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SalesLoft powers modern sales organizations by helping them perfect sales engagement. In order to empower their customers to deliver better selling experiences, SalesLoft leads the way with a best-in-class sales process. One of the engines behind that success is Guru.

Setting the pace

SalesLoft is growing and innovating at a rapid clip, constantly cranking out new capabilities and platform updates that augment the selling experience. In order to both keep up with that rate of change and speak effectively about the product and market, the SalesLoft sales org needs easy access to up-to-date knowledge. The content, brand, product marketing and sales enablement teams needed a way to not only centralize all of that knowledge, but keep it up-to-date, and have it find sellers in their workflow.

“The pace at which our platform innovates, and the pace at which our marketing team provides supporting content for that innovation, made sending out emails or updating our wiki ineffective. There were too many places for people to go to get the information they needed and there was too much going on for them to keep up with multiple sources. We needed something that had everything together in one place that was easy to access.”

Sunshine Levin
Product Marketing Manager

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For SalesLoft, that “something” was Guru. “We knew we needed Guru when, internally, the folklore started to fail,” explained Sunshine Levin, Product Marketing Manager. “We were on this trajectory for growth, and when you can no longer look around and share information with the 10 people around you because it’s now 150 people around you, that’s when a system like Guru is needed.”

Before Guru, knowledge was scattered across a number of locations, including Google Drive, intranet sites, reps’ individual desktops, email threads, and in the minds of subject matter experts. Reps didn’t know where to go to find the latest resources, which introduced the risk of sharing outdated content with prospects. “Not having the most current information can mean that reps unintentionally mislead the prospect, which is not what we want for their buying experience,” said Sunshine.

The goal was to unify all knowledge. SalesLoft rolled out Guru first and then a learning management system (LMS), with Guru acting as the go-to knowledge destination and the LMS being used to administer homework based on the knowledge inGuru. “All of our knowledge lives inside of Guru,” explained Reena Ambai, Sales Enablement Manager, “The LMS lessons all contain links to Guru Cards and we encourage employees to explore the knowledge in Guru.” Sunshine elaborated: “The difference [in terms of usage of these two solutions] comes down to the type of knowledge. Is it a sales training exercise? That goes in the LMS and references Guru. Is it the latest and greatest knowledge that everyone needs to have fast, searchable access toon the job? That goes in Guru.”

Empowering a better buying experience

Sunshine teamed up with Reena to roll out Guru to the entire sales organization – account executives, sales development reps, and sales operations – in addition to the customer success, support, implementation, sales enablement, and marketing teams. The goal was to revamp their knowledge strategy to empower external-facing reps to have better conversations with prospects and customers.

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Not only was SalesLoft’s knowledge scattered and occasionally outdated, it existed predominantly in long-form documents, which made it hard to reference on the fly.

“Guru helped us realize that we needed to structure the way we present knowledge to enable our customer-facing teams differently. We recognize that people are looking for an answer to a pertinent question and they need to be able to get that information quickly, so we make our knowledge in Guru as sound bite-ish as possible.”

Sunshine Levin
Product Marketing Manager
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Reena and Sunshine devised a new method for documenting pieces of knowledge as Guru Cards that included pulling out abstracts and top-line insights and featuring them at the top of the Card so reps could reference key facts in real-time rather than having to scroll through long documents.

“Before Guru, I’d be like, “Here’s the document you need, good luck out there…” But now with Guru, I can distill that information in a way that’s easy for reps to consume and that makes such a difference.”

Reena Ambai
Manager, Sales Enablement
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Guru’s bite-size knowledge structure helped SalesLoft uncover a better way to share pertinent information. In addition to reformatting their knowledge, SalesLoft also credits Guru with inspiring them to double down on their treatment of competitor intel. “We actually formed a dedicated team for competitive analysis as a result of bringing our battle cards into Guru. Now we have sales enablement, product marketing, sales engineering meeting on a regular basis to make sure the battle cards are up to date and accurate," says Sunshine.

Maximizing contract value

“I knew Guru was working when a couple of weeks after we rolled it out, we started getting Slacks like: “Why isn’t this in Guru yet?” We became inundated with requests to add stuff to Guru, and that validated that it was working.”

Reena Ambai
Manager, Sales Enablement
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According to Reena and Sunshine, Guru has become part of the culture at SalesLoft.Their highest-performing reps access knowledge in Guru multiple times a day, which has cut down on shoulder-tapping and accelerated sales conversations. One of the biggest indicators of Guru’s success is adoption: “There’s a ton of information that reps could be going elsewhere to get – our website, the subject matter expert, etc. – but they go toGuru. That is meaningful for us,” said Sunshine.

Guru helps SalesLoft distill information, stay up to date on the product and competitors, and empower reps to have better conversations with customers by adding value and keeping the conversations fluid. With knowledge empowering a better buying experience, Salesloft has been able to get more out of these selling conversations, which has led to a 67% increase in average contract value since implementing Guru.

“Delays, misinformation, and confusion all undermine the trust and confidence that a prospect has in their sales person, so we avoid that completely with support from Guru.”

Sunshine Levin
Product Marketing Manager