How Taylor Corporation Achieved 81% Recurring Usage

Unclear Insights Stunt Efficiency

The sales team at Taylor wanted to land immediate value in buyer interactions. To do that, it needed to reduce the amount of time reps spent on buyer engagements that would not move deals forward. But without visibility into insights that could help identify customers with the highest win potential or resources that influenced engagements, the team lacked the data needed to make decisions on where to invest time and energy. “It’s really not a good use of our time to have salespeople pursue a conversation with a customer when they’re simply not ready to buy,” explained Bart Prins, chief business development officer at Taylor Corporation.

Similarly, Taylor wanted to match the best selling opportunities with the best strategies to approach those buyers to improve rep effectiveness. This meant that it needed to convince reps to stop pursuing activities that would not give them the highest rate of return. “Some of our best salespeople have trouble occasionally with letting go of what may not necessarily be the highest value-creating work that they do every single day,” shared Prins.

Leveraging Analytics to Invest Wisely

To help its business development reps increase productivity, Taylor looked to streamline reporting through its tech stack and began leveraging Highspot to gain actionable insights into rep activity and buyer engagement. By examining these insights in Highspot’s Analytics alongside win/loss analyses that detailed customer feedback on the sales process, sales leaders are able to evaluate where their reps were succeeding and how they could improve.

This model of using Analytics to inform sales motions and decisions also allows the company to manage underperformance in its reps. By identifying underlying factors influencing engagement, such as particular reps or communication techniques, sales leaders can coach reps to hone the selling strategies most likely to succeed, boosting sales performance and increasing win rates. “We have sales leaders look at the data that is being provided back to us through Highspot. That gives us a sense of where we should be prioritizing our time right now,” detailed Prins. “We may have a customer who is interested in talking to us, but they’re not engaging to the level where this seems to be a burning issue for them or a problem that they need to solve in the immediate term. We would just handle that opportunity a little bit differently than we would with someone who’s engaging with our content consistently and immediately.”

Taylor applied the same intentionality to improve productivity by assigning specific roles and responsibilities to the team member best suited to perform those tasks. That way, the right people were focused on doing the right job, creating a culture of shared accountability that helped boost the team’s overall productivity. “Everyone understands uniquely what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and we complement that with a culture of trust, shared accountability, and selflessness so that when we win as a team, we win together,” shared Prins.

ANALYTICS MAKES PRODUCTIVITY A WAY OF LIFE Analytics Makes Productivity a Way of Life

By leveraging actionable insights, Taylor Corporation eliminated the guesswork to understand buyer engagement. The team was able to accurately gauge customer interest and determine how to approach each customer productively–which ultimately led to achieving 60% adoption of buyer engagement capabilities. “Are they interested in talking to us as much as we’re interested in talking to them? That’s a really important way to use Highspot,” said Prins.

One of the best ways to drive productivity is to eliminate poor usage of resources in areas that do not produce desired outcomes. Through Analytics, Taylor Corporation prioritized the right activities on the right opportunities to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, underscored by an 78% improvement in content findability and 81% recurring usage. “We had an exceptionally strong year last year, and I really believe that is a result of the discipline that we’ve brought to finding the right types of opportunities that fit us really well,” said Prins. “Then, putting our very best resources on that deal team on the best opportunities that we are most likely to win. When you do all of those things right, you’re going to get great results, and we have been getting those for these last few years.”