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“Sending out inaccurate information could quite literally lose us a customer, or harm an important relationship. It’s really important for reps to know what content is verified and up-to-date. This is easy to do in Guru.”

David Aronica
Director of Business Development
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Splash is an end-to-end event marketing solution that empowers companies to execute beautifully branded events while maximizing ROI. As the company grew, Splash identified a knowledge problem that was making it difficult for its sales team to quickly find the right resources they needed to close deals effectively. On top of that, sales reps couldn’t trust that resources were up-to-date, accurate, and on-brand before sharing them with prospects.

Splash’s marketing team was producing great content, but they lacked a centralized, verifiable place for the sales team to locate and leverage it. As they began ramping up their go-to-market strategy, the need grew for a knowledge management solution that would empower the sales team. Enter Guru.

What began as an initiative to support sales with the right marketing assets quickly evolved into a wider knowledge initiative. Guru spread across Splash’s departments, and the team’s definition of ‘knowledge’ expanded with it. Instead of taking the view that marketing collateral was the only knowledge the sales team needed to succeed, Guru helped broaden Splash’s horizons and brought insights from across the organization under the sales team’s knowledge umbrella.  

But let’s start at the beginning.

Laying the groundwork

When Esther Chung, director of content marketing, joined Splash, marketing was a relatively new team. “Before we had a marketing team, a lot of people who weren’t technically marketing were creating their own collateral,” said Esther.

“This lead to an inconsistency in branding and accuracy. A lot of the collateral floating around existed in several different outdated versions, and reps had to physically tap our shoulders to ask if the one sheet they were leveraging was up-to-date.”

By the spring of 2018, Splash’s knowledge was spread across Google Drive, Confluence, Slack, and individual computers. Their knowledge dilemma was compounded by constant product development and innovation; new features and functionality were being released regularly, which caused materials to become outdated quickly. Reps weren’t confident which knowledge was up-to-date, and the thought of them sending inaccurate, outdated knowledge to prospects snapped Splash’s marketing team into action. To help the sales team execute and close deals faster, they decided to roll out Guru. Marketing was drawn to the trust in knowledge accuracy that Guru provides and were eager to dig into analytics around the knowledge they were creating.

Splash’s marketing team began migrating their knowledge into Guru with a goal of establishing a single source of truth for sales. They recognized the need to equip their sales counterparts with the right knowledge to help them close deals. “When we showed Guru to the sales team, their jaws dropped,” said Esther. “They said, ‘This is game-changing, we want this now.’ Before we even sent the invites, people were trying to sign on.”

Optimizing the knowledge marketing worked so hard to create empowered the sales team to communicate more effectively about Splash. And, according to Esther, migrating their knowledge was a rewarding process. “We’ve heard such resounding positivity. We rolled out Guru and people were constantly thanking us for helping them. They saw the value for themselves immediately.” Now, when marketing releases content, the first question they get is “Is it in Guru yet?”

“Everyone here loves Guru,” Esther continued, “especially the sales team.”

Empowering the sales team with the right knowledge

When the sales team finally got their hands on Guru, the effects were immediate. Processes that used to be painful were simplified. Alec Rogers, Business Development Manager, joined Splash pre-Guru, and does not miss the old days of inefficient searching for up-to-date knowledge.‍

“Before Guru, it took a lot of time to locate content we already had,” said Alec.

“If I needed information for a prospect, I’d spend so much time looking through emails, Google Drive, and Slack, that eventually I would just use whatever I had on hand. We had great content, but we weren’t getting the maximum value from it.”

The sales team was wasting time searching for information that they could have spent engaging with prospects. Guru fixed that by overlaying the applications they used every day and networking their collective knowledge. “With Guru, if I’m responding to a prospect’s email, I can find a relevant testimonial or other resource in Guru within seconds, without even leaving my inbox,” said Alec.

The speed at which Splash’s sales team can access information on the fly has enabled faster onboarding and empowered reps to have more meaningful conversations with prospects. Alec used Guru to extend the sales team’s knowledge base beyond marketing assets by setting up step-by-step instructions on common internal processes that reps can reference on-demand.

Empowering his team to find their own answers to questions builds confidence and helps them ramp up faster. It also gives Alec back the time he previously spent responding to shoulder taps so he can focus on more meaningful work, like driving revenue.

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Inspiring confidence and independence

Empowering new reps to operate confidently is a core value of Splash’s sales team. “We try to enable our reps to be as autonomous as possible, and Guru is key to this,” said David Aronica, Director of Business Development.

“Because Guru is so easy to use — especially with the browser extension and Slack integration — there’s no room for excuses anymore. If a rep has a question, the answer is almost always ‘Check Guru.’ It’s really enabled a high level of independence and autonomy.”

David Aronica
Director of Business Development
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This confidence stems from being able to trust that the knowledge they’re sending is accurate. By providing visibility into when a piece of knowledge was last verified and by whom, Guru mitigates the risks associated with uncertainty around knowledge recency.

“Sending out inaccurate information could quite literally lose us a customer,” said David. “It’s really important for reps to know which knowledge is verified and up-to-date, so they know what’s safe to share with prospects. This is super easy to do in Guru.”

David Aronica
Director of Business Development
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Trust in knowledge has led to extremely high adoption of Guru amongst Splash’s sales team. Whether through the browser extension or the Slack integration, Alec says Splash reps use Guru “all day.” And their newfound empowerment from knowledge accuracy did not go unnoticed by other teams.

To infinity and beyond

Today, Splash’s marketing, sales, customer success, support, and product teams all use Guru. The number of Splash users doubled in the first six months, and 42% of the employees with Guru access use it every day, compared to 10-20% adoption rate for most software solutions.

Originally implemented by marketing to empower sales, Guru has created a cross-functional knowledge network at Splash that enables multiple teams to leverage internal knowledge to work more confidently and efficiently. To Splash’s sales team, the knowledge they need to do their jobs now includes marketing assets, product documentation, internal processes, and more. And teams like support, which already has over 650 cards saved in Guru, are also reaping the benefits of having an integrated knowledge network. Guru helped Splash harness its teams’ own potential and facilitated trust in knowledge, high autonomy, and increased efficiency.

But statistics only tell part of the success story. At the end of the day, how do Splash’s employees feel about being empowered by their knowledge network? Esther said it best: “We all love Guru. We really do.”