Everyone deserves a cup of coffee they love: that’s a fundamental principle at Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE) Professional, a maker of coffee, tea, and coffee machines. The company, located throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, serves a global customer base with different needs and expectations.

In each case, the buying experience needed to demonstrate the company’s commitment to providing a coffee or tea solution that is a “perfect fit” for the customer. In particular, JDE Professional needed a mobile selling solution that could tailor messaging based on the demands in each customer’s particular market. But the company was still operating with paper documents that became obsolete quickly, were often out of stock, or were just too cumbersome to access and distribute.

JDE Professional partnered with Showpad to deliver an interactive buyer experience. The company uses Showpad to organize digital content, making it easier for sellers to immediately access material so they can instead spend time creating solutions for their buyers. The results were swift: Since working with Showpad, JDE Professional’s print costs fell 71% in the first year and an additional 54% the second year. Eighty percent of its salesforce became day-to-day users in the first year.

“Showpad was much more of a fit for our needs,” explained Bob De Rydt, Marketing Manager for Professional Solutions. “It was the first software we used that had no hidden surprises.”

Showpad first appeared on the tablets of more than 30 account managers, delivering content like videos and podcasts that go beyond static marketing assets such as brochures or PDFs. JDE Professional now had the ability to instantly package and send targeted marketing content to customers. They can now track views and gain visibility into the right moment in to follow up, which is particularly valuable in long sales cycles.

Showpad further enhanced the JDE Professional buyer experience the following ways:

Advanced Experience

With Showpad Advanced Experience templates, users can create immersive and interactive experiences for the buyer by quickly building and maintaining mind maps, visual maps, or content selectors without any coding experience required.

“Our customers want us to listen and understand both current and future business needs,” De Rydt said. “With Showpad Experiences, they can see we are doing that.”

By incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities, Showpad Experiences bring an unprecedented level of engagement to the buying experience because it allows customers to be more actively involved in the sales conversation. For example, a customer can select the factors most important to them — quality, taste, and speed of delivery — talking points that then guide the sales conversation.

As a result, JDE Professional’s Marketing team can add and edit elements of the template-based Experiences. The custom Experience, therefore, creates a “virtual” machine — at actual size and viewable in 3-D — in the customer’s work space.

“Today, how you tell your story is extremely important in building trust with customers,” explains Dieter Jaspers, Head of Digital Experience for BBC Creative, JDE Professional’s creative agency. “Showpad Experiences helps JDE Professional create a powerful emotional bond with customers.”

Analytics reporting

Analytics is one of the key components that Showpad offers. Not only can users track in real time which content is being used, and at what frequency, but Showpad also gives users the ability to measure the performance of its salespeople.

“From an analyst perspective, it’s really given me a lot of more data to measure my customer journey,” De Rydt said.

Because of Showpad’s intuitive interface, JDE Professional’s salespeople had few problems jumping into it and turning around results fast.

“From day one, all our sales people were using it,” De Rydt said “It’s the first thing our new salespeople get — even before their computer — so they can already start spending time with the material. It helps in the onboarding of sales. It’s been the best sales tool we’ve used in a long time.”

The rapid adoption rate helped sales create content they hadn’t considered before, such as video.

“Now we can add them in the sales conversations,” De Rydt said. “Basically, it’s selling itself.”

In little time, JDE Professional has strengthened the buying experience through Showpad. Buyers are now engaged in conversations that speak to their individual market and needs.

“Our customers want us to listen,” De Rydt said. “With Showpad, they can see that we are doing exactly that.”