Using Confluence for Sales Support or Enablement?

Question

Hi Folks --

Are there any other marketers out there using Confluence for sales support and enablement?

I run the product marketing team at HubSpot (www.hubspot.com). Our internal wiki is a big, active Confluence installation, and we're using it for almost all of our sales enablement and support process. I'm pretty happy with the setup now, but I want to figure out how to get it to the next level.  So I'd love to swap tips on what's working and what's not -- best practices for organizing things, pluggins/add-ons that are useful, problems that have come up, etc.

Thanks,

Rick Burnes

rburnes@hubspot.com

Rick Burnes · Answer

Interesting, Sergio. What would you use the SFDC connection for? (We also use Salesforce, but find that reps are MUCH more active on Confluence than on Chatter.)

We use Confluence for all of our sales documentation. We list our resources (ppt decks and videos) there, we have a deep suite of pages documenting our product and its positioning, and the comments section on both types of pages act as an ad-hoc q&a forum for reps.

I'm curiuos about ways to share, rank and filter content for reps in confluence. I'd LOVE to have a way to publish a series of decks or sample emails, then let reps vote and comment on each one. Then they'd be able to find the best assets for their particular vertical -- most popular enterprise email templates? No problem. Most popular SMB demo deck? Also no problem. Each asset would be easy to filter for on a single page.

How have you used Confluence for sales support? Do you know of any good ways to do the kind of content filtering I'm talking about?

Sergio Storch · Answer

Hi Rick

I use Confluence for sales support as an extranet, where I publish pages that can be viewed by anonymous users. Sometimes with permissioning to specific sets of customers. They don t need to have individual logins. A collective login and password may be enough. If I want to interact with them relative to a specific content (means, it s a content-centric interaction), then I ask them to use comments on Confluence. If the interactions are related to some opportunity or pre-sale, then I call them to interact on Salesforce Chatter.

Now, although I haven t experimented yet, I believe that a great integration would be to publish Salesforce reports on a Confluence page, so that users of the reports don t need individual SF licences and can view them (and comment them) on Confluence. Does it make sense for you?

Glad to share with you and wish we can share more as we advance further in our utilization.

Sergio Storch · Answer

Hi Rick, I have also used Confluence this way, and I am very interested in co-learning with other users who use or intend to use it in conjunction with Salesforce. There are good plugins in the marketplace, but I haven t experimented with them yet.