How commercetools Drove Active Learning to 100%

Enterprise-Ready Enablement Partner Needed for Go-to-Market Expansion

Facing new growth, commercetools focused on scaling its internal processes to meet external demand. As it began producing additional content to help sellers approach new markets and buyer types, commercetools realized its existing enablement solution couldn’t keep pace with its new content volume. “As we have grown as a company, we have more and more content that sellers need to do well at their job,” shared Chris Book, global head of enablement at commercetools. “With our previous solution, we had reached the limits of its scalability in terms of content management.”

Seeing the cracks in its current solution, commercetools decided to make a change before those flaws inhibited its growth potential. As its enablement team searched for a new platform, they sought a solution robust enough to support a growing, enterprise-level team. Simultaneously, they aimed to ease the pain of their current sales readiness technology. “My experience with other platforms is that when they have acquired [training] technology, it’s never fully integrated,” explained Book. “You can really notice when other learning management systems are trying to be smashed into an existing platform.” 

The team also knew their new solution needed to do more than just support content management and sales training: It needed to optimize the buyer experience across the entirety of their go-to-market teams. To uplevel every customer-facing team, commercetools chose Highspot.

New Platform Equips Teams to Deliver Value Across the Buyer Lifecycle

As commercetools transitioned to Highspot, it prioritized content management, creating strict governance guidelines designed to organize its existing assets and support its growing content library. With an enterprise-ready solution easing the content chaos of its previous solution, commercetools then began leveraging Highspot’s learning capabilities. With training and coaching capabilities natively built into the Highspot platform, sellers no longer faced disjointed learning experiences. The streamlined sales readiness experience was a big win for the enablement team, driving a 100% active learner rate across go-to-market teams.

With sellers better equipped to more consistently execute in the field, commercetools turned its focus to buyer engagement, aiming to harness and scale its newfound go-to-market consistency. To do so, features like Remix, which allows sellers to customize templatized content, became invaluable. “We have a master template and have taught sellers to Remix it based on the characteristics of the prospect they are selling to and the pain they uncover during discovery,” noted Book. “They can select different pieces of content within the Remix feature and create an incredible value pitch.” But the time-savings went beyond the first sales call: commercetools soon embraced Digital Rooms, using customizable microsites to further ease personalization. “We’re focusing on how to build the customer engagement side with Digital Rooms,” added Book. “That’s why we are seeing such high statistics early on.” Indeed they were: 77% of sellers regularly use the platform to pitch personalized content to buyers. With a 35% increase in recurring usage of the platform, the impact is growing, and commercetools’ teams are ready to impact outcomes across the full breadth of the go-to-market motion.

Enablement Initiatives Resonate in Real-World Outcomes

As commercetools built out its sales readiness and buyer engagement strategies with Highspot, it did so with a central goal in mind: sparking impact on real-world outcomes.

With Highspot equipping pre- and post-sales teams to deliver and track their impact on key outcomes, commercetools has the insight it needs to more effectively and efficiently engage prospects and customers. As they look ahead, the team sees capabilities such as Meeting Intelligence as key opportunities to deepen their real-world insight and further hone their go-to-market strategy. “Conversational intelligence is the future of selling,” noted Chris. “This is the way that, in every industry, we will sell. It’s about the productivity of the sales rep and being able to properly listen to the customer — it’s the most important skill.”