Sales Enablement PRO Awards 2021: Maximizing Sales Content and Guidance At Terminus

Congratulations to Sales Enablement PRO Award winner Amanda Dossey from Terminus. Learn more about the Content and Guidance award winning initiative below.

What was the challenge you were facing?

Amanda Dossey: Hi, I’m Amanda Dossey. I am a sales enablement manager at Terminus software. We are a B2B marketing software headquartered in Atlanta. As I mentioned, I am part of the enablement team with one of my large initiatives being onboarding new hires that come to Terminus. I joined the company about 18 months ago and it feels like a lifetime, but at that time we were very Google drive driven. So everything, if you wanted information, if you wanted to share content, you would have to just Slack somebody that link. We did have an instance before I was actually at the company, but no one took care of it. Nobody used it. And so it pretty much phased itself out. When I came on board, my onboarding was an Excel document with a bunch of links to Google drive content. And then I would just go through it that way. As you can imagine, not very efficient, not very pleasing to the eye. It was very tedious to go through each of those instances bit by bit. But it did get the job done at the time.

The other challenge was obviously content organization and content management. So having a million different versions of things out there and not always knowing if what you’re looking at is the right piece of content. So slacking links to Google docs is not the most efficient way or probably professional way to be sharing content. But that is what we did, and then our sales team was constantly complaining about building customer decks and having the right information and getting that content from our marketers over to our sales team and in the hands of our customers was always a challenge. As I mentioned, new hire onboarding was almost obsolete at that point. We would work maybe one or two days with somebody on the enablement team. Prior to my manager joining the company about two years ago, there was no enablement team. So it was you just came in, you learned on the job, you would work with your manager. So, things have definitely come a long way.

What was the process of developing this initiative?

AD: My manager did put together that Excel sheet, which was absolutely a step in the right direction, and it was at least organizing and bringing all of the relevant information into one place. That being said, it was still a big struggle to onboard when you had new hires to try to get them engaged and to help them feel like they had a handle on the content that they needed. So I think step one was just getting that content audited. So when we started with Highspot, we went and did a major purge of content that was old and needed to be archived. And then we just brought content in. I think our first instance at HighSpot was maybe 80 pieces of content. We’re now at well over 800, 900 pieces of content. And that was maybe 15 months ago. So, definitely come a long way. We’d want it to learn to crawl before we were walking though. And I would say at this point we’re jogging. But at the time we really had to keep it simple. We had to do a lot of clean out, and there was a lot of content load.

How was the rollout and adoption of the new initiative?

AD: That was happening courtesy of yours truly over here. So uploading all of that content, making sure that we had everything that we needed and then organizing that content. So getting it all in one place is great, but we had to make it easy to find outside of search because search can always be a little bit overwhelming. So working with spots, organizing those spots, using those global filters based on use case or sales stage or product feature. We also initially relied pretty heavily on search. Which was great when you had 80 to a hundred pieces as content, but when you start to get a massive amount of content, the search is so good. It’s almost too good. So if you’re looking for a piece of content that has something in it that says demand generation or account-based marketing, you’re going to get about 800 pieces of content that have that somewhere. So it does work for some very specific instances, but we quickly outgrew that saying, “Oh, just search and you’ll find it.”

So we really had to move towards spots and use those global filters. We also started out with governance groups, which again, I think worked for us initially where each spot all of our content was in different spots and those spots were owned by individuals. They would monitor and guard the content. We would meet on a weekly basis and then we would go and purge content once a month. I think that we quickly outgrew that and found that it was just too many cooks in the kitchen. And so we had to find a more scalable approach to how we were going to organize that content. So the roll out was fantastic. Right away we had what we called our Highspot power users. We’ve seen an interesting shift in dynamics since we’ve rolled out some of our employees that have been with our company for three, four years are used to using Google in a certain way. So trying to move that culture forward into using this tool has been a slow but steady process.

That being said our company has been hiring. We’ve been growing so quickly and we had new hires coming in almost every single month. So I’m very fortunate that I have the opportunity, not only to train them in this new program that we’ve built, but then they’re used to this software right off the bat. So they’re starting their job here at Terminus using Highspot as one of their main sales tools. So that’s been really, really exciting. Some of the other things we did, I think is just over time when people would want to have a piece of content shared, instead of slacking the Google drive, we just Slack them the Highspot link. We also had great support from our senior leadership. Our CEO, our CRO are all big fans of Highspot. They see the value. And so they’re really pushing that message with everybody at the organization. So adoption has more than doubled in the past 15 months, which is really exciting to see.

What are some of the business results and impact as a result of your efforts?

AD: We just continue to evolve with our partnership with Highspot. We are using it more and more in a pre-sale sales capacity, in addition to an onboarding capacity with our new hires. Now we’re really starting to dig into the customer success side and the implementation and onboarding of our customers to see how we can use that in a post-sale capacity as well. So I’d like to say that we have our quantitative and our qualitative. So quantitative, we’ve seen increasing usage, as I mentioned. We’ve seen user adoption rank go up. People are really using this content. We’ve started to see the use of it. Pitching has been very successful with our customers.

One of the most exciting things that I like to see is feedback from our customers. And when you see an email from the head of marketing and HP saying, I love the way that this content is organized. Thanks so much for sending, you’re doing something right. So for me, it’s really exciting because we’ve been such a great tool for us to organize our content and to be able to pitch our content, but it’s made the lives of our customers easier as well, because they can go and find all of their content in one place. And they always know it’s up to date. So great customer feedback, which has always been wonderful. Then the statistics don’t lie. I mean, more than double growth, we’ve been seeing content usage go up, pitching sharing, downloading. So we’re seeing, I think some of our old Terminus employees really start to embrace Highspot. Then again, as we hire more and more people they’re integrated into Highspot right at the beginning, and then they take it, run with it and it becomes a part of their daily life.

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