Selling In a Tempest

Helping supply chain partners navigate choppy waters

Céline Gouriou

e2open prides itself on value-based selling—a practice rooted in educational engagement with customers and prospects — prioritising “solving for the customer”. The e2open team needed an easy way to share new ideas with clients and educate them on the full range of e2open products and how it solved the clients’ needs.

e2open's diverse range of services is categorized by distinct "Intelligent Application Suites," such as the Logistics, Global Trade, and Supply Application Suites, with each suite requiring its own set of specialized content. 

Given the breadth, it was essential to ensure that e2open Sales teams had easy access to utilise and distribute this content, and also keep themselves upto date about e2open’s products and services.

Céline Gouriou

Realising the shortfalls of their existing methods

As a first step, the priority was to consolidate content to make it easily accessible to the entire team.

To bring all of it together, e2open undertook a comprehensive content audit. Céline and the marketing team then brought every public-facing piece of content — whether from the website or the Product Marketing content library housed on Sharepoint — onto Paperflite’s Content Hub. 

Using Paperflite's Streams the e2open team created Content Hubs
that were carefully tailored to each active sales cycle. 

With the help of auto-recommended tags, the Product Marketing team categorized the content by use case, buying stage, active sales opportunity and made it easy to find content.

Now, with content unified, the next step was sharing this content to prospects and customers.

Before Paperflite, the Sales team at e2open was sending out content as clunky attachments to emails or links within the email. This ended up resulting in scattered inboxes, misplaced files, and constant back-and-forths.

And this only got worse as the deal progressed, with different types of files being shared (proposals, comparison guides, case studies) at each stage.

Upon adopting Paperflite, the Sales reps at e2open took to Paperflite’s Collections — a microsite where they could add all the essential content in one central, easily accessible location for the buying group.

As the deal moved along, the rep would update the Collection with content relevant to the stage and support the prospect with content they might need.

Early in the buying stage, the rep would add thought leadership content, and as the conversations progressed, the rep could add product demos and meeting recordings, and once the deal had progressed to the negotiation stage, the rep would include proposals and legal documents.

The Collections have become a virtual deal room where e2open is bringing all stakeholders together in a collaborative shared space.

Bring Content Together

Personalise and Share

Measure Engagement

Enable Self Serve for Sale

Previously, when the team at e2open were sending large files via emails, they had no insight into how their prospects were engaging with this content. This resulted in multiple email follow-ups and the ever-so-famous
“Just checking in to see if you’ve had the chance to read the content I’d shared”

With Paperflite, the e2open team has been able to capture content engagement data and have eliminated a shoot-in-the-dark approach with their sales follow-ups.

“With Paperflite, everything is fully integrated, and the analytics are available on Salesforce, which is perfect for tracking performance and measuring the impact of what we're doing”

With this, e2open had brought content together, made it easy for teams to distribute content and also track and measure the impact of content. End of scene, right? Not quite..

Once the immediate content challenges were solved, e2open leveraged Paperflite to set their sales teams up for success. Here’s how they went about it:

Or the story of how a team’s futuristic thinking shaped the roadmap of a product. With insights into how content is being consumed, and engaged with, e2open Marketing team knew which content was working. 

Then, the question arose: What if we could take all the high performing content (content that has worked in previous deals) and make a template for the Sales reps. The forward-thinking team approached Paperflite with a request to allow creation of templates for the Sales teams.

This led to close collaborations between e2open and Paperflite product specialists which resulted in Paperflite Collection Templates becoming a marquee feature on the product. Once the feature was live, Celine and the team would build Templates that the Sales teams could come in and use.

Sales reps could then clone the template, add a touch of personalization on their end and share it with their prospects.

This ensured:

Global Marketing Director

Céline Gouriou

e2open‘s value-selling principle hinges on customer education and they recognised that the content had to be personalised and tailored to the client’s needs to showcase that e2open’s suite of products were the best fit. 

To set this in motion, the e2open team began identifying their target accounts with the help of an Account-Based Marketing tool (6Sense) and built out a list of accounts.

“We were using an ABM platform to identify intent-based buying signals, and we needed a solution to help us personalize and tailor content that would help us differentiate from competitors,” notes Céline Gouriou.

Once the target accounts were identified, it was about serving them with personalised, tailored content.

With Paperflite’s Collections, e2open has been able to achieve this. By personalising each element of the collection — banner image, customer logo, custom CTA, contact card — e2open has made each interaction feel highly curated to the prospect. 

And Paperflite’s AI-powered content recommendations eliminated the guesswork for sales by recommending high-performing content based on use case, buying stage and other deal parameters.

These personalised Collections were shared through unique links, further enhancing the tailored experience for each account. This has ensured that the content shared is highly relevant and personalised.

“Without any doubt, Paperflite has become one of the best ways to impact and accelerate our sales cycles”

With Paperflite, e2open has been able to solve their immediate content access and distribution needs but has also helped how the Sales Enablement strategy has evolved. 

Here’s what the winning sales strategy looks like now:

Here’s Celine with an anecdote about the autonomy:

“Paperflite is also, and above all, the platform allowing our Sales teams to run their own mini-ABM campaigns, without any marketing support. My team has created a library of collection templates for all the solutions we are selling. Sales can clone these existing templates, tailor them for their clients, and share them. This means Sales do not need to wait for a marketer to be able to support them in a Marketing-led ABM campaign, they are autonomous”. 

This way of collaborating on deals has allowed the e2open sales teams to move faster with each deal.

“We know that nowadays, the purchasing decision is not made by one or two individuals in the company, but by several people that are part of the buying group. With Paperflite’s Collections, we’ve been able to provide each persona in the buying group with relevant content, and has helped us move the deals across the pipeline”.

Upto 53% of buyers said they selected
a supplier based on the buying experience.

With Paperflite, e2open has provided that superior buying experience tailored to each of their customers, and, as a result, has stood out from their competitors. 

“Paperflite revolutionized our sales content distribution strategy. It has become the best way for Sales to share content assets with their clients. Not only does Paperflite enable us to package assets in content collections that have a nice look & feel, but also every single engagement is being tracked, which provides invaluable insight into what triggers interest for our clients.” 

While, in hindsight, it seems like a “fit like a glove” scenario, there were initial hurdles that the e2open team and the Paperflite team worked together to fix: getting teams to adopt to the new platform.

Several salespeople were skeptical about adopting to the new platform. However, as soon as they saw the platform in practice and started to see results, they were quick to embrace the change. And with continuous awareness, education and training programs, e2open has achieved broader and consistent adoption of the platform 

“Adopting a new content strategy or platform is not always easy at the beginning, but it is worth the effort, especially with a gold partner like Paperflite.

The incredible support we've received from Paperflite has guided us in the right direction. They've shown us best practices and how customers in different industries are successfully using Paperflite in their efforts. This sharing of knowledge and use cases has been instrumental in our success."

Summary