“Guru has impacted my sales process dramatically, especially in reducing the time it takes to close deals. It helps me be the first one to answer my prospects’ questions, with such a level of thought leadership, which gains their trust and results in more won deals.”

Jai Cheema
Senior Account Executive
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If anyone understands the importance of closing a deal, it’s Lever. Given that they’re a leading recruitment SaaS firm whose primary offering streamlines the hiring and applicant tracking process, it’s literally their business to give companies the tools to find the right people and get them to the point of saying yes. So why were they having so much trouble getting the right information to their own revenue teams? And how much was this time-intensive knowledge-finding process slowing down their sales cycles?

Navigating the knowledge dump

By the end of 2017, Lever’s employees were using a diverse array of solutions, including a knowledge base, an asset repository, shoulder tapping, and pinging each other on Slack, to address requests from prospects. It was a comprehensive setup with one major problem: it wasn’t easy to find what sales reps actually needed to find in order to close deals.

This wasn’t due to lack of knowledge. Lever’s marketing team had been putting out knowledge — a lot of knowledge, including product documentation, security information, externally focused one-sheets, and testimonials — on Google Drive, but sales reps didn’t know how to find the best collateral to use without pinging someone. And that trouble went both ways, as the marketing team realized they didn’t have any visibility into which assets were actively being used, or at what frequency. Were they even having an impact? And how many deals were stalling out in the time it took to find the right data and collateral?

The sales and marketing teams were suffering from information overload, with marketing having no good way to judge the effectiveness of their investment in content, and sales struggling to keep on top of useful information — all of which lead to inefficient sales cycles.

That’s when the Lever team realized they needed to try something that wasn’t just another platform; they needed something smarter, something faster, and something that would give both teams the wins they needed. So their marketing team took a look at Guru to see if it would empower them to easily organize, share, and track all of the content they were developing.

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Just the needle, no haystack

Guru adoption by the sales org was high right from the start; the rollout process went quickly and easily thanks to on-the-ground implementation help from Guru’s support team—and, in Sarah Nahm, a CEO who championed the initiative. Kiran Dhillon, product marketing manager at Lever was an early advocate, nudging team members one-on-one to see what they could accomplish with Guru. Once they saw how easy it was to use, a 100% adoption rate by account executives quickly followed.

“Implementing Guru was really easy and fast. We worked with sales managers to help build adoption across our sales team. Early on, when someone asked a question in Slack, a sales manager would typically respond, ‘Did you Guru it?’ Everyone quickly learned to check Guru for any questions they needed answered.” ‍

Kiran Dhillon
Product marketing manager
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The team realized that by sitting on top of their existing platforms and importing information, Guru’s knowledge network empowered them to effortlessly find just the relevant content needed to accelerate their sales cycles. No more digging through endless folders or searching through multi-page documents; they always had exactly what they needed to keep the conversation going. Eventually, they jettisoned the use of Google Drive as a knowledge repository altogether.

Guru’s knowledge network empowered Lever’s revenue team to effortlessly find just the relevant content needed to accelerate their sales cycles.

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Jai Cheema, senior account executive, put his experience with Guru this way: “It has really removed that gap where I have to come back and say, ‘Hey, let me get you that answer at a later date,’ or, ‘Let me circle back with some of my teammates internally,’ because now I have that information at my fingertips. It’s been very impactful for all my sales today.”

Reaching escape velocity

It wasn’t long before the Guru experience was rolled out to the rest of the company. In 11 months, Lever went from using Guru primarily in a sales capacity to seeing it adopted by the support and customer success teams as well — and they weren’t the only ones thrilled with their newfound agility in navigating knowledge. Marketing was finally getting some insight into how their assets were being used. “Guru’s analytics are incredibly easy. I log in everyday and can see things like adoption metrics, the most common cards being used, and searches that don’t produce results (to help focus our efforts),” explains Kiran.

The good place

In under a year, Lever has expanded its Guru knowledge network to encompass almost 75% of the company, and “Did you Guru it?” has become the de facto answer to any shoulder tapping. And don’t worry, it’s not about shaming colleagues who don’t know the answer, it’s about empowering them to be self-sufficient.

The rollout has been so successful that, in contrast to most software (which has a 10-20% active daily user rate), 44% of Lever employees with Guru access use it daily, and at least 80% use it monthly. With their knowledge network growing, Lever’s Guru card trust score — which is aggregated by looking at how recently all cards in the instance have been validated as accurate by a subject matter expert — is a staggering 89%, meaning that reps can count on the information they find being confirmed as correct. “If you have any questions, Guru is like a second brain to your entire organization. You no longer have to chase down answers from people across your team,” Jai says.

Between wide adoption and the high trust score, Guru has empowered Lever to maintain a far more efficient sales cycle while also creating a data-driven marketing strategy. Getting to yes is all about leveraging what everyone in your company knows in a meaningful way. Lever already had the knowledge, Guru just gave them that leverage.