When purchasing new software for your organization, you look for the best solution to meet your needs. An enablement platform touches many teams in your company—from sales and marketing through to your IT department. Choosing the wrong platform will not only hamper your efforts towards solving the challenges you originally sought to fix but also impact your ability to meet revenue targets.
Considering New Vendors
Despite careful and thorough vetting, it’s still possible to make the wrong decision about your enablement vendor. While making the wrong decision is hard to acknowledge, delaying a switch to the right solution only compounds pain and opportunity costs. Every day you remain with the wrong solution is another day you’re paying for negative value and racking up losses on the business outcomes you care about.
If you are still experiencing a variety of challenges – from inconsistent advisor performance to misaligned sales and marketing teams to lack of data-driven insights – you may want to consider a new vendor.
What to Look For
Selecting an enablement platform that solves your most pressing needs today – and will scale as you grow – is no small task. Look for a natively built, end-to-end platform that’s built on one experience for better ease of use, streamlined adoption, deeper insights, and a quicker return on investment. These benefits mean marketing and sales can truly align, helping to deliver and scale best practices across the organization.
Here are six areas to focus on when evaluating whether to consider a new vendor:
1. Low Adoption
One of the most important questions when implementing new software for your team is: “Will anyone use it?” Client-facing professionals can be sensitive to any changes to their existing workflows and the addition of more tools. If the tool isn’t intuitive and easy to use, your teams simply won’t use it. Consider the contributing factors to adoption when searching for a new provider. Look for a solution embedded in your CRM platform that features best-bet content and guidance for advisors and offers intuitive search and content findability. It should also feature an easy-to-use administrator interface.
2. Poor Relationship with Current Vendor
When choosing a platform, you are selecting a partner to help transform your organization. The team you partner with needs to have your back every step of the way. It’s important to ensure your investment in a vendor’s platform will be met with their investment into the relationship with you as a valued customer. Post-sale implementation is also critical for success. Is your current provider invested in your long-term success beyond implementation? Are they easy to do business with and receptive to your questions and concerns? What is available to you to ensure the success of your enablement strategy? Will the provider help you articulate your progress and results, and provide best practices for growth? Look for a provider that is always ready and willing to help, and will be a long-term business partner to your organization and remain invested in your firm’s overall success.
3. Lack of Insights Into Content Usage and Advisor Engagement
You want to know more than whether a piece of content was used. You also want to know what happened to it after and whether it contributed to winning the business. Look for a solution that can provide insights on content shared with prospects. Does your enablement platform automatically and accurately attribute content back to revenue? Do you have scorecards that provide detailed insights? Is there a facility to build sales plays to activate the content for your teams?
4. Difficulty Administering and Maintaining the Platform
Your chosen platform should minimize the time involved in migration, and streamline the experience for administrators, marketing staff, and customer-facing teams. When purchasing any software, it’s important to consider the administrative impact and whether you will need additional headcount, extensive training, and if your team will be able to find the exact content they need when they need it. Look for an administrator experience that’s the same as the end-user experience – without a separate content management tool or complex backend that admins would need to log into in order to configure their environments and do their job.
5. Poor Integration Between the Platform and Your Other Tools
Asking client-facing teams to learn a new tool with a new UI and workflow is no small task. The key to having a seamless workflow experience is making sure your enablement platform integrates with your existing tech stack to avoid the frustration and inefficiency of bouncing from software to software. Your platform should integrate with your CRM and marketing automation tools—and these integrations should go deeper than surface level. With strong partnerships and API integrations, your enablement platform should keep your client-facing teams within their normal workflow as much as possible.
6. Missed Opportunities
Especially in uncertain times, your teams need access to the most up-to-date content and messaging, and firms need the ability to distribute changing messaging across the organization quickly. Financial services firms need a platform that can help them quickly organize around new plans and pivot in real time if there are changes to organizational structures. Look for a provider that not only builds a tool that works well at one point in time but also iterates fast and is able to move their roadmap forward and deliver new features as industry needs change. It’s equally important your enablement partner delivers on product enhancements that were agreed upon at purchase.
If you’re experiencing challenges with your current enablement provider – or your sales and marketing teams are frustrated with (or not effectively using) your platform – consider other solutions that may better fit your needs. You want a tool that helps with engagement, execution, and insights that has significant advisor adoption and is positively contributing to your bottom line.
Highspot’s sales enablement platform drives the performance of marketing and client-facing teams by delivering best practices. Financial services firms like Advisor Group, Barclays, HSBC, MSCI, Nasdaq and others use Highspot to equip, train, and coach their customer-facing teams while obtaining deep analytics. Executing strategic initiatives with Highspot can increase revenue, ensure consistent advisor performance, and improve ROI.
