How Baker Tilly Increased its Win Rate by 16%

Find out how Highspot helped Baker Tilly meet several business needs and served as a bridge between sales and marketing.

Industry:

Professional Services

Employees:

5500+

Introduction

Baker Tilly US is a top ten advisory tax and assurance firm helping businesses generate and sustain growth. Through customised solutions, Baker Tilly helps clients in a number of different industries navigate regulatory requirements, identify and mitigate risk, and improve the way they work. However, with an extensive and varying client base comes a high volume of content, something Baker Tilly struggled to organise with its existing system. The team needed a way to house and manage content where both sales and marketing could easily find what they needed. With Highspot, Baker Tilly found a solution that brought accessibility and ultimately improved win rates.

Opportunity

Disorganised Content Hindered Agility and Consistency

As both an accounting and business advisory firm, Baker Tilly has a large library of collateral to support its diverse client base. But without a centralised enablement platform, the team struggled to find the information they needed.

With content spread across multiple systems, the team also lacked a unified way to analyse and report on performance, making it difficult to identify content gaps and make strategic decisions. “We weren’t able to see if we had enough collateral in any particular area,” explained Trula Hensler, senior manager of sales enablement and operations at Baker Tilly US. “We didn’t have one place where leadership could look and say, ‘We probably need this for our salespeople or our practitioners.’ Or, ‘We need something further to help them be valuable.’” 

Amid these challenges, the company was also facing external pressures that impacted operations and organisational strategy. “There was an awful lot going on in our organisation and in the marketplace,” shared Bob Bortz, director of sales enablement at Baker Tilly. For example, as the industry shifted toward online communication in the post-pandemic landscape, outreach became all the more difficult to differentiate. “We were looking for ways to make the processes more consistent and at the same time, more effective.” The team needed a more robust tool to unify their content, effectively equip employees, and help reps stand out from the competition.

We had content everywhere. We needed an area where we could find our sales-related information, as well as any marketing information we wanted to share.

Trula Hensler
Trula HenslerSr. Manager of Sales Enablement and Operations, Baker Tilly

Solution

Centralisation Fostered Collaboration, Consistency, and Differentiation

Implementing Highspot provided Baker Tilly with a multifaceted tool that met a number of business needs. With a centralised ability to find the right content, reps could provide a more consistent and seamless experience to buyers. “It enabled us to put a lasso around that content chaos,” explained Hensler. “No longer did we have practitioners or salespeople saving things to their desktops where it would quickly become outdated.” 

With Pitch capabilities, the team also helped sellers better engage buyers with an experience that is differentiated from competitors in the digital sales landscape. “We had difficulty differentiating ourselves in the market among the barrage of emails, so the opportunity to create a video email and introduce yourself to a prospect, or even reintroduce yourself to a client, was game-changing,” said Hensler. As a result, Baker Tilly has achieved 95% Pitch adoption.

Additionally, Highspot served as a bridge between sales and marketing. In particular, access to actionable insights helped improve collaboration between the teams. Marketing owned the lion’s share of the content, but we created a process of what needed to be done by whom and when. That just created a nice collective, collaborative environment,” said Bortz.

Beyond enhancing collaboration, these insights helped improve the team’s ability to make strategic decisions to evolve enablement programmes alongside the needs of the business. “When you get these Analytics back, you can look at a particular page a customer might have spent a little extra time on and gain a little insight into the added value you can bring,” described Hensler. “We often send three or four different options for customers to consider, and it’s handy when we can understand how they engaged and what we might follow up with. That’s how Highspot has helped us really start to navigate in this whole sales enablement process.”

We positioned it from a point of view that as much as this is a win for us and our sellers on the enablement side of the platform, the reality is it’s a fantastic tool for marketing to validate what content is being used and what is and isn’t creating wins.

Bob Bortz
Bob BortzDirector of Sales Enablement, Baker Tilly

Impact

Effective Enablement Influences Revenue

Investing in Highspot gave Baker Tilly a more effective way to enable its team and achieve significant business results. For example, improved content management, the ability to monitor insights on content effectiveness, and strong adoption of Pitch capabilities have helped improve buyer engagement. “More than 81 hours of our content is being reviewed by our buyers,” highlighted Bortz. “In collective, that’s significant. We’re getting in front of people and we’re sending it to stakeholders that are looking at it and reviewing it.” 

This has had a direct impact on the company’s bottom line, as Baker Tilly saw a 16% increase in win rate after switching to Highspot and a significant influence on pipeline. With these results, Highspot has since become a crucial tool for the Baker Tilly sales enablement team, and even for the company as a whole. “By finally having a singular place to store information, we have a resource to guide our teams and help the rest of the firm get the information they need,” said Hensler. “From our first meeting with our Highspot rep, it was like an epiphany. I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, we need this.’”

In the first couple of months since launching the tool, we had more than $2 million in pipeline revenue influenced via Pitch functionality in Highspot.

Bob Bortz
Bob BortzDirector of Sales Enablement, Baker Tilly