How SmartRecruiters Aligns Their Sales and Marketing Efforts With Digital Sales Rooms

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SmartRecruiters is on a mission to revolutionize the talent acquisition and hiring industry, which has mostly relied on out-of-date tools that make the recruiting process less efficient than it should be.

“Today, a lot of recruiters use clunky, hard-to-use applicant tracking software [that] makes hiring harder than it needs to be,” explains Caitlin Brannan, the revenue enablement director for SmartRecruiters.

SmartRecruiters stepped in to fill that gap with a tool that focuses on ease of use, efficiency, and flexibility so it can help any company achieve hiring success.

Now trusted by over 5,000 businesses worldwide, SmartRecruiters’s all-in-one hiring platform helps staffing teams source high-quality talent, personalize the candidate experience, and streamline the selection process to fill their openings with the best candidates available.

Overcoming Misalignment and Low Visibility in Sales Execution

Sales execution requires seamless collaboration between teams – something SmartRecruiters was having a hard time achieving with their previous sales process and software. 

Their marketing and sales divisions weren’t effectively aligned, which created a disconnect between the content standards and messaging shared by marketers and sales representatives. As a result, sales reps would sometimes share ineffective or outdated content with prospects and customers, leading to inconsistent sales execution that lowered engagement and led to low win rates.

SmartRecruiters also didn’t have a centralized sales environment, which meant team leads couldn’t easily monitor the content that sales reps shared. Without this insight, it became difficult to ensure they were using the right assets and provide additional guidance and resources as needed, reducing reps’ ability to engage prospects and close deals consistently.

Finally, between low visibility and a lack of sales execution standardization, the team at SmartRecruiters couldn’t gain any insight into what content and strategies were working and which had little impact. Without this data, they couldn’t refine their sales content to engage prospects better and satisfy buyer intentions.

Using SalesHood’s Digital Sales Rooms to Enhance Service Delivery

SmartRecruiters knew they needed to standardize how they engaged prospects and buyers throughout the sales process, including collecting insights and data to help them monitor asset performance.

They decided on SalesHood’s Sales Enablement Platform, specifically Client Sites, because they allow their team to control the content, monitor seller interactions, and track the performance of individual content through buyer insights and sentiment.

Client Sites act as digital sales rooms where businesses can create a page specifically for a prospect or customer. Team leads can develop templates that sales reps build on top of, saving time and helping to standardize the sales process and better engage prospects. Plus, they track engagement to provide insight into what prospects are responding to most.

How SmartRecruiters Started Using Digital Sales Rooms

Shelby Powell, a revenue enablement manager at SmartRecruiters, took the lead on the project. She began by enlisting a small group of enthusiastic sales reps to help test the idea. The goal was to increase deal velocity, win rates, and forecasting accuracy–and they did.

After some quick training and best practices tips from Dana Granard, SalesHood’s customer success manager, Shelby and her team created their first template. It included tabs to help organize content for easy access and contained all of the most up-to-date content and critical assets that weren’t often used by reps– and it was a great success.

In addition to these base pieces of content, sellers created and added their own content to the site. They would include targeted content based on conversations they had with the prospect, like pricing information or answers to specific questions, and add follow-up content like mini demos and call recordings they conducted so it was easily accessible, helping to remove friction from the sales process.

Over time, word spread, and other reps who heard about the success of the demo became excited to try it themselves. After a short while, it was so popular that it became a staple of their sales execution. “It’s been such a refreshing experience to have people genuinely excited about a tool,” said Caitlin.

And it’s not just the sales reps that love it; prospects and customers do, too. According to Shelby, “One prospect we were using [Client Sites] with was so excited to see something like this because… nobody had given them something like this. When they were trying to find an asset we shared or a call recording… with the Client Site, they could just go in and find it.”

The Impact of Digital Sales Rooms on SmartRecruiters

SmartRecruiters were looking for a way to address a lack of content control and engagement information, which Digital Sales Rooms matched perfectly.

• Adding a dedicated folder for Digital Sales Rooms that holds up-to-date content and resources helped address outdated information
• Templates resolved content control by ensuring critical information was included by default
• Team leads can monitor different sites to evaluate performance and provide assistance as needed
• Engagement tracking allows them to monitor how prospects interact with different content as a way to determine which assets are most effective so they can refine their sales approach.

Resolving these problems led to a:

• 15% increase in deal velocity
• 400% increase in deal size
• 2x increase in win rates

They could also use engagement data to forecast whether a deal would be won or lost.

“Our reps have been able to qualify out sooner than they would have, so they’re spending their time much more efficiently. Knowing where to spend their time is huge, so they’re not wasting time on deals that have no chance,” explains Caitlin. “On average, deals that we have won with Client Sites have 10x the level of engagement of deals we’ve lost.”

Looking Forward: The Future of Digital Sales Rooms for SmartRecruiters

SmartRecruiters has seen that Digital Sales Rooms have a significant impact on their deal success–of their last 17 deals, 100% of those using Digital Sales Rooms were won– and they don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

As time goes on, SmartRecruiters hopes to find new ways to use Digital Sales Rooms. They’ve recently begun adding Digital Sales Rooms to their email marketing campaigns by creating a private site for different verticals they’re targeting, allowing them to qualify leads at scale based on engagement.

They also plan to constantly adapt their templates, refine their sales execution, and take advantage of each new update and release that comes out, like the recent AI assistant that helps transcribe calls and videos to make Digital Sales Room assets even more accessible.