How GWI Boosted Buyer Engagement by 27%

GWI revamped its sales with Highspot, enhancing audience engagement and gaining key insights into content performance.

52%

Introduction

GlobalWebIndex (GWI) knows it all. Its mission: to bring that knowledge to organizations across the globe. To help everyone become an expert on its audience, GWI combines a bespoke analytics platform with a comprehensive archive of consumer survey data to equip organizations to better understand audience interests and behaviors. But as GWI looked across its internal sales organization, it realized it needed to infuse that same insight into its sales process. To capture key audience data — and level-up beyond its previous system — GWI made the switch to Highspot.

Industry:

Professional Services

Employees:

696+

Use Cases:

Sales Plays and Playbooks Buyer Engagement Sales Training Sales Coaching Sales Content Management

Opportunity

Growing Market Requires More Robust Enablement Support

There is no shortage of demand for insight into the minds of today’s buyers. To keep pace, GWI is busily scaling its teams — and seeking to create a standardized process for enabling them. However, its previous enablement system struggled to provide a comprehensive environment, focusing primarily on training while allowing content and guidance to fall through the cracks. “At the time we had an LMS,” began Lucrezia Keane, senior vice president of revenue growth at GlobalWebIndex (GWI). “It wasn’t being used as widely or as effectively as it needed to be. Adoption wasn’t great.”

Discordant tools and low rep adoption curtailed GWI’s efforts to take advantage of the ever-growing demand for consumer insight. “Training was a key focus because we were growing really rapidly,” continued Keane. “We were hiring lots of new people and realized our ramp time was slower than we wanted it to be.” GWI knew it was poised to drive incredible growth, but it needed to ensure its new sellers would be ready to do so.

Soon, GWI put pen to paper on an initiative designed to help its teams achieve this potential. “I set out to ensure our revenue teams were ready to get the right content, at the right time, to the right customer,” added Ellie Marshall, senior product marketing executive at GWI. With a plan in mind, all that remained for GWI to do was find an end-to-end enablement platform equipped to support it — a search that soon led to Highspot.

It was really fun finding a solution that helped with content management and coaching and training. What made Highspot shine compared to some of the other companies we evaluated was the ability to do both of those things — and do them well.

Lucrezia KeaneSenior Vice President of Revenue Growth, GWI

Solution

Comprehensive Platform Powers Performance Improvements

As GWI transitioned to Highspot, the platform’s out-of-the-box content governance and streamlined search capabilities quickly bolstered reps’ confidence in enablement. With new governance policies driving higher adoption and content usage, GWI ensured reps had the first half of the equation — the right content — at their fingertips.

To power timely execution, GWI wove together Highspot’s native learning and buyer engagement capabilities. “Having a consolidated, unified way of training — by building out Sales Plays and Learning Paths based on different roles or teams — enabled us to be a lot more effective and efficient with the training we were building and how it was delivered to reps,” shared Keane. These role-specific learning experiences shared foundational knowledge and reinforced it over time, boosting competence in sellers old and new.

But while sales readiness is essential to empowering timely outreach, GWI saw Highspot’s external sharing capabilities as the key to unlocking buyer engagement. “It was so easy to show the value of things like external sharing,” enthused Keane. “For an account manager, when a contract is coming up for renewal, they could share that and see: Has a key decision maker engaged with it? Have they shared it with anyone else? Once they know customers have had time to consume that content, then they reach out to them, rather than just chasing people endlessly.” GWI’s teams soon saw the value of external shares and the data they captured, leading to a 52% increase in external shares created. With Highspot, it had achieved the three pillars — the right content, the right time, and the right customer — and was ready to drive greater returns through its reimagined strategy.

Having Highspot and Spot owners who were responsible for uploading new content and removing out-of-date content built trust with the team.

Lucrezia KeaneSenior Vice President of Revenue Growth, GWI

Impact

Newfound Agility Leads to Improved Outcomes

Now, GWI’s reps ramp faster and generate greater returns. “Through the different kinds of Learning Paths, those joining GWI were able to onboard themselves a lot quicker and had better results,” explained Keane. “We see that with our SDR team, as well. They’re running faster than they ever did, hitting their targets quicker, and have better knowledge of the new products and how to engage with their customers.”

Improvements in seller competence, engagement, and external sharing behavior soon sparked clear impact. “We’ve seen better success rates in terms of closing deals faster because of external shares leading reps to engage at the right moment,” continued Keane. By strategically targeting customers based on engagement data, GWI’s reps know precisely when to strike to maximize their impact — and, in doing so, have boosted buyer engagement by 27% and increased content engagement by 64%.

As a company, we are constantly on the hunt for new and innovative ways to improve the success of our revenue teams, and Highspot has played a pivotal role in meeting this.