Showpad Releases Showpad Experiences

Showpad, a provider of sales enablement technologies, today launched Showpad Experiences, a presentation platform designed to help B2B sales professionals make better use of marketing materials and engage in more immersive conversations with their prospective customers.

According to Showpad, more than half of today’s B2B buyers decide to purchase from a company as a result of their experience, a factor they value above all others. Noticing this trend, the vendor has been offering integrations with Hickup, a developer of interactive sales playbooks, since 2014, and acquired the outfit in February of this year. The tool, which allows reps to easily find content on an intuitive visual setting, while taking into account data and inputs from customers, has been useful to those companies who sell complex products and services and want to deliver better information during customer interactions.

In the past year, however, “we’ve seen a huge increase in traction for the product,” says Pieterjan Bouten, cofounder and CEO of Showpad. “Our customers are becoming bigger enterprises; they’re dealing with more informed buyers, who have less time, and are way more demanding.” They require information that is harder to come by than details about product features or pricing models.

Showpad Experiences offers more than the previously available integration with Hickup, which has been used by the most successful of Showpad’s 1,000 customers, says Bouten. Before the release, marketing teams that wanted to go beyond using “static, linear content, to do something more advanced had to contact an agency, build something custom, work with developers, product managers, and designers to build guided selling playbooks,” he says. Now, users can access these capabilities within the platform, and customize via a drag-and-drop interface.

Using the platform, marketers can classify their content using three templates--Atom, Mapper, and Selector--to guide salespeople toward appropriate content for each sales call. Atom is a visual structure for organizing content, which aims to make it easier for sales reps to navigate and retrieve the materials they need in a branded environment; Selector allows users to surface the content appropriate to each prospect in real time, using criteria-based filters. With Mapper, users can demonstrate how the products and services they are offering might look in a 3-D setting familiar to the customer, including a lab, factory, or office, for instance.

Salespeople benefit from the freedom of dictating the flow of their conversations, while exercising control over the documents and materials they are using. Marketers benefit from knowing that the materials they have worked to produce, meanwhile, are being used to good effect. The buyer gets a clear visual experience, which allows them focus on the information that is contextually relevant to them.

Graham Leeson, head of communications at Fujifilm, one of the product’s early adopters, praised the platform in a statement:

“Showpad Experiences adds value to the way we engage with our customers, ultimately improving our ability to convert more business. It increases sales productivity, more deeply engages our buyers and gives marketing the power to control content.”

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