How Hootsuite Boosted Revenue From Active Users by 70%

As leading social media platform Hootsuite grew rapidly, boosting the productivity of new and existing reps became key. Hootsuite’s global sales enablement manager, Shamis Thomson, started to solve the problem of achieving faster seller success by assessing the effectiveness of Hootsuite’s existing sales tools and resources. Digging into analytics within Highspot, its enablement platform, Thomson discovered something fascinating: Highspot could help his team look at the extent to which reps were engaging with training and selling resources and correlate with their sales performance.

The Road to Revenue is Paved With Content and Training

Onboarding sets the precedent for new rep performance. But often, reps are expected to learn as they go. With training content spread across multiple systems, reps did not have a smooth journey for getting up to speed to starts selling, which slowed their ramp-to-revenue. Further, without engagement analytics, sales trainers lacked visibility into where the program was falling short and struggled to prioritize areas for improvement that could accelerate their sellers’ ability to close revenue faster.

Similarly, reps need context alongside content to sell effectively. Most importantly, they need guidance on when and where to use specific content, and the ability to access it at the point of action. Though Hootsuite stored sales content within Highspot, these assets weren’t organized to support continuous, micro-learning experiences. This left reps struggling to engage modern buyers, and performance gains were inconsistent.

Finally, sales and enablement managers at Hootsuite knew reps required coaching to succeed, but didn’t know which reps needed it most. With limited time and resources, busy leaders needed a way to identify struggling sellers and intervene before a lack of coaching hindered performance.

Hootsuite Expands Beyond Original Highspot Use Case

Though he didn’t know it at the time, Thomson began his journey to world-class onboarding years earlier when he needed an easily searchable sales content management system. Highspot fit the bill and became an immediate success — quickly achieving 90% adoption among primary users.

As Hootsuite grew and accelerating ramp-to-revenue became a top priority, Thomson naturally began exploring Highspot data to understand rep activity patterns. Highspot’s analytics showed Thomson that the more reps engaged with Highspot, the better they performed. Soon, the answer to Hootsuite’s onboarding and training problems was clear. Hootsuite could use Highspot as acentral hub for all learning content to ramp sellers faster, more effectively, and with greater predictability.

Reps who accessed more content on any given subject within Highspot closed on average 4x more associated revenue than their peers.

Self-Guided Learning Modules and Focused Content Drive Revenue

First, Hootsuite organized onboarding assets via dynamic, comprehensive hubs using Highspot SmartPages™. Guided learning with role-specific experiences made training easier to find and consume. Unsurprisingly, reps were suddenly engaging with more content than ever. As Thomson expected, content consumption directly impacted performance: soon the most engaged Highspot users among newly ramped hires were performing the same or better thantenured peers with more experience.

Just-in-time training created the immersive learning experience reps need to keep knowledge at hand and close deals. By using Highspot to provide micro-training alongside content, reps not only quickly found the right assets, but also had guidance on how to use them effectively. In fact, Hootsuite saw an averageincrease of 60% in closed-won revenue across all groups of sellers for reps who increased their use of Highspot each quarter.

Hootsuite’s sales enablement team used the strong correlation between Highspot usage and performance to help sales leaders predict which reps will struggle based on how often they use Highspot, and by proxy, training and selling materials. This gave sales leadership enough information to effectively allocate time and resources — and ensured struggling reps got the coaching they needed to improve.

Hootsuite embraced modern onboarding and continuous training to unlock predictable, consistent performance for both new and tenured reps. Empowered by learning from the day they onboard to every deal after, Hootsuite reps are moreeffective than ever before.