How Icertis Saves Reps 2 Hours Per Day

When Carl Saxon, sales director at Icertis, was first tasked with evaluating anew sales enablement tool, he was skeptical. “I was against it at first,” says Saxon. “I’m the longest tenured salesperson here, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” At the time, reps were used to a content environment that JP Mantey, head of global sales enablement at Icertis, describes as chaotic. “Information was hard to find and version control difficult to stay on top of,” Mantey says. That changed when Highspot replaced a variety of disparate solutions. “What Highspot taught me is that you can teach an old dog new tricks,” says Saxon. “Highspot has revolutionized how we pitch and communicate with customers. It’s been a huge asset.

An Intuitive Solution Needed to Navigate Rapid Growth

Gretchen Eischen, chief marketing officer at Icertis, describes the company as “the contract intelligence platform of the world.” Icertis’ AI-driven software helps organizations track and organize contracts. As a global leader in contract lifecycle management, Icertis is experiencing rapid growth. “Our sales organization is doubling in size and the marketing organization has grown from twelve to forty team members in less than two years,” explains Eischen.

While Icertis’ rapid growth is a testament to its product and customer success, rapid expansion also presented a challenge to sellers at the company. “Before Highspot, our sales collateral was in multiple places,” says Eischen. “We lacked a single source of truth.” The confusion led to a lot of time spent searching for content, up to two hours a day. The situation also made it difficult for marketing to ensure that reps were always using the latest messaging. “We want our teams to use our most relevant messaging,” says Eischen. “But if they can’t find it, they certainly aren’t using it.”

The same drawbacks made onboarding difficult, an increasingly important process for the growing business. “When I joined the company, prior to Highspot, my onboarding consisted of sitting next to a veteran seller and gathering content via email attachments,” says Mantey. “A lot of what we did was ask our peers. ”While that approach built comradery among reps, it negatively impacted ramptime and brand consistency. “We ended up with a lot of PDF’s emailed back and forth. It was impossible to keep track of,” says Mantey. As the head of global sales enablement at Icertis, Mantey made it a personal mission to give new salespeople the tools he wished he had in his days as a sales rep. “Highspot has been a critical part of enabling that,” he says.

Another thing that was difficult to track: engagement. While Icertis reps did have a tool to track emails, there was no way to tie those insights back to specific deals. “You had zero visibility into what was going on,” says Saxon.

Capturing Customers’ Attention With Personalized Pitches And Timely Contact

With Highspot now in place at Icertis, reps have masterminded a whole new method for selling. “For every deal I work on, I start by creating a digital salesroom in Highspot,” explains Saxon. “I can easily add the customer’s logo and make it look very professional.” And, if Saxon is responding to an RFP, he uses the same method to get the attention of prospects. “I use a Highspot digital salesroom to create different sections that address various aspects of the RFP,” he says. Given the abundance of documentation that often accompanies an RFP, Highspot is a welcome alternative to email. “We might have up to 30 supporting documents we need to share,” says Saxon. “You can’t email all that to a customer.”

While customers respond to the personalized, all-in-one nature of a digital salesroom, Saxon and his colleagues also benefit from the ability to track engagement.“ The digital sales room works two-fold for me because now I can see if there is engagement with the proposal. It gives me a heads up that we may become the vendor of choice and negotiations might start.” Mantey refers to the analytics capabilities in Highspot as a newfound “superpower” for reps. “Everyone knows timing is very valuable,” he says. “Our reps use the insights they gather from Highspot to ensure their calls to customers are timely, for instance right after apiece of content was passed on to a colleague.

Selling More, Searching Less

Highspot took off at just the right moment for Icertis. “In hindsight, there is no way we would have been able to scale the way we have without Highspot,”says Mantey. “The business outcomes we’ve driven relate to how much easier it is for reps to find content and how analytics help them be more strategic as they engage with prospects.” Reps have become adept at using Highspot to accelerate their work. “I use Highspot to create templates that align with all the verticals we pitch to,” says Saxon. “I can customize pitches on the fly and work faster than before.” Mantey has noted a meaningful reduction in the length of theaverage sales cycle: “What enables that is the speed that reps can find the right information. Highspot has really helped us do that.” And the two hours a dayreps used to spend searching for content? Today, Icertis reps use that time more productively.

With a 94% adoption rate of Highspot, rep engagement is on the rise. “We have more content, and precise content, now that we use Highspot,” says Saxon.“ Today, we have a marketing page, a sales enablement page, a sales operations page, and a partner page. Everyone knows where to go to get the job done in an efficient manner.” Marketing and sales teams are better aligned, too, because Icertis employees use Highspot analytics to track how content performs in the real world. “Our marketing and enablement teams love Highspot because they use the analytics to make smart choices about what content to retire and what is resonating,” says Mantey. “That’s a greater value than just increased revenue, the value of resource efficiency,” adds Eischen.