How TIS’s Sales team used content to their advantage with Paperflite while dealing with complex buying cycles

October 21.2021 5 minutes

Company: Treasury Intelligence Solution (TIS)

Industry: Cloud-based platform for outbound payments

Founded: 2010

Markus Holzmüller, VP of Sales at TIS, joined us to reveal how Paperflite and Cleverstory (Paperflite's no-code product to help create interactive content experiences) helped their Sales team:

Organize and manage all Sales content according to different stakeholders
Ensure everybody involved in the complex buying centre had access to the latest information at all times
Make a good first impression on prospects
Personalize the content for each prospect

The challenge

The sales cycles at TIS are quite long and include a lot of people. And during the sales cycle, it’s always tough to make sure that everyone involved has all the material at hand and has access to the latest version. The Sales team wanted to ensure that their prospects don’t go hunting for a specific white paper or a video.

“My goal was to have everything in one place and make it as easy as possible to do business with us,” said Markus.

how TIS used Paperflite to organise and use content in complex buying cycles

Solutions considered and why Paperflite was chosen

Markus revealed that TIS looked into two American and Canadian companies before choosing Paperflite. Even though Markus was unsure about the time zone differences that came with dealing with Paperflite, here’s what convinced them:

“Your sales guy, I still remember this one sentence he dropped. He was like, ‘We can't afford to let you down. And we can't afford to offer bad service’ and this literally was putting me over the edge. This sentence in combination with the flexible contractual conditions which you offer was great and made us choose you”

Internal buy-in for Paperflite

Once Markus and his team decided to go with Paperflite, they had to get the internal buy-in at TIS.

“The fact that you had this short commitment period made it quite easy to get the internal buy-in. It took me one phone call to our CEO to explain what you were offering, how that’ll hopefully help us to win some more deals and cut the sales cycles a bit. He was immediately convinced and that’s when we decided to go ahead with Paperflite”.

How Paperflite's short commitment period helped TIS get internal buy-in

Implementation of Paperflite

“It was a good exercise for us to organise all the marketing content we had and sort out the ones that weren’t relevant anymore. But as the VP of Sales, I was even more interested in the Sales pieces. We have around 20-30 main content pieces for our sales process.

With Cleverstory, we were able to structure our Sales landing page (that we internally refer to as the Sales portal). Since we have a variety of categories, we structured the page based on the different stakeholders we’d interact with.

TIS used Paperflite and Cleverstory to organise content for various stakeholders in their complex buying cycle

So if you are a legal person involved in one of our deals, you just go to Cleverstory and hit the legal button. You’ll then see your NDA, a statement of work, and the general terms and conditions service level agreements, that kind of stuff. Whereas if you are in IT security, you’ll be able to see all the certificates and the integration information”.

After using Paperflite, TIS received great feedback from customers on how easy it is to make information available - a case study

Internal feedback for Paperflite

A case study on how TIS's Sales team is able to easily create personalized content pages for customers using Paperflite

After discovery calls, the Sales team at TIS is able to create personalized sales portals in place for each customer. And as the prospect moves forward in the buying journey, for instance after someone signs an NDA, the team shares additional information.

“We also like that we can make the contact details always available in one corner. So even if someone was never involved in the project and just got this link forwarded from someone, they could easily hit the chat directly button or the email button or just give the salesperson a call”.

Results seen with Paperflite

“I guess we would have closed the deals we wanted as well without Paperflite. But I think the whole conversation was smoother because whenever we wanted to know if we shared a specific piece of content with a customer or not, we could always log into Cleverstory and check it.

And when there was a new version of a content document, it was as simple as updating this version, publishing it, and sending the customer champion an update about it.

Paperflite helped TIS has smoother conversations with their customer champion - a case study

For smaller deals, we had buying centres of five people. But in bigger accounts, we have up to 30 people in the buying centre. Making sure that all 30 of them had the right information available always can get tough and that's where Cleverstory helps us a lot”

a case study on how TIS's Sales team was able to convince prospects in bigger accounts using Paperflite's Cleverstory

What do you like about Paperflite?

A case study on how TIS's Sales team uses content to their advantage in complex buying cycles using Paperflite

“I once heard from a study that 70% of people go for the vendor with whom it's easiest to do business. I don't know if it's true but even if it's only 50% going for the easiest solution, a solution like yours can help because it really makes it easy to do business because you find all information that is necessary.

It also looks nice, it's well organized, you can download and easily share. So, these were the reasons I need this kind of marketing platform for my team”.

The performance is flawless and we’ve never had any issue where stuff wasn't fast. I also like this video embedding functionality because it allows us to share confidential videos in a secure way. Earlier, we used to upload it on non-indexed Youtube channels.

A case study on how TIS's Sales team used content to their advantage in complex buying cycles using Paperflite

I’d recommend Paperflite especially to those companies who deal with complex buying centres. If it's only one or two contact persons I would say, you can simply have a OneDrive or whatever. But the more complex the buying centre, the better you must be able to share information easily.

Also, if you have similar information you're sharing all the time. In our case, it's certificates, contract templates, and videos about the platform. The more repetitive the stuff you're sharing, the better it is.

And in general, I think, for everyone who wants to make a good first impression because it's really nice to have a customized link that’s also password-protected so you can share confidential information securely. So I would say this first impression, if this is important for your business, then Paperflite is really a good solution!"