From business offices to hospital lounges to college classrooms, Krueger International (KI) has furnished a wide range of organizations since its founding in 1941. With six manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S. and Canada, and a sales force hundreds strong operating in North America, Mexico and Europe, the Wisconsin-based company has come a long way from manufacturing basic metal folding chairs.

Yet as KI evolved, one thing has remained constant: a belief in the power of personalization. The company prides itself on providing expert advice that is customized to customers’ needs.

Without the right tools in place, a passion for personalization can come with its own headaches, according to the Manager of Sales Training and Development, Dale Griffin. “We want to be able to make our client feel that all of the content we’re presenting to them is customized to them,” Griffin says. “They don’t want to receive a generic presentation. That doesn’t help us stand out to the client. That doesn’t help us be remembered, and it doesn’t make the client feel like they’re getting optimal service from us, either.”

Unfortunately, the need for personalized presentations led to field representatives staying up all hours of the night, rushing to create PowerPoint presentations suited to prospects’ business needs. “Sometimes that led to less-than-ideal presentations,” Griffin says.

“We were looking for something that could quickly create a customized presentation that would be very easy for the rep and also give a world-class experience to the client,” remarks Griffin.

Showpad caught KI’s eye not only for its ability to support content customization, but its overall content management capabilities. Previously the company had many sources where reps could search for digital content. Not only were these sources disorganized, they often contained content that wasn’t client-approved.

“What we were able to do with Showpad was put only our best foot forward, with images and documents that were approved by our marketing team,” Griffin says. KI knew finding a solution was only part of the process. After all, it doesn’t make sense to invest in a platform no one will ultimately use.

Fortunately, Showpad’s Customer Success team quickly put the company’s mind at ease. “Showpad gave unwavering support and also suggestions on how we could improve our adoption rates throughout the process,” Griffin says. “Any questions we had, they were there to help guide us. It was very easy for us to deliver the platform to our reps in a way that they could quickly understand so they could become Showpad experts.”

Showpad Advanced Experiences empower KI to guide buyers through every kind of sales situation using a visually engaging format that differentiates it from competitors. For example, the Mapper Experience allows the company to present products and services within a visual map that matches the prospect’s own space, whether it be a factory, lab or office.

“The Mapper application has, by far, been the most widely used by our reps when directly talking to a client,” Griffin says. “For example, Mapper can demonstrate a university campus in which we’re able to show all our different applications, whether it be a residence hall, a lecture hall, a cafeteria or a classroom. This creates a very powerful visual effect for the end client and also makes us look very tech-savvy and cutting-edge as we’re presenting the information.”

And by centralizing all content in an easily accessible database, sales reps are able to customize presentations on the fly, creating Collections for prospects by mixing and matching marketing-approved content, including documents, slides, videos and HTML5 files. “We find that often a client will be asking for something — say, a very specific custom option — and we’re able to search quickly and easily through our assets to find an image the customer is looking for, as opposed to having to come back to them with it later,” Griffin says.

Griffin continues, “So while we’re talking with the client, we can compile all those images and install shots that they’re interested in, share it with them with the Collection, and they’re usually very pleased with the way that we’re able to present that to them.”

Showpad’s content capabilities are only part of the story. With Showpad analytics, KI can optimize sales and marketing strategy by understanding how salespeople and prospects interact with different pieces of content. “What it’s allowed us to do is easily recognize which pieces of content are being shared the most with our clients so we can refocus our efforts on what’s been successful, what clients are looking at and what’s being shared the most by our reps, as opposed to putting efforts into something that perhaps isn’t shared as consistently,” Griffin says.

Tracking how content affects outcomes is made easier thanks to Showpad’s technology integrations, which include Salesforce. “Showpad has worked seamlessly within [Salesforce]. So now, instead of our reps having a separate login, they’re able to work directly within Salesforce. They log into Salesforce, click on the Showpad tab and they’re in it, without having to remember another set of login credentials. Previously, we had to log into up to five different applications that may have held all our digital content,” Griffin says.

Among other things, the data in Salesforce revealed how Showpad helps shorten sales cycles. “It’s far more efficient for the reps to deliver content and move the initial sales process along more quickly,” Griffin says. “As the end user is able to share the content more quickly with people, we’re able to respond to them faster and get them the information they’re looking for.”

These results have inspired KI to expand its Showpad usage to incorporate Shared Spaces, which allows Sales reps to share all content used throughout the sales cycle with multiple stakeholders in one easy-to-navigate, fully brandable microsite.

“Many of our projects end up with multiple decision makers,” Griffin says. “So we’re looking forward to utilizing Shared Spaces so multiple end users would be able to have conversations with each other — again, hopefully speeding along that process so everybody can see the conversations going on at once.”

Showpad provides the kind of form and function KI’s designers would be proud of.