ManpowerGroup: Accelerating sales response with QorusDocs + Highspot

As part of the Sales Enablement Soiree, Europe 2021, our CEO and co-founder, Ray Meiring, participated in a roundtable event with ManpowerGroup’s Robin Beck, Head of Bid and Pursuit, and Rebecca Croucher, SVP, Head of North America Marketing & Sales Enablement, along with Jake Braly, VP of Strategic Alliances at Highspot. The discussion explored how the North American revenue teams at ManpowerGroup are managing the challenges of high RFP volumes by accelerating the creation of high-quality, visually-compelling proposals and RFP responses from within Highspot.

Challenge: RFP volume hindering sales response speed

ManpowerGroup supports five brands across North America, handling a maximum of approximately 500 bids annually. With the volume of RFPs increasing steadily, especially during the pandemic, the workforce solutions company was looking for a way to automate and accelerate the RFP response process. “We’re such a large RFP-volume business. We needed to find a way to make a decision on whether we want to bid and then expedite the response process,” said Croucher.

Plus, the company needed to find a way to support its sales teams without relying on the bid team to create proposals for the smaller deals. ManpowerGroup wanted a self-serve platform that could fast-track proposal creation, leveraging templates and a controlled, consistent content environment.

“Given the capacity limitations of the bid team, the convenience market and the market managers were on their own with no support,” said Beck. “We provided images and static tool kits, but they needed to find the content, download it, manually update all of the client sections, strip out what they didn't need, add what was missing, and then send it out to their client—a process that could take several hours.”

Content management was also a huge issue for ManpowerGroup. The company had 39,000 pieces of content sprawled across the organization in 29 different locations, creating havoc for the team. “Content is king here. I don't think people really realize how valuable consistent content is or how much we are in constant need of reliable, up-to-date content,” noted Croucher.

Solution:

To drive automation across the RFP response process and remedy the content management issues the bid team was grappling with on a daily basis, ManpowerGroup implemented the QorusDocs proposal management solution in 2019, followed by the Highspot sales enablement platform in 2020. “QorusDocs enabled us to build consistent fields across all our content and create interactive templates to build new proposals—like using Legos to build new structures,” said Beck.

From a sales enablement perspective, Highspot gives sellers a single platform that offers a unified content experience. “Plus, Highspot has a great tool to pitch out to clients, and analytics on the backend let us know how the client reacted to the pitch,” added Beck. “Both of these software tools have really great searching capabilities, metadata, and tagging so we can drive a consistent experience across the organization.”

Self-serve proposals

Sales proposals have become an important asset within the sales cycle, especially with the rise of remote selling and the increasing size and complexity of buying committees. “The ability of reps to have the sales proposal at their fingertips is critical,” said Meiring.

How does QorusDocs, together with Highspot, help ManpowerGroup sales teams create proposals in minutes? QorusDocs integrates into the Highspot experience to create a self-serve proposal process: QorusDocs recommends the best proposal template (using data from Highspot and CRM systems), at the appropriate time in the sales cycle. The sales rep can access the template from within Highspot, without having to switch to a different environment. ManpowerGroup can pitch directly to the prospect from Highspot and track how they’re interacting with the content—which ultimately leads to more deal wins and increases the sales cycle.

Use case: Manufacturing

While the recruiting method for the ManpowerGroup brand is relatively consistent across all the industries, manufacturing clients may have additional safety concerns. “There’s a safety section that we can quickly add to the proposal from the Tool Pick List in QorusDocs. Our sales rep can be pitching a personalized proposal to a manufacturing client from within Highspot—all in less than 5 minutes,” said Beck.

“Plus, when the safety policy changes, we simply go into the master file through our QorusDocs engine and update it. If the seller runs the proposal two minutes later, they have the new safety content,” Beck added.

Looking ahead in the industry

The foundation of the B2B go-to-market tech stack is built on driving greater efficiency, initially driven through salesforce automation and CRM systems, followed by a wave of marketing automation. “But we've quickly moved into a need to not only engage with our customers and prospects more efficiently, but also to elevate the effectiveness of our processes and customer-facing interactions,” said Braly. “Effectiveness is a really high order value for a lot of organizations because, if you can move that top line, there are tremendous gains.”

“In this kind of new normal that we’re operating in, differentiation is no longer just about the products or services an organization offers,” Braly added. “It's very much about the experience that prospects and customers have with the vendor—all of the individual interactions they have as they’re evaluating the product or service, and how they’re serviced as a customer.”

Personalization of customer-facing content has also moved into the spotlight and will be increasingly vital for winning business. “Because buyers are accustomed to having generic static content thrown at them, personalization is becoming critical for keeping their attention and accelerating the purchase decision process,” noted Meiring.

Personalization is extending beyond proposals and RFP responses to other documents: presentations, case studies, white papers. By personalizing the content to the exact needs of the buyer, ManpowerGroup can bring customers into the conversation and accelerate the sales cycle.

“To achieve personalization at scale, we need the signals, the data from QorusDocs, Highspot, and CRM systems. We need to know what's important to the buyer, what they're really interested in, and what characteristics they’re looking for,” Meiring added. “These data points can really help us to drive that valuable level of personalization—which improves the efficiency of the sale and increases some of those key metrics around the sale as well.”

Going forward, adoption of automated, AI-driven technologies, such as sales enablement and proposal management, will continue to grow on a wider scale, helping companies drive consistent engagement across every customer touchpoint and ensuring efficiency, effectiveness, and personalization throughout the funnel.

Watch the full conversation between Robin, Rebecca, Jake, and Ray to learn more about how ManpowerGroup is using QorusDocs and Highspot to streamline content management and automate the RFP response process to build a scalable and predictable revenue engine.