When it comes to winning over modern buyers, we could all use a little help from sales enablement solutions.
Companies are seeking solutions to equip their sellers to deliver a better buyer experience as today’s buyers demand more from their engagement with sellers. By 2021, 15% of all sales technology spending will be applied to sales enablement technology, up from the 2017 level of 7.2%, according to Gartner’s 2018 Digital Content Management for Sales Market Guide. That represents a growth rate of over 208%!
In the Market Guide, Gartner evaluated 19 Representative Vendors within the Digital Content Management for Sales space. Highspot met all vendor capabilities and use cases identified.
“Across the almost 40 vendors that Gartner tracks in this market, finding functional differences between them is increasingly difficult,” Gartner says. “To find differentiation, Gartner recommends that software buyers focus on vendors’ platform capabilities.”
If you’re a sales, marketing or enablement leader looking for a sales enablement solution and are wondering exactly what capabilities you should be examining, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are six capabilities in the DCMS market common to all vendors listed in the guide, and what Highspot delivers:
CONTENT REPOSITORY MANAGEMENT
For sales and marketing teams looking to effectively guide buyers through their journey, content is king. But problems arise when content is scattered across multiple files, folders or drives. Sellers often can’t locate content, and marketers waste time and resources developing content that goes unused. To solve this challenge, the Highspot team developed a unique, award-winning approach to content organisation where content is managed in ‘Spots’ instead of rigid folder architecture. Because sales success starts with the right content and relevant context in one place, Highspot goes beyond basic content organisation to deliver content alongside communication and guidance.
Equally important as managing content is the way that reps discover content. To ensure that your sellers have the materials that they need for any given situation, your sales enablement platform should be designed to surface relevant content. Highspot’s AI-powered search algorithms mean that sellers get accurate results on time, every time. Reps have the option to find the most effective content with artificial intelligence or hand-curate their own. Then, when content gets updated, automatic notifications let reps know what’s new, what’s changed and what’s relevant to their selling success.
As a real world example, Dun & Bradstreet adopted Highspot to solve the problem of too many content sources and not enough organisation. Prior to implementation, the company had more than 6,000 pieces of content stored across 12 different locations. Highspot enabled more than 500 sales reps to spend their valuable time selling – not searching.
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Different scenarios require different approaches to content customisation, which explains why sellers require the flexibility to adapt content to every unique case. To create the perfect pitch for every customer interaction while staying on-message, reps need a way to quickly assemble presentations and customise content on the fly. Highspot is the only solution that empowers sellers to quickly edit documents or presentations using Office Online or Google Docs from within the platform.
Sometimes, the perfect pitch needs to be pieced together from content in multiple formats. With Highspot’s unique Remix capability, sellers can quickly re-arrange decks and documents, mixing and matching different formats.
Another time-saver is Highspot’s AutoDocs, which allow sellers to easily build complex, data-driven and personalised content at scale with data from your organisation’s CRM systems.
CONTENT DELIVERY
Modern buyers demand that sellers provide unique perspectives and added value at every stage of their journey.
With Highspot, sales reps can meet buyers where they are with advanced pitching capabilities. Engage from LinkedIn, Twitter, Outlook, Gmail and more. Or present live to customers online through Slide Cast or other fully integrated third-party web conferencing platforms.
One of Highspot’s newest solutions is Pitch Experiences, which allows reps to organise a prospect’s content into a single, customisable and dynamic portal that showcases all content related to an account. As a result, sellers see higher response rates and more engaged prospects.
CONTENT USAGE ANALYTICS
One of the most common challenges for companies is lack of content insights. Take Red Hat, for example. Fielding a worldwide sales force of more than 2,700 sales reps, the company had no way to get insight into content usage or effectiveness and struggled with prioritising and creating the content that sales needed. After choosing Highspot as their sales enablement platform, Red Hat unified 3,000 content items in a central location, making it possible to analyse performance data, prioritise and optimise.
With Highspot, reps receive real-time alerts that notify them when a prospect engages with their content. Insight into which slides the prospect spent the most time on, to whom the prospect forwarded the pitch, and those which most help reps to make the most informed and strategic next step.
For marketers, Highspot analytics show indicators such as content downloads, views and pitches, allowing them to prioritise creating content that the sales team will use. One of the best features: patented Content Genomics technology that tracks modifications down to the individual slide level, so sales and marketing teams can see how content evolves over time and use this knowledge to harvest best practices. With insights into what’s resonating and what’s not for customers, sellers can adjust their approach and marketers can focus on developing content that sales uses.
SALES PROCESS INTEGRATION
When you’re a seller engaging dozens of prospects and customers every day (or sometimes every hour!), efficiency is crucial. From recording new contact information to tracking activity, staying on top of data entry reduces valuable selling time.
CRM systems are only as powerful as the data that’s in them. The good news: Highspot’s deep integrations allow reps to manage customer engagements in a single dashboard. For example, for organisations that live in Salesforce, the entire Highspot platform is available within the platform, including features that improve the sales process, like intelligent content recommendations and smart search. In addition, Highspot automatically records activity in Salesforce, from email pitches to customer interactions.
INTEGRATION AND SALES ENABLEMENT PLATFORM
Most sellers today are constantly bouncing from tool to tool for various parts of their workflow. Your sales enablement solution should streamline your workflow, not complicate it.
Knowing that the last thing that companies need is another separate platform, we made sure that Highspot works where you work, seamlessly integrating with your existing tools. Highspot has more than 50 certified integrations – the most of any sales enablement solution on the market – with CRM, CMS, LMS, productivity suites, web conferencing platforms and communication tools like Outlook, Gmail, Outreach, SalesLoft, LinkedIn, Twitter and more.
Deciding what to order from a restaurant menu can be a difficult dilemma, let alone choosing a sales enablement platform for your organisation. As you evaluate various sales enablement solutions to find the best fit, keep these six capabilities as a compass to help to guide your decision.
Download your complimentary copy of Gartner’s 2018 Digital Content Management for Sales Market Guide to learn more about different platforms and what they can bring to your team.
