SAP Concur Gains Control of Sales Content

Scattered Sales Content

Concur’s goal is to deliver effortless management and visibility into business spending, whenever and wherever it happens.

The company’s focus on this objective has enabled it to grow into a global enterprise, operating in more than 100 countries, and trusted by more than 20,000 clients and 25 million users globally.

Sales enablement at Concur is a fundamental part of the entire sales cycle, from top-of-funnel to deal close. Communicating the company’s mission to prospects and clients throughout the process is considered critical to success. Playing a central role, sales content forms the foundation upon which sales reps engage with prospects.

But Concur had outgrown its existing system of managing sales content. The sales and sales enablement teams had tried multiple ways to organize their thousands of pieces of sales content, none of which had the desired result: a single, organized content management system. Instead, content was scattered across multiple repositories, including Salesforce, a SharePoint Portal, and Box.

With dispersed content, sellers often couldn’t find the content they needed. Reps were wasting valuable selling time hunting for content. Some sellers were using content that was badly out of date — even up to seven years old — while others were creating their own “original” assets, resulting in inconsistent messaging and ineffective sales conversations. Communicating the company’s mission to prospects and clients throughout the process is considered critical to success.

The sales, sales enablement, and marketing teams all lacked visibility into usage data, and no one could measure which content pieces were more or less effective. Without the ability to understand what was useful, it was difficult to improve content and hone messaging.

Highspot Makes Content Easy to Find and Measure

Concur employees realized the need for a single, effective platform for managing all sales content. They chose Highspot to accomplish this, and now all content is consolidated and organized there for sales’ use. The sales content in Highspot can be accessed from Salesforce.com in addition to the web or mobile app.

In choosing Highspot, two key differentiators for Concur were ease of use and machine learning capabilities. Because Highspot’s user interface has a modern, intuitive design and navigation, making it easy to use, Concur benefited from faster adoption along with greater sales efficiency.

Highspot’s machine learning technology powers unique capabilities like full semantic search with intelligent results, content scoring, and content targeting that recommends the best content to a seller based on the buyer profile and sales stage. Machine learning capabilities that automate scoring and targeting eliminate the need for tagging content — a manual and time-consuming process to maintain across thousands of content pieces.

Centralized Content in a Single Repository

The Highspot implementation has led to better content management for sales and marketing alike, creating stellar adoption rates and impressive efficiency gains.

After the initial pilot, a post-pilot survey showed that the lion’s share of reps believed that Highspot would significantly help them get their jobs done. Once the world-wide rollout for the enterprise team completed, 90% of sellers were satisfied or very satisfied with Highspot. Adoption has also been impressively high, with 95% of sales reps using the platform each month. Concur estimates that reps save 4 hours a week that they used to spend looking for content. With more than 1,000 reps worldwide, this adds up to impressive productivity gains.

It is now much easier for employees to find the content they need when they need it. Field teams can organize the content specific to their needs while leveraging Highspot’s powerful machine learning capabilities for search and targeting to learn about new content. And because Concur only allows the final versions of documents to be uploaded into Highspot, the field teams trust that what they see is the latest and greatest.

For sales enablement, marketing, and content publishers, having all the content in a single repository greatly simplifies management, tracking, version control, and content mapping to the buyer lifecycle. These teams now can measure content usage, content age, customer engagement, and impact on sales. They now measure what the different sales teams are using and what they aren’t touching.

With the content pipeline operating smoothly and gaps in content delivery fixed, Concur’s content teams can focus on improving content quality. They now measure what the different sales teams are using and what they aren’t touching. Over time, as the teams dive deeper into analytics in relation to sales effectiveness, customer engagement, and influenced revenue, Highspot’s value will only increase. The solution will not only save time and improve sales force efficiency, but will also drive real advances in sales effectiveness.