Showpad Promises To Accelerate Account-based Selling Through Personalized 'Shared Spaces'

Showpad may have started as a way to arm sales people at conferences and events, but its latest tools are designed to extend their reach with branded microsites for specific customers and prospects.

With a North American head office in Chicago, Showpad is based on the idea of salespeople using something other than a slide presentation to walk buyers through a potential purchase. The application lets reps set up a portal with marketing content that gets recommended through a machine learning algorithm, along with analytics that can show firms things like what assets were most useful in closing a deal.

Last month Showpad made updates to the product to ensure it will be compliant with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that is coming into effect for all companies that do business with the European Union on May 25^th. Around the same time, however, Showpad also launched Shared Spaces, which will allow reps to create personalized, secured web pages to share content with B2B decision-makers that can evolve at each stage of a buyer journey.

“We noticed that we live in the subscription economy, which means there is often a longer relationship with their customers,” PJ Bouten, Showpad co-founder and CEO, told B2B News Network. “There’s a need for one place to gather information, upload and share content. There was also an increased need for collaboration in the sales process, because whenever companies are purchasing a solution now, there are likely to be at least six to seven buyers involved.”

Bouton said the idea for Showpad came at a trade show, where a friend was trying to sell artificial grass and printing a lot of paper brochures to hand out to passersby.

“Rarely do (salespeople) have a clue of who they’re giving the information to,” he said. The initial application was designed to offer more dynamic content on a mobile device like a tablet and has evolved into a more comprehensive sales enablement platform that integrates with several content relationship management (CRM) systems as well as content management platforms and messaging tools such as Gmail.

Of course, there are already several other existing tools in the enterprise for collecting files and sharing them within a team, but Bouton argues that Showpad is filling a specific void in the sales space.

“To set up a separate page in Sharepoint — sales people don’t really want to do it,” he said. “With our tools, they can do it from their smartphone in two or three swipes, and they’ll have something that includes the customer logo and information drawn from other areas of the business.”

Customers usually measure ROI for Showpad based on things like deal size and close rates, Bouten said. The company is looking at potential acquisitions and extending it reach through partnerships. The recent appointment of Don Matejko, formerly with SAP Hybris as its chief revenue officer, is another move to grow its presence globally.

“If we can offer something that gives sales people even one more customer meeting a week, that’s incredibly value to them,” Bouten said.