Sales Enablement PRO Awards 2021: Improving Rep Engagement at Coupa

Congratulations to Sales Enablement PRO Award winner Meg Hall from Coupa. Learn more about the Engagement award winning initiative below.

What was the challenge you were facing?

Megan Hall: My name is Megan Hall. I’m from Coupa software. Coupa is a business spend management platform based out of Silicon Valley. We’ve been growing very fast in the last three years. We have actually tripled in size not only from our stock price, the number of employees, the number of users and even the number of products we have. So a couple of years ago we got together and we were talking about how we are going to support all of these new sales reps and how we most efficiently set them up for success. I run our industry in vertical go-to-market and our marketing team has been creating hundreds of new marketing materials each year. As we have a whole bunch of different sales reps coming in, we need to make sure that they are always being able to find the latest marketing materials and making it explicitly clear which products are best for the prospect. So we really had to think through how we set these sales reps up for success.

What was the process of developing this initiative?

MH: What we tried to create was personalization at scale, and that means that we’re setting it up, making it easy for each sales rep to be able to personalize their pitch for each prospect based on the company size, the in-company industry, the company, or the prospect’s role. So what we created was using the Highspot sales enablement tool. We created ways each rep can actually create a personalized website for each prospect. On the top of it, they put their logo. We have things like customer references, demos, business cases, white papers, analyst reports. On the main part of the website and then on the bottom, it has the per each of the reps information. And what’s really great about these value sites is that they can continue to evolve as the deal evolves so they’re continuing to put more things on it. And this is really innovative compared to how it used to be done just a couple of years ago before we created this program.

How was the rollout and adoption of the new initiative?

MH: It used to be that we would send out a rep that would have something, they would take the marketing materials, they’d download to their computer, they would make some changes and we’d have a whole bunch of version control issues. And then each rep would just send it via email and they just attached to that email. So what would happen is we wouldn’t get any of the analytics. It was really not a good experience for the end user because of the fact that they would have to search through hundreds of emails to be able to find the one piece of content that they’re looking for. There was no discovery or authentic way to be able to find other customer stories and things like that. And so the new way is much more streamlined is better for both the buyers and to be able to find and get up to speed with everything that’s going on with the deal at one time. And it’s also better for the supplier for the sales reps, because they can easily share information back and forth with the prospect or with other people on the team. And as marketers, we always can measure which materials are being used if they’re impacting deals and really giving it that great analytics so that we can make smarter decisions and we can be able to measure the ROI of our efforts.

What was the impact you experienced as a result of your efforts?

MH: The results of this program have completely astounded Coupa. We actually have seen over 600% increase in engagement from prospects over the last year. And sales reps are actually sharing content 500% more than they used to because of the fact that they just seem so much more engaged and they’re getting that analytics. So because of the fact that they’re getting more engagement and better results, it makes them want to share content and create more value sites for prospects. It’s really streamlined and taken over our whole entire sales process. It’s been really great results. Now we’re ready to take the success of this program and replicate it. So we’ve actually added in partners, and we’re actually extending it out to our sales team as well because the streamlined communication is something that we want to be able to give this benefit to whether you’re someone that’s barely talking to us all the way through their current customer, they still deserve to have that place to be able to communicate with and find all their materials. It’s just a better way to do things. So I’m excited for the future to enable and support the sales team as much as we can. I am super excited about this award, it made my day.

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