Best practices for getting a Sales team on Guru?

  • 10 January 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 122 views

Hi everyone,

Many of our customer-facing teams have adopted Guru and love it, but the final frontier is getting our sales team using the tool. I’d love to hear people’s experiences / success stories with getting Sales teams on Guru and what features in particular your Sales folks found most valuable. 

 

Thanks,

Cait


5 replies

Great question and topic @Cait Breslin! This page on our site has some helpful messaging and case studies, and here are some examples of how Sales teams can organize their knowledge in Guru.

What tool(s) do your sales team currently use to access information they need at various stages (e.g., when a prospect has a question about the product, security, etc. where do they look)? Do you have any sense of the pain points they’re experiencing?

In terms of features, I imagine the browser extension is pretty critical for most sales teams, so they can easily access the info. they need right on the fly via the extension (e.g., while in their inbox, LinkedIn, CRM, etc.).

I’m going to tap in some of our resident sales & sales enablement pros to weigh in as well: @Deborah Sanderfur @kelly @Charles Derupe @John McKoll - he/him @Ian Link @Katie Vermilyea @Allie Sokoloff @Zev Zoldan @Kristin Fretz  

Userlevel 4
Badge +1

In my experience, the Sales team wants/needs info fast and in the moment. We have structured our Sales collection into what they need during prep, what they need during a call, and general info to do their job. We have boards for things like Proposals and Marketing Templates for the prep, Competitor Intel and platform for myself (the Sales Engineer) and the Sales Rep to have on hand in the moment, and then we have the Sales Process and Legal for general “stuff”.

I met with the Sales team and their Managers to see what worked best for them, but a lot was just conversion of existing data in offline docs and folder structure into boards and cards. It was easier for them because they were used to the existing structure and just had a new place to access.

Userlevel 4
Badge +2

I agree, my Sales team was the first to adopt and they are loyal users. They love when everything about their job, product integration information can all be in one place. I train Sales to use Guru for easy access to things like Case Studies, Pricing Rate Cards, Contract FAQs, Competitive Positioning, Sales Process Documentation for all of our tech stack tools. The possibilities are truly endless :blush:

Userlevel 4
Badge +3

Thx for looping in @Chris Anderson 

@Cait Breslin I have many ideas on this topic, as I am sure @Tori Belkin would as well!

But overall be the place of conciseness and consistency. You wouldn’t want to have to sift and search through mountains of info before finding the answer you are looking for, so chances are someone on your sales team would become very guru adverse if the information is not where they need it, when they need it. 

Some tips:

  • Keep cards short and sweet, especially if the card is something a rep would need for a call/meeting
  • Break up info into multiple cards, and link out from a single card (use the guru links!)
  • Be the home for ALL information (if you are going to use guru then try to avoid keeping important info in docs, wikis, slack, etc.)

Most importantly - meet your sales team where they are now, so you can help get them to where the ideal place is. If right now all their information is in google docs, don’t sunset all their google docs overnight. Slow and steady wins the race (as the old saying goes). 

And finally, feel free to send me an email if you have any more questions 🙂 (kelly.parks@ceros.com)

Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Others have already said it better than I could, lol. Sales teams can be finicky but as long as you are providing what they think they need, then they will start to buy-in. It might take a while, but bit by bit you’ll get them onboard.

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