Why you should survey your users - Benefits

Showpad's mission is to bridge the gap between sales and marketing to help sellers sell the way buyers want to buy.  However, to accomplish this mission, we need buy in from the sales reps who are supposed to be using the tool! The first step here is communication - you'll need to get in touch with your sales reps who are notoriously hard to get a hold of and even harder to get feedback from. Surveys are a quick and useful way to gather information!

It's quite likely that you purchased Showpad for at least one of the below reasons:

• To save sales reps time in preparing for meetings
• To save reps time in creating and searching for presentations
• Uplevel confidence levels when selling complex products
• Increase confidence in selling cross-sell products
• Improve your content

The goal is to have a baseline idea of how you're currently scoring against these goals and to measure progress on these after a certain period of time. On top of that, once Showpad has been rolled out you'll want to add in additional questions about the tool and general feedback.

When you’re surveying your sales users, keep these tips in mind:

• Include open-ended questions to ask what reps like most and least about Showpad and why
• Send out reminders, so sales reps can answer them whenever they have time
• Frame it in a way so it’s clear why you’re doing it (ex: to make their lives easier!)
• Use their feedback to summarize a current “state of the union”

After surveying your users, you'll be able to establish a baseline of the sentiment among the sales team to poll the impact Showpad is having on what you want to achieve. What do they currently think of the existing content? How easy is it to find? How much time do they currently spend on preparing for meetings?

You may  find some surprising insights into how sales reps actually work, what's important to them, and how you can support them. You might discover another training should be organized, or that a key piece of content is missing.

Measuring in a quantative way will help you make better decisions and it will also make it easier to present how you or your team is performing to leadership.

For sample questions and more information on surveying users, read here.