Customer Corner: How HiBob Surpassed User Engagement Goals in Crayon BEFORE LAUNCH

Bringing on competitive intelligence software is transformational for your compete program — when done right. The “when done right” caveat boils down to setting your teams up for success. Chances are, your colleagues are using several software platforms to do their jobs each and every day. So, how do you quickly achieve strong adoption for a new CI software tool?

I recently sat down with Tali Soroker, Market Intelligence Manager at HiBob to chat about how they got Crayon implemented in record time and users on the platform before day one!

Q. You just got the keys to your shiny new CI platform — what was your first priority for the project? 

Content migration was a big one, of course. One of our priorities was not only to get the content into Crayon but to completely rethink our formatting to ensure it is more easily digestible for our teams. Presentation is huge, and it’s crucial to make a strong first impression. Basically, I knew that from the first time I sent our reps to the platform, they had to see the value straight away and WANT to come back for more, otherwise I would be fighting a losing battle.

At the same time, communicating early and often is critical. I wanted to create a lot of awareness among the sales team that Crayon was coming and how it would help better enable them on competitive deals.

To that end, I started to meet with our Sales Enablement team to get their opinions and feedback on our new templates and with Sales Leadership to get their buy-in and connect with my future platform champions.

Q: How did you initially generate interest and excitement among teammates? 

The first hurdle that we had to overcome was peaking the interest of our Sales Leadership without having any concrete assets or materials to show them yet. Remember this was early days so we had only just begun to work on the reformatting of our existing content.

To get them interested and create action items from the calls, I took the opportunity to lay out my plans for a Beta launch and asked them each to nominate a few of their reps to participate. We made sure to communicate the (limited) time commitment and worked together to figure out the best timing. Basically, we avoided scheduling our Beta launch training for the end of the fiscal quarter.

For that session, we made sure to have enough content for our early adopters to get a good sense of what they can expect moving forward and provide us with feedback on the formatting and more. This created exclusivity — letting certain people in the door before everyone else — and also gave us the opportunity to let our reps be heard and make improvements before the official launch. 

Aside from getting buy-in from Sales, we really wanted to take the opportunity to engage new departments and expand our reach and impact across the company. We have a really active competitive channel on Slack and so I made sure to post to that channel about the upcoming launch with an open invitation to join the Beta. FOMO can be powerful. Those early hand raisers were really enthusiastic and they instantly became advocates for Crayon.

Q. Another way you achieved Crayon curiosity was to launch some must-needed CI collateral right away. What did you launch? 

Definitely, so we had 15 existing battlecards that all had to be updated, reformatted, and migrated to Crayon. For the Beta launch we planned to complete our top three competitors to have enough there, but that still left a big gap between the Beta users and the company-wide launch in September.

Early wins are a catalyst for change management. To further capitalize on the coming platform update, we also introduced a beautiful new newsletter designed by our Creative Services team that we send out to the entire company once a month. 

To show that the proof is in the pudding, and generate even more buzz around the launch, I shared the battlecard for our top competitor with viewing permissions for non-users. Again, we’re still not quite to the official launch yet — there’s still about 2 weeks to go. In the end, we actually had 93 unique visitors in the month before we even launched the platform. 

I knew our sales team would be eager to check out Crayon once this in demand battlecard was published. I didn’t quite expect the enthusiasm that we saw from the rest of the company. We had 140 users signed up to the platform through Okta before we even sent out the official launch announcement with instructions for how to do that. People just saw it there, after hearing so much about it, and immediately signed up. 

In the first three months, we reached 212 unique visitors with our battlecards which is double our previous audience which was from the Sales department only.

Q. It sounds like everything leading up to your launch date created a lot of noise around the new platform. How do you make sure that usage doesn't dip after all that?

To keep engagement up following the launch of the platform, I focused on two areas. The first was creating a training resource that is easy to find and accessible to everyone in the company interested in learning more.

At HiBob we have an internal learning management system. To keep the momentum going after I launched Crayon, I created a short course that covered why we use Crayon and the value of insights, where to find battlecards and how to use them, and how to send us intel from the field.

I can’t emphasize enough how effective it is to have that video in our internal learning system rather than scheduling live training sessions and then telling new employees or anyone that wasn’t free to join to watch a recording of that call. People love that session and are able to share it with their colleagues super easily.

The other way that I constantly draw attention back to the platform is by using it in just about all of my enablement sessions. So, for example, when we have an enablement session about our competitors in X region, I walk through the materials in Crayon and always add a reminder that they can come back to the battlecard(s) at any time to refresh their memory or dive deeper.

Not only does it reduce the overhead of needing to create presentations for those training sessions (and the Crayon platform has great UI/UX, so really, no need for that), it also is a constant motivation and reminder for people to revisit Crayon on their own.

Q. Anything else you would recommend to help companies get a quick start with CI software?

I think that launching a new CI platform can be such a powerful initiative for your standing in the company. And there are endless possibilities for how to approach it, taking into consideration the needs and current state of CI in your organization. 

My advice is to create a reasonable scope for what you can accomplish in the period leading up to the launch, but don’t shy away from having conversations with anyone and everyone to collect more ideas to expand in the future. For today, just get started and set yourself up as a beacon for CI. The rest will follow.

Interested in learning how other companies increase competitive intelligence adoption within their organizations? Check out a few additional Crayon Customer Corner interviews: 

• How ConnectWise Increased Global Battlecard Adoption by Centralizing CI 
• How Crayon Onboarding Empowered MiQ to Achieve 70% Battlecard Adoption