@Ashley W. I know we spoke about this way back when! 

@Heather Speaker We also chatted about trying to bring Guru to other teams, if I remember correctly :) 

Hey Lily! This is a great question that’s come up in other Guru conversations I’ve had with folks in the community. Tagging in a few people who may be able to add perspective - @Gabriel Ginorio @Radhika Parashar @Joaquin Felix Dalla Via @Alex Avila @Anastasia Rybalko @Valerie Renda , how has this been playing out at your organizations?

Hi everyone, and @Callie thank you for the mention!

In our case, this was definitely a bottom-up initiative. From my experience, it’s enough to show one team the benefits of Guru, go through implementation with them, see the results, and then use that as an internal case study/success story.

My perspective is deeply rooted in Customer Support – the speed and ease with which an agent finds information is crucial; it’s a crushing feeling when you’re chatting with a client and feel completely lost due to information unavailability. So for me, a company’s Support Team gets Guru’s foot in the door.

Once you take a look at how much time agents save by quickly surfacing information (check out the 12 Days of Guru series to craft a complete kit of data!) and share it with other teams, it’s very easy to raise awareness and organically expand to other teams or the entire company. We started with a few people from Support, and now we have all customer facing teams in Guru. Our plan is to end this year with the entire company using Guru as the single source of truth. 

We also used a bottom-up approach and started with the support teams, then organically expanded to Sales teams. As a chat support rep myself in a SaaS company it was very painful bouncing between so many Slack channels and looking at outdated docs to answer a simple question.

As for resources we used to make the initial pitch to the execs, we used Guru case studies/testimonials and success stories, and included a potential time and cost savings section. We highlighted our existing pain points and quantified the number of unnecessary hours used to answer repeat questions on Slack for example.

When selling Guru and even as I drive adoption, I feel that people are resistant to change - why replace Notion? I still struggle to distinguish the two and the different use cases. Doing a side by side comparison and listing use cases where you’d pick Guru over Notion was very helpful in reducing friction.

@Callie Rojewski thanks for looping me in here. 

When making the case for Guru, we did a side-by-side comparison of current state and future state. We were working across Intercom, Notion, Confluence, Slack, and Google Drive, making it challenging to find the right information. We showcased Guru’s features and how they’d impact our day-to-day process for our Sales org and it made a lot of sense to leadership.

That said, Guru was more of a bottom up approach. Our Sales team was always vocal about wanting a smoother process and centralized, verified knowledge, but ultimately it was our Head of Enablement who pitched it to our senior leadership team. 

The pain points we experienced were pretty significant, so Chrome extension and the concept of bite-sized cards provided a lot of leverage. We really leaned into the value of time savings and it made a huge impact on the proposal. Initially leadership was skeptical to use yet another tool, but after seeing rapid adoption across the sales team, we started bringing in other departments and are currently in the process of deciding if it makes sense to use Guru org-wide. 

Hope this helps!

@Alex Avila I actually recently started my new role in Enablement! 

To ensure info is maintained, does that fall under enablement or did you create a knowledge council?

Did you also experience challenges migrating some info that should belong on Guru, from Notion?

@Callie Rojewski appreciate the mention.

Ours was, like many others in this thread, a bottom up approach as well. It started because the team I was a part of at the time (Brand Management) wanted a way for us to catalog our Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) so we can better onboard new people and keep processes up to date. Although we had signed up for a Guru trial at the time, they asked me if I could become the Learning and Development Manager to lead that process. My goal was that if anyone ever had a question, anyone could respond “did you Guru it?” or with a link to the Guru card and they could find it. This was super important for us as a company going through very high growth (and the beginning stages of the pandemic shift to remote work) to keep organized. So it wasn’t hard to convince at the time that we needed “some hub” to archive our knowledge. Then, before leaders could question Guru too much, I think the culture of using Guru organically spilled over into other departments that were experiencing the same pain (it took a bit of evangelizing from my part , but it ultimately solved peoples’ pain points).

Now, after 2-ish years, each department hired what we call an “Ops and Comms Manager”, which is essentially a project manager for their respective department’s needs (including documentation and communication of that documentation). With more and more departments hiring that “Ops and Comms Manager”, Guru became the default and it stopped being “questioned”. It took a while but ultimately the best message that resonated with leaders was that people were using it regularly. So when leaders ever asked me, “Why is this worth the investment?”, I could turn around and show, thanks to Guru’s analytics tab, that over 70% of the company used it on a weekly basis (for many weeks and still). Although the threshold at which leaders will find that metric impressive will vary per company, it showed that most people find Guru useful enough to log in every week. And that the people who weren’t logging in were predominantly because their department had no content on Guru (so they had much less to find when they searched).

All said, I think in this day and age, most leaders will acknowledge the need for a knowledge hub, especially those companies that employ remote workers. Although I can’t say we did all the research in the world to pick Guru over other platforms, I can say that I’ve been very happy with Guru and that people in my company find it useful and the supporting evidence is weekly use.

Hope this is helpful and good luck!

We don’t use Guru company-wide so I don’t have a ton of detail here. Up until this point, our enablement team and sales/CS managers are our knowledge council since we have to create cards and other content before distributing to our teams. Occasionally we’ll tap a team lead to help contribute. So far, Guru has been an enablement tool but we much prefer it to Notion. I don’t know the specifics since we haven’t fully transitioned away from Notion, but we are meeting with our Guru CSM to evaluate how big of project it will be.

We have a small team that creates documentation internally at our organization, so we started the process of vetting new knowledge management platforms because our Google Wiki site was not sustainable or scalable. By vetting a bunch of different partners it was easier to make the case for Guru for our organization because it matched up with our goals of implementing a new way of knowledge sharing.

• What resources did you use to make the case for Guru? We first created little scorecards for each of the partners. Once we selected Guru as a team, we created a deck to present to our leadership team with extensive use cases and illustrative examples of how Guru would solve the challenges we were facing with our wiki. 
• Did implementing Guru come from a bottom up or top down approach? (or put another way…was Guru part of a larger company initiative, or did a few folks decide a change was needed and ran with it?) Definitely a smaller group (myself and one other person) determining we needed a change.
• What arguments did (or didn’t) resonate when you were “selling” Guru internally? How did that vary by seniority and department? Verification and clear content ownership were definitely two main selling points because our company is growing pretty rapidly and lack of ownership on our Wiki was a huge problem. Cost was our biggest obstacle because managing a Wiki was free and obviously implementing a new knowledge management platform is more of a long term investment. Having really concrete examples of the time savings via Guru was really important to counter those concerns.