70% of marketing content goes unused (Forrester). That’s right, the content your team spends hundreds of hours building per year is likely not getting the mileage or ROI it deserves.
Not only do you need a unified sales enablement platform to equip, train, and coach your sales reps on making effective use of this content—you also need to consciously structure your site to be intuitive and aligned with your business objectives. Highspot customers who follow content management best practices triple the adoption of this content and even double the chances a prospect will engage with it.
We on the Highspot Professional Services team have the pleasure of working hands-on with many of our customers to accelerate value realization and drive solution adoption. At no surprise, the biggest request we receive by far is how to help our customers develop, design, and build a great Highspot environment that’s tailored to their team’s needs.
Whether they are just starting out with Highspot, or are upleveling their environment, we recommend the following steps to optimize Highspot’s structure and turbocharge sales rep efficiency.
Build a Solid Foundation
In the most organized Highspot environments, reps find the content they need nearly 3x as quickly, making them 26% more efficient and freeing time to focus on selling activities. Your revenue teams should be able to easily find the answers to four key questions when accessing their sales enablement platform:
- What problems do we solve as a business?
- Outline what you sell—products, solutions, services—and their value propositions
- What skills or behaviors will drive outcomes?
- Define how you sell. Surface key sales processes, methodologies, and channels
- Where is our market opportunity?
- Make it clear who you sell to, and against. Document details on your competition, target personas, and markets/verticals
- What do I need to win?
- Communicate your strategic initiatives. What big bets, campaigns, and OKRs will your reps care about? What information, training, and coaching do they need to win?
Infuse the answers to these questions across your solution, surfacing go-to-market content alongside prescriptive guidance so your revenue teams know exactly what they need to do to win. Highspot makes this easy with Sales Plays—microsites that bundle insights, messaging, value propositions, and training to effectively guide reps and provide insights into execution and outcomes. More on structuring effective Sales Plays below.
Strengthen Your Site Navigation
It’s important to optimize your sales enablement platform for both great search and site navigation so your revenue teams can always find what they need, in seconds.
Typically, reps look for content when they need to achieve a specific objective, such as preparing for a call, or when they need instant answers so they can respond to their prospects in time-sensitive situations. We often see them default to using search to zero in on exactly what they have in mind.
With Highspot Copilot, users can ask a question directly in Highspot’s search bar to get an AI-generated response based on your entire content library!
Highspot also offers the ability to influence discoverability and focus attention on specific content based on search terms, similar to promoted search results in Google.
It’s also important to optimize your site navigation for browsing. In fact, reps browse 70% of the time in well-structured Highspot environments. Browsing enriches users’ experiences with context, deeper information, and examples of what ‘good’ looks like from their peers, making them more knowledgeable than they would have been if they only consumed the original content in mind.
To improve the browsing experience, consider your reps’ workflows. Highspot allows you to target content in Salesforce or Dynamics to equip reps with the best resources at the moment of action, and design your site with navigation and effective guidance in mind.
Design Intentional Pages
Highspot SmartPages are a powerful tool to craft guided experiences that are specifically tailored to your reps. Three, of many, examples of how they can be used to boost productivity across your teams is with Homepages, Overviews, and Plays.
Homepages
First impressions count. Your Homepage is the billboard for your site—it’s the window into your reps’ user experience. If they can’t get to what they need quickly from the Homepage, you may have a difficult time getting them to come back. For the most engaging, personalized experience, Highspot SmartPages allow you to publish dynamic Homepages that are customized by audience.
Keep the following design principles in mind when building your sales enablement platform Homepage:
- Engaging: Make your Homepage relevant, and easy to read and navigate. Keep it current and visual.
- Simple: Begin with a simple welcome message at the top, and prioritize the content you want to share. Less is always more on Homepages!
- Informative: Get to the point—highlight business goals and key initiatives above the fold. Prioritize important topics (e.g. products, processes, events) with quick access to each. Add contacts for further support and to minimize internal noise.
Spot Overviews
Highspot Spots are collections of related content that align with sellers’ needs across various selling scenarios and initiatives. Using SmartPages, you can create custom guided experiences for your Spot, such as an Overview page to give the audience a sense of what resources they can access from the Spot and help them easily navigate to them. Less is more when it comes to Spot Overviews as well—the goal is always to laser focus reps on what’s most important.
Ensure your Spot Overviews include:
- Brief description of the Spot
- Navigation buttons and content feeds to the most recent, relevant, and popular Sales Plays, training lessons, Meetings, Digital Sales Rooms, and other items
- Subject matter experts and contact information
Sales Plays
Sales Plays pull together content and materials from across Spots, and are a great way to help drive awareness, adoption, and action from your reps to drive business initiatives forward.
Be sure to incorporate:
- Digestible guidance on what to Know, Say, Show, and Do
- Specific resources that reps need to do their jobs successfully, from multiple Spots
- Real examples of top performers performing the action(s) in the ‘Do’ section
- Ways to access the Play in the seller workflow, such as by promoting directly in your CRM
In Highspot environments with well-governed content, users have 35 percentage point-higher adoption of Sales Plays. They are able to quickly navigate to the most relevant Plays, and find the content and information they need to drive business outcomes. Scorecards provide visibility into the execution of your initiatives and programs so you can continue to refine your approach.
When your site’s pages are concise, engaging, and informative, your reps’ experience is drastically improved. This will drive higher adoption of your go-to-market materials, and help reps to more effectively drive toward business outcomes.
To build a great Highspot environment that’s aligned to your business objectives and maximizes content adoption, always begin with a solid foundation, optimize navigation, and design intentional pages.
Highspot Professional Services relieves resourcing constraints by designing and building SmartPages, and much more. Recently, we’ve partnered with Personio to help them build a holistic enablement strategy that drives behavior change, and hone their Highspot environment design. Gesine Halligan, director of sales enablement shares how this has accelerated their time to value:
“We left the workshop [with Professional Services] with a lot of work done that would have taken weeks otherwise. We now have a really clear path and roadmap for what we are going to accomplish, and I couldn’t be more excited,” said Halligan.
To get a demo of Highspot, and learn more about how Professional Services can work with you directly to help achieve your enablement goals, visit our demo request page.
