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. Users will find recommended content in Accounts, Leads, Contacts, or Opportunities.
You need this to succeed
- Admin privileges on both the Showpad and Salesforce platforms
- Showpad Ultimate plan
- Salesforce Enterprise or Unlimited plan
Select your Salesforce Experience
 Classic |
 Lightning |
See how it's done on Salesforce Classic
- To enable these recommendations, make sure you first configure the Salesforce instance, CORS and the Showpad for Salesforce app. There are some settings in your Salesforce instance that must be configured a certain way in order for the integration to work.
- Enable the Shared Activities by navigating to the Activity Settings via Setup, Build, Customize, Activities, Activity Settings. Enable the Allow Users to Relate... option.
- Profiles need to have read access to Price Books in order for the recommended content to be available once the connection is configured. You can find these settings under Administer, Manage Users, Profiles. In Basic Access, enable the Read access for Price Books.
See how it's done on Salesforce Lightning
- To enable these recommendations, make sure you first configure the Salesforce instance, CORS and the Showpad for Salesforce app. There are some settings in your Salesforce instance that must be configured a certain way in order for the integration to work.
- Enable the Shared Activities by navigating to the Activity Settings via Feature Settings, Sales, Activity Settings. Enable the Allow Users to Relate... option.
- Profiles need to have read access to Price Books in order for the recommended content to be available once the connection is configured. You can find these settings by seleting the Gear icon, Setup, Security, Sharing Settings. Choose Price Book in the selection box labeled 'Manage sharing settings for:' and set the default access levels to Use.
Do this step by step
- Click the settings gear in the Online Platform and select Integrations.
- Create or edit an existing Instance in the CRM tab.
- Click the Recommendations tab. Select where you want to see the recommendations in Salesforce by checking Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and/or Opportunities.
- To select which categories of recommendations users will see in Salesforce, click Advanced. Uncheck the categories you wish to hide. You will see the following options:
- Files to Share: Recommended content which is tagged as Shareable
- Popular Content: Most popular content that user has access to
- Internal Files: Recommended content which is tagged as Internal-Only
- To add a Recommendation Rule, click Add Rule. These rules link the tags of your assets with the Salesforce fields. When certain Salesforce criteria are met, Showpad content with the linked tag will be recommended. That way, you can customize your machine learning engine.
- Click the Select object field and choose Account, Contact, Lead or Opportunity from the drop-down menu. Next click the Select field and choose an option from the drop-down menu. Add the corresponding tags for which you'd like to recommend content. Click Save when you're done editing.
For example: Recommend content with the tag ‘Med’ for Salesforce Accounts when the Industry is ‘Healthcare’.
Note: Recommendation Rules can only be based on existing picklist fields. If not available, create a custom picklist field in Salesforce, so this custom picklist also shows up as an option in Showpad.
- For recommendations to work with opportunities, you need to be sure that you have a Contact Role in your Salesforce opportunity. This role makes sure your contact is assigned with an opportunity. If you don't have a Contact Role in your Opportunities, please create a New one.
Note: When you first start using Content Recommendations, your users will notice that content is not available yet.
- If you create your Recommendation Rules and attach content tags to the correct fields, content will start to show up for your sales colleagues in the various places you selected.
- 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. - The Learn from These Files tab in the Showpad app in Salesforce shows internal content. This internal content is based on the Cannot Be Shared property of the assets in your Content Library on the Showpad Online platform.
Note: Results for Content Recommendations are always limited to 20 assets. This rule may, or may not, also affect the results under the Learn From These Files tab.
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.
