How Aetna Improved Content Governance by 62%

Scattered, Difficult to Find Content and Resources

Despite the company’s simple client solutions, Aetna’s sales reps were struggling to traverse Aetna’s multiple internal systems to access sales content and collateral. That’s because sales assets and marketing content were stored in three separate file systems, making it difficult to know where to look. Worse yet, because there was no good way to govern the activities of content authors, publishers, and system owners within a single repository, content was often miscategorised, outdated, redundant, or not meant for internal or external consumption. As a result, Aetna’s sales reps avoided using the internal content repositories, opting instead to download key files directly to their desktop. This behaviour exacerbated the already existing issue of reps using outdated or off-message content. The content issues were so notorious that the Aetna sales team referred to them as the “3S Issues” for content storage, structure, and search.

To complicate matters even further, the diverse sales backgrounds and training of Aetna’s sales reps meant that new hires came in with natural biases for their own preferred sales approach and methodology, making it difficult for sales leadership to know which sales approaches most effectively drove client engagement.

Single-Source of Truth, Easy for Sellers to Access

After doing some initial research, the management team at Aetna decided that their sales reps needed a system specifically designed for sales enablement instead of a collection of content management systems that weren’t designed to address the unique needs of modern sales and marketing teams. Aetna’s managers reached out to other peer organisations and industry analysts in the healthcare insurance space to get their solution recommendations. Highspot came highly recommended, but the Aetna team also wanted to conduct their own vendor research.

The management team knew they had to identify a solution that would address the wide range of issues they were experiencing with their existing solutions. The team’s first step was to formalise their ideal offerings by creating a priority list.

The management team dedicated time toward evaluating a shortlist of sales enablement vendors, but it soon became clear that Highspot was the only solution that would address and solve Aetna’s issues. The next step was for Aetna’s evaluation team to test drive the platform to understand how sales reps would be able to adopt the new solution.

Highspot Saves Reps Time and Improves Overall Efficiency

The first thing that everyone at Aetna noticed about Highspot was how it made their sales reps significantly more efficient and happy. Hours wasted on hunting for the right content had been replaced with a single place to go for the latest and best sales assets. The sales team was blown away by the ease of use, accurate search, and ability to customise presentation slides for clients.

A major game changer for Aetna sales reps was Highspot’s real-time engagement notifications. These notifications gave sales reps instant visibility into which clients were engaging with their content, all the way down to the number of minutes and seconds they spent looking at an individual slide or page. Guesswork was truly a thing of the past for both the Aetna sales and marketing teams.

The biggest and most impactful change that Aetna noticed was a previously unseen level of collaboration between the Aetna sales and marketing teams. Suddenly, internal disagreements regarding which content items and sales processes worked best dissolved. Highspot’s ability to analyse when and how potential clients were looking at promotional content showed the marketers what content was and wasn’t working. This meant marketing could focus on creating content that they were confident would work.

And, of course, the sales team was pleased to receive more effective content from their marketing team. This, in turn, led to more collaborative discussions between sales and marketing teams about where to collectively focus their efforts in order to make maximum sales impact. With more efficient sales organisation, the company continues to achieve strong year-over-year growth.