What's in it for you
Content recommendations automatically suggest the most relevant content for each sales conversation. The recommendations, which serve up materials such as videos, ebooks, whitepapers, and infographics, are based on deal data in Salesforce. Using machine learning, the recommendations become more intelligent over time. This will give your sales reps the best suggestions on how they advance each deal.
See our detailed example if you want to know how it works.
You need this to succeed
- To enable these recommendations, make sure you first configure the Salesforce instance, CORS and the Showpad for Salesforce app.
- Enable the Shared Activities via Setup, Build, Customize, Activities, Activity Settings, and enable Allow Users to Relate... option.
- Profiles need to have read access to Price Books. You can find these settings in Administer, Manage Users, Profiles. In Basic Access, enable the Read access.
Do this step by step
1. Open the Integrations on the Online Platform.
2. Create or edit an existing Instance.
3. In the last tab, enable the recommendations and select Save.
4. Add a Recommendation Rule. These rules link the tags of your assets with the Salesforce fields. That way, you can customize your machine learning engine. Your sales reps can map specific content to the corresponding staging status of their customer or prospect.
These rules link Showpad tags to Salesforce fields. When certain Salesforce criteria are met, Showpad content with the linked tag will be recommended.
For example: recommend content with the tag 'New Business' for Salesforce opportunities in stage 'Prospecting'.
Click Save when you're done editing.
5. At this point, you need to be sure that you have a Contact Role in your Salesforce Opportunities. This role makes sure your contact is assigned with an opportunity. This is necessary to make the Content Recommendations work.
If you don't have a Contact Role in your Opportunities, please create a New one.
6. Content recommendations are only available in your Opportunities. Your sales reps can choose from the available list.
7. When you first start using Content Recommendations, your users will notice that content is not available yet. 
8. If you create your Recommendation Rules, attaching content tags to the correct fields, content will start to show up for your sales colleagues.
9. The Popular Content view shows the popularity of the content, together with the number of times it has been shared.
More information about how it works for your sales reps is available here.
Detailed example
To clarify how Content Recommendations work, we'll use an example to show you how relevant content will be displayed for any given opportunity.
Let's say, you go to Salesforce and see an opportunity that is in 'Stage 1'. The industry of this opportunity is 'Medical Devices'. In this case, Showpad will recommend content that has been tagged as:
- Stage 1 only
- Stage 1, Stage 2
- Stage 1, Stage 2, Medical Devices
- Stage 1, Stage 2, Medical Devices, Construction
In all of the above cases, Showpad matches the tag on the asset with the corresponding field in Salesforce. If no match is found, then there shouldn't be a tag on the asset that conflicts with the field in Salesforce.
Showpad will not show you files that are tagged as:
- Stage 1, Construction
(Why? Per the tag, this file is valid only for construction, and the industry on the Salesforce opportunity is Medical Devices, so this file would make no sense to a 'Medical Devices' customer) - Stage 2, Medical Devices
(Why? The file is valid only for Stage 2, and the Salesforce Opportunity is 'Stage 1' and so wouldn't be valid for a Medical Devices customer since they are past stage 1 and already in stage 2.
After all of these rules, the final filter that is applied is the user access filter. The person viewing the opportunity in Salesforce should have access to the assets in Showpad that are being recommended. So, even if the recommendation engine finds assets to recommend based on the rules above, they will not be shown if that user does not have access to those assets.
As an administrator, when tagging assets on Showpad's Online Platform, you just need to think: Where should all these files appear?
- If the file should be recommended for all opportunity stages, then attach all the opportunity stage tags to the file.
- If the file should be recommended for only specific opportunity stages, then attach only the tags for those opportunity stages.