How Cleo Improved Rep Engagement by 32%

Supply chain integration company Cleo has a wealth of experience in bringing together disparate parts of an ecosystem to make a greater whole. Companies across industries have used their solutions to improve integration across complex networks. With their emphasis on better integration and connection through end-to-end automation, it’s no surprise that Cleo’s sales enablement efforts endeavor to be similarly focused. Through their new partnership with Highspot, they’ve created a more efficient tech stack that has allowed them to improve sales training and give sales reps back their most valuable resource – time.

Fragmented Systems Demand Valuable Time and Energy

Cleo has leveraged a variety of tools to store sales collateral over the years, beginning with OneDrive before moving to SharePoint and even adding on Google Drive as the company grew. With content in so many places, it was difficult for the enablement team to organize and almost impossible for go-to-market teams to effectively search. Content would be shared via email, Slack, or even text messages, which made version control difficult to maintain and insights impossible to acquire. “It’s just not efficient for version control, and it’s also not efficient because it really promotes reps to save it to their desktop where I don’t have control of that content,” shared Frank Kenney, the director of industry solutions at Cleo.

Meanwhile, with multiple systems in place for enablement and limited integrations with other critical aspects of the tech stack, it was difficult to maintain consistency and predictability in how enablement programs were delivered to reps.

A Unified Tech Stack Empowers Consistency

To help offer the entire organization more consistency and predictability within their tech stack, Cleo implemented Highspot as its unified enablement platform. “It was very easy to make an initial investment in Highspot,” explained Kenney. Right away, Cleo began leveraging integrations and the united nature of the Highspot platform to more seamlessly equip, train, and coach its teams.

For example, with the Slack integration, Kenney and his team began embedding Highspot into the daily workflows of reps, helping to drive adoption from the start. In doing so, Kenney also encouraged reps to create a habit of searching for what they need in Highspot themselves rather than reaching out to enablement with one-off requests. “When someone asks me for something, I can easily find it via the Slack integration and then I just press a button and send it to them,” said Kenney. “Salespeople are hardwired, so sometimes it takes a lot to re-hardwire them. What I’ve found is after three or four times of doing that, they start to understand how they can search for themselves.” This approach to driving adoption has led to impressive results, including 94% recurring usage of Highspot and a 37% increase in content usage.

Another early organizational priority was updating training modules within Highspot to create interconnected learning resources. With all content and training materials in the same platform, Cleo was able to easily embed key resources and sales collateral already living in Highspot into lessons and courses. That way, reps can continue to reference learning materials beyond completion of the training, helping them get up to speed faster and better retain information. “What’s really helpful is giving them content that they can use in a sales cycle, or even better, being able to take information from a sales cycle and rapidly update a training module because things change,” noted Kenney.

Insights Improve Predictability

As Cleo has embedded Highspot into the culture of its go-to-market teams, it has improved rep engagement in enablement programs by 32%. “Highspot is just another validation of an investment and a commitment that we make to our employees and our customers by extension,” shared Kenney. “It really is a reflection and a helper in buying into our culture.”

With high adoption and engagement, the team has been able to gather essential insights into what works, which has improved decision-making. “Now, they can go sit back and just watch the metrics in Highspot,” explained Kenney. “The cool part about being able to watch that interaction, almost in real-time, is that it allows people to become more objective and make better decisions.” These insights give reps much-needed visibility into how buyers engage with their materials, streamlining the sales process. For enablement staff, this visibility is essential because it helps them optimize programs and create more predictability. “It really takes the unknown out of the equation,” said Kenney.