The growth of SailPoint’s sales team is something to ring the gong about–in fact, the team is experiencing hypergrowth. But with growth comes more pressure to train up the team and give salespeople fast and easily accessible tools so they can learn and refine their pitches. Given the rapid pace of innovation in the identity security market, SailPoint’s reps have to constantly stay abreast of their products and market trends so that they’re sharing the latest with buyers.
“As we get bigger, the need for intelligent training tools grows,” says Megan Kay, global director of revenue enablement for SailPoint. “We have to align our sales teams across the globe to ensure we’re staying consistent in our messaging for our key sales plays. This means organizing a massive amount of content that employees can instantly access.”
When SailPoint integrated Highspot, its sales enablement platform, with Slack, the speed of content sharing mirrored SailPoint’s rapid growth. Reps can immediately find and share everything—from training presentations to customer win reports—without the pain of endless searching. Also, while working in Slack, reps immediately find out when a buyer engages with their content, so they can respond quickly and accelerate decision-making.
By using Highspot and Slack’s native integration, SailPoint has improved its sales performance by letting team members:
- Search for Highspot content directly in their Slack conversations
- Share content in Slack channels or direct messages
- Receive notifications in Slack on Highspot pitch activity, including when a buyer viewed or downloaded content
“We’re so confident about the sales plays we’re sharing in Highspot and Slack that we’re setting higher lead-close targets for our first-year sales reps.”
Supporting a rapidly scaling sales team
SailPoint’s identity management technology relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning —complex and dynamic technologies that are changing rapidly. The company’s sales teams have to stay on top of new features and innovations in order to sell effectively. In addition, sales people need access to what Kay calls the “human element”—that is, SailPoint colleagues who can guide newcomers, share experiences with prospects and customers, and suggest content that helps move prospects down the sales funnel.
The widespread use of Slack at SailPoint has helped bring that human element to SailPoint teams. No matter where SailPoint employees are, they know they can ask more experienced colleagues for help and get fast answers, like in the Slack channel that’s informally referred to as “Learner Journey to Greatness.”
“To scale sales, people need to be able to reach out and say, ‘Hey, I need help,’” Kay explains. “Slack is the simple answer. There are hundreds of people in the company with experience and wisdom that can help new team members. With Slack, they can find each other, become friends, share content, and learn from each other.”
But as the sales team grows, so does the amount of sales content that needs to be managed and shared. “Connecting people with the content they need gets tougher as the organization gets larger,” Kay says. In addition, the sales team previously had no system for tracking ownership of content, including the subject-matter experts who needed to keep content fresh and accurate.
Making content part of the conversation
In the search for a better sales enablement solution, SailPoint selected Slack for its ability to connect sales teams with the messaging and content they need to do their job and Highspot for its ability to organize critical sales enablement materials in a centralized, intuitive platform. Perhaps most important, Highspot integrated effectively with Slack.
“When you’re a global company, you want employees company-wide to create and share sales materials that are written and designed in a unified voice,” Kay says. “Highspot landed so well with us because of the massive amount of content we can share and manage within Slack.”
Finding and sharing content within Slack, at the time and place where sales conversations happen, is critical—but so is keeping track of ownership, versions, shares, and feedback. That’s the advantage of Highspot and Slack, Kay says.
“We don’t want salespeople to share outdated materials with buyers,” she says. “Because it’s integrated with Slack, Highspot helps reps find the most current high-level messages, but also empowers them to get creative for content that needs to be regionalized.”
“Our implementation of Highspot integrated with Slack has significantly improved the efficiency of our sales team. I can plan ahead to meet our goals for the next 12 months, knowing I have this reliable infrastructure and technology behind me.”
The proactive approach to closing sales
Now, requests for help or specific content can all stay within Slack. Highspot uses artificial intelligence to power its search, so simply by typing the command /highspot
in Slack, SailPoint sales team members can enter keywords and find the correct content. Once the search is complete, the content can be shared in channel or via direct message.
Sales team members can also track progress and metrics related to specific content like case studies and product brochures. If a prospect opens an email or engages with content, salespeople get a notification in Slack right away and can act on that knowledge proactively. Over time, salespeople can use results to assess which sales collateral have worked and which ones haven’t.
“You don’t want to have a knee-jerk type of team where you’re just running to the next fire to put out, and you’re never getting ahead of the curve,” Kay says. “Our implementation of Highspot integrated with Slack has significantly improved the efficiency of our sales team. I can plan ahead to meet our goals for the next 12 months, knowing I have this reliable infrastructure and technology behind me.”
Kay has more than intuitive technology to guide her sales team to success. She has the “human element” through Slack that she believes is essential to building a tight-knit and collaborative sales team—especially when new employees take part in conversations.
“We’re so confident about the sales plays we’re sharing in Highspot and Slack that we’re setting higher lead-close targets for our first-year sales reps,” Kay says. “As long as the reps are adopting Slack and Highspot to stay current with leads and content within three months on the job, we are confident in their ability to hit these targets.”