Salesforce
2016 State of Marketing)
The Smarketing Library

3. 2 “60 to 70% of content in
b-to-b organizations goes
unused. The number-one
reason? Irrelevance.”
– Erin Provey, SiriusDecisions
The Smarketing Library

4. 3Smarketing Content Asset №1:
Case Studies
What is it:
A case study is a single customer’s success story,
often told as a narrative that begins by illustrating the
customer’s initial challenge or need. A case study
should explain how a particular customer leveraged your
product or service to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
The narrative should be easily digestible, and its design
should highlight quotes or data points that you want the
reader to focus on.
How To Collaborate:
Marketing will need help from sales for two reasons.
The first reason is that sales will need to help identify
ideal customers based on the use cases or verticals that
both teams want to cover in the creation of new case
studies. Secondly, marketing will need to rely on sales
to help facilitate the approvals and client interviews
for customers identified as case study candidates.
Remember that it’s the sales team that has the close
relationship with clients, and it would feel unnatural for
an unknown marketing team member to approach a
customer without a prior relationship.

5. 4Smarketing Content Asset №1:
Case Studies
Why Sales Needs It:
Case studies are one of, if not, the most commonly
requested content asset during the sales process.
And they’re one of the most useful, according to that
72% of buyers • Demand Gen Report find case studies to
be the most valuable content they could view during the
decision-making process of their buyer’s journey.
Case studies help prospects understand how they
could use your company’s product or service based on
similarities between their needs and those of the client
featured in the case study.
Why Marketing Needs It:
Customer success stories are a vital part of any brand’s
website. They also make an excellent gated offer.
Implementing a lead capture form over your case
studies is a smart idea because a download can signal
a ‘hot’ lead who is ready to buy and has demonstrated
an interest in a particular product/service or industry
vertical. If you’re using marketing automation or lead
scoring, prospects who download or view case studies
are signaling high intent and they should be scored
accordingly.
Additionally, you can use them to segment your
prospects by industry/interest and can use that data for
personalizing follow-ups and future content.

6. 5Smarketing Content Asset №2:
Battle Cards
What is it:
Battle cards sound like something that you’d find at
a Dungeons and Dragons meetup rather than in a
sales and marketing library. But battle cards are a
tremendously useful tool to add to your smarketing
library. They illustrate the strengths/weaknesses and
feature sets of competing companies or products, often
including competitive intelligence. Some companies
create individual battle cards for their offering vs. a
particular competitor’s offering; others choose to show
all competing offerings on the same card.
How To Collaborate:
Marketing will likely need to take the lead here but
with extensive input from sales. For battle cards to be
useful, there needs to be a healthy representation of
the competitive set. So, sales should be vocal about
competitors which clients mention regularly, and
marketing should perform independent research into
the competitive landscape in order to make sure that all
bases are covered.
Secondarily, it’s important that the structure of the cards
(and the type of information included on each one)
maps to the way that customers are thinking about the
products/services during their comparison shopping
process. If battle cards fail to compare offerings in a
meaningful, useful way from the buyers’ perspective,
they won’t add value as sales or marketing content.

7. 6Smarketing Content Asset №2:
Battle Cards
Why Sales Needs It:
Sales reps can benefit from the ‘quick reference’ nature
of battle cards, but they can also use a battle card as a
piece of outward-facing sales collateral by linking to it
or attaching it during the sales process. Battle cards are
especially useful when a prospect mentions that they’re
vetting a particular competitor’s offerings.
Why Marketing Needs It:
Battle cards, similar to case studies, can be repurposed
into killer web content that helps address visitors’
comparison shopping needs by going on the offensive
to frame your brand’s offering as the winner within the
context of competitors’ not-as-stellar offerings.

8. 7Smarketing Content Asset №3:
Sales Presentations/Demos
What is it:
Sales presentations and demos are pretty straightforward
regarding format. Some companies prefer to use a
presentation format like Keynote or Powerpoint, others
like the flexibility and collaboration of cloud options
like Google Slides or, yup, PandaDoc. Regardless of
what platform you use to create your presentations, the
content is the important part. Crafting a winning sales
presentation is an artform and a highly iterative process.
And, your sales presentation should be regularly
revisited by both sales and marketing for refreshes.
How To Collaborate:
Ask both teams to come up with a list of all of the content
that would be relevant to a sales presentation. This list
might include case studies, battle cards, a full swath
of product/service images, a customizable client logo
banner slide, etc. as well as blank ‘slide templates’
that can be used to create custom content on the fly.
By checking off all of the slide content on the wishlist,
marketing will be able to create a single master deck that
can then offer sales the opportunity to pick and choose
which slides to use in each presentation.

