To illustrate how Showpad helps Cincinnati’s sales team, we’re going to take you through a typical day in the life of one of their salespeople. We’ll call her Jackie.

Jackie is in field sales, and as soon as she walks through the prospect’s door, the countdown begins.

She has anywhere between five and 30 minutes to make her case, impress the customer, and close the deal. The time range varies because sometimes reps end up with just five minutes of facetime with a prospect in the front lobby, even if they’ve scheduled a longer meeting. That means Jackie has to be ready to do a stellar sales presentation on the fly, sometimes without normal luxuries – like the Internet. Fortunately, Showpad works online or offline, so presenting unexpectedly in the field like this is never a problem.

After the initial presentation, Jackie needs to get into the shop, where the products she’s selling are actually being put to use. That’s when Showpad stands out even more. Jackie can look at an older piece of equipment and say, “Hey, our new Maxform Series Press Brakes will solve many of the problems I’ve seen these older press brakes run into.” Then she can play a video on her tablet and show exactly what she means as she stands next to the outdated machine.

Sales jobs today require reps to go with the flow of the conversation, especially when it goes someplace unexpected. That means they have to have a tool that offers the flexibility to pivot at any point – to pull up a piece of content they didn’t think they’d have to show, or to share valuable knowledge about product features they didn’t study up on. For CI, Showpad made that experience smooth for their salespeople, which means their reps always looked like experts in front of prospects, no matter the situation.

“Showpad allows our reps to be more proficient in how they present a product,” said Matt Garbarino, Director of Marketing Communications at CI. “You may be thinking you’re going to start slides 1, 2, and 3, but your customer really wants to see slides 10, 18, and 25, but you’re organized sequentially. Showpad lets you easily go where the conversation goes.”

Here’s a question most companies ask themselves at some point: to build in-house or not to build in-house? In 2012, CI identified a problem: reps needed a more organized, efficient way to store and share content in the field. So the company developed a home-grown mobile app that helped display more content digitally.

But resources necessary to manage the app were unsustainable. Constant requests for enhancements and content management meant they would need to hire more people to manage the process, minimizing the benefits in other cost and efficiency savings. The app also couldn’t operate on all devices, which meant reps were limited in how they could share content. Ultimately, the home-grown solution was a hinderance rather than a help — which means the answer to the question above was not to build in-house.

But now they needed to find a solution that solved their unique problems, which can also feel like a daunting task.

Before Showpad, Cincinnati never considered the concept of being able to track what happens to content after a rep shares it with a prospect. Now reps like Jackie can see exactly when a prospect opens an email, the individual slide the prospect viewed the most, and the fact that the prospect shared a video attachment with another colleague.

Showpad gave her context around when and how she should follow up, based on how the prospect interacted with the content she shared. Moreover, the marketing team can see which content sales shares the most, and which prospects interact with the most — which means they now have a more informed content strategy than they used to.

“Showpad allows our marketing department to update sales media from a central location and push that content in real-time to the sales team. They are alerted to the updates and what the updates entailed. This ensures that our sales team is always up-to-date using the current and approved marketing content,” Matt Garbarino said.