Rather than selling from a fixed catalog of products, PDI’s salespeople take a consultative approach to selling. They work closely with each customer to build customized solutions that address power transformation, distribution, and monitoring needs in mission-critical facilities. Other stakeholders, such as internal engineers and external third-party consultants and architects, ensure that complex solutions are implemented correctly during the sales process and that they effectively serve customer needs.

Although this customized and collaborative approach is highly successful, PDI was faced with some key challenges, including the following:

• As content was distributed via email to sales teams, the company could not track which pieces of content salespeople used in conversations or shared with prospects. Furthermore, each salesperson had to manually organize the content on their local hard drive.
• Salespeople were constantly emailing their managers to re-send content. The company’s Marketing Manager alone received 15 to 20 requests for materials per week, often from the same people.
• Sales teams had no confidence they were using the latest version of a piece of content.
• Salespeople could not provide feedback to managers regarding content corrections or suggestions. There was no standardized process or workflow for communication.
• It was frustrating and time-consuming for salespeople to access the network and search for content. External salespeople (i.e., those that worked for manufacturers and represented the company’s product offerings) could not access the network.
• Salespeople took the “path of least resistance” to get content or answers by asking application engineers, which, in turn, diminished the engineers’ productivity.

To solve these challenges, Power’s Global Product Manager Evan Owen researched and found Showpad. He and the management team then compared the solution’s capacities against their company’s needs. It didn’t take long before they agreed that Showpad was the ideal solution because:

• It helped the company to easily get the latest sales and marketing content in the hands of salespeople.
• All maintenance, updates, and upgrades were handled automatically — PDI’s employees did not have to worry about anything.
• The platform was fast and very easy to use. This allowed salespeople to reduce their administrative and clerical work and spend more time actively selling.
• The SaaS model allowed the company to scale its investment and control its budget.

Evan described the implementation of Showpad as “extremely fast,” since it only took about two months. The company’s regional sales managers were onboarded first, so they could get familiar with the platform and see its advantages. After that, all salespeople were onboarded.

Showpad’s in-depth analytics — including the number of daily sessions and the number of documents shared with customers — show that adoption continues to increase.

Since implementing Showpad, PDI continues to see improvements in several areas, including:

• Requests for managers to send/re-send content has gone from dozens a week to zero.
• Sales teams are always confident that they are using the most recent version of content.
• Sales teams are more aware of the content that is available to them. Now, they also know which presentations are successful for a product line and can repurpose these. Prior to Showpad, salespeople rarely knew which content existed and how to find it.
• Salespeople can increase customer engagement by showing video presentations on their iPad.
• Salespeople have increased their active selling time since they no longer need to search for content.
• Management has visibility into which pieces and types of content are popular among salespeople for a particular product line. These insights are allowing the company to allocate resources accordingly and improve content ROI.
• The company has reduced its printing budget and expects to see further reductions in the future.