9. 8Smarketing Content Asset №3:
Sales Presentations/Demos
Why Sales Needs It:
It may sound like a no-brainer, but sales needs a
standardized ‘master deck’ that any particular sales
rep can customize to their specific needs on a case-by-
case basis. Having access to a comprehensive, master
deck that incorporates every possible slide that a rep
might want empowers each individual by giving them
the flexibility they need to tailor a pitch based on the
prospect.
Why Marketing Needs It:
Creating ad-hoc decks is not an ROI-positive time invest-
ment for the marketing team, so empowering the sales
team to be able to do this on their own will pay dividends
by making both teams more productive and efficient.

10. 9What is it:
Interactive content represents a motley crew of different
formats like product demos, videos, interactive images,
and pricing tables/calculators. Each format serves the
same purpose: to engage the viewer while providing
them with information that’s better communicated
through a dynamic format vs. a static format.
How To Collaborate:
Both teams need to understand that interactive content
is significantly more expensive regarding budget and
content to produce which means that it’s important to be
as deliberate as possible in choosing which messages
and use cases will benefit the most from the additional
investment. Have an open conversation about what the
top priorities are concerning content production as it
relates to shared objectives. Look for situations where
both teams’ objectives share a particularly complex
message that would best be illustrated with dynamic,
interactive content.
Smarketing Content Asset №4:
Interactive Content

11. 10Why Sales Needs It:
Interactive content can help sales pros communicate in
a way that static content can’t. Whether you’re sharing a
video of your product/service in action or offering buyers
a chance to calculate the ROI that a custom solution will
bring to their organization using an ROI calculator, you’re
engaging the prospect’s brain differently than you would
by simply ‘telling’ them the same information.
Why Marketing Needs It:
Some information is better served through interactive,
dynamic content instead of static formats like .pdf or text.
Take, for example, an ROI calculator that helps simpli-
fy the value of a product or service down to cold, hard
math. Enabling a prospect to demonstrate ROI using
an interactive calculator is an incredibly effective way
to drive home the value and to capture highly-qualified
leads by gating the calculator. Yet, only 27% of buyers
report having leveraged an ROI calculator • Demand Gen
Report during their research process.
Smarketing Content Asset №4:
Interactive Content

12. 11Smarketing Content Asset №5:
Proposal Templates
What is it:
Similar to the 80’s trend of bedazzling, you can templatize
just about anything. In this particular context, we’re
primarily talking about sales-specific documents like
sales proposals and quotes.
How To Collaborate:
Sit down with both the sales and marketing teams and
take an objective look at your current proposal/quotes.
Identify what’s working with the current proposal and
what’s not. Then, look for ways to customize your
proposal to each specific use case, similar to your sales
presentation.You can approach customization at scale
by creating content blocks that reiterate core messaging.
The great thing is that those content blocks can be
reused instead of reinventing the wheel for every
proposal or quote.
Why Sales Needs It:
It’s been documented that on average, only 24% of a
sales rep’s time is actually spent selling • Alexander
Group. Templatization of quotes and proposals is critical
toward increasing the efficiency and productivity of
today’s sales team.
Why Marketing Needs It:
The marketing team benefits from creating templates in
two ways; for one thing, it enables sales to function au-
tonomously during the proposal prep process. Secondly,
by creating proposal templates, marketers can ensure
that branding and key messages remain intact.

13. 12Conclusion
It’s not easy for two teams to collaborate on the
production of content when their objectives seem to be
wildly different. But, with some creativity and cooperation,
it’s possible to build up a library of high quality ‘smarketing’
content assets that can serve both teams well. Further,
aligning the efforts of both teams will pool resources and
lead to stronger, more valuable content at the end
of the day.
Looking for a way to manage, deliver, and analyze the
success of your ‘smarketing’ assets?
PandaDoc is offering our readers a complimentary
14-day trial to launch their own smarketing library.
Learn More

14. 13Infographic Data Points
SiriusDecisions
SiriusDecisions’ Erin Provey
2016 Content Preferences Survey Report
• Demand Gen Report
●● 67% of the buyer’s journey is completed digitally.
●● “Sixty to seventy percent of content in b-to-b
organizations goes unused. The number-one reason?
Irrelevance.”
●● 73% of buyers (nearly three quarters!) viewed a case
study during their research; 72% of buyers reported
case studies to be the most valuable form of content.
●● Nearly half of buyers (47%) viewed video during their
research.
●● Over ¼ of buyers (27%) used an ROI calculator.

15. 14Infographic Data Points
Sales Analytics – Understanding & Improving
Sales Asset Utilization • Alexander Group
2016 State of Marketing Report • Salesforce
B2B Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks,
Budgets, and Trends • Content Marketing Institute
●● 84% of marketers report that sales will be the most
important goal for B2B content marketing.
●● 65% of marketers say that case studies are effective.
●● 62% of marketers say that videos are effective.
●● 63% of high performing marketing teams “are
excellent at collaborating with other business
units” and are “17.1x more likely to be excellent at
collaborating with other business units.”
●● 76% of a sales rep’s time is spent on tasks other than
selling.