Brooksource is a trusted partner for technology staffing and consulting services. They provide solutions ranging from contingent labor to professional services and workforce transformation. With a growing national presence, Brooksource is working to redefine what to expect from an IT services provider. Founded in 2000, Brooksource employs a national team of recruiters operating out of 27 offices nationwide.
Brooksource employs nearly two-hundred full-cycle sales reps to provide IT staffing services in 30 different markets across the United States. Sales leadership had initially implemented a sales engagement solution to make their reps more productive and effective, but they quickly got feedback from the field that the tool was difficult to use and offered little value.
The reps who did figure out how to use the tool were frustrated by their inability to customize it for different accounts or to effectively respond to a changing sales environment. Because of the low adoption and limited reporting, management didn’t have the visibility they needed to understand rep performance and deliver effective sales coaching.
On the sales ops side, the solution didn’t integrate with Microsoft Outlook or talk well with Salesforce. It quickly became clear that Brooksource needed to find another solution.
“Our previous sales engagement platform wasn’t intuitive or flexible,” said Mitch Thomas, Sales Enablement Manager at Brooksource. “Reps didn’t see the value in it, and their inability to customize messages made them feel like robots.”
To overcome these challenges, Brooksource began evaluating the top three sales engagement providers. Groove stood out as the only solution that offered the ease-of-use, flexibility, and relationship-building features Brooksource needed to support its full-cycle sellers.
“A lot of the other tools we looked at were chocked full of features for BDRs, which didn’t fit our needs,” said Mitch.
Groove had the formula we were looking for and the roadmap that aligned with where we wanted to go.
Mitch Thomas, Sales Enablement Manager, Brooksource
Brooksource had never achieved more than 74% adoption of its previous platform. Since rolling out Groove, Brooksource has achieved 98% adoption across all of its reps nationwide. They also started getting positive feedback from the field right away.
“From day one, our reps saw how intuitive the platform was, how much time it was going to save them, and how it would make them more effective at their jobs,” said Mitch. “Our reps love using Groove, and that’s one of the most important aspects of sales tech. It doesn’t matter how much value leadership sees in the tool, if the reps don’t ultimately love it, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle.”
Groove wasn’t just easy to use, it also easily fit into Brooksource’s reps workflows. Groove’s Microsoft Outlook integration went beyond auto-logging emails; it enabled them to easily access and update relevant Salesforce records right from where their reps spent most of their time – the inbox.
Collaboration and visibility is key for an organization with a large and distributed sales team. Before Groove, Brooksource’s reps were collaborating over email and taking ad hoc notes without any structure behind it. Now, Brooksource is using Groove Spaces to collaborate on account lists and opportunities to accelerate deal cycles, close more revenue, and coach reps more effectively.
“Groove Spaces has become a central coaching hub,” said Mitch.
Brooksource is also using Groove to overcome another challenge: understanding how its reps are performing. Groove has given Brooksource’s sales leaders the visibility they need to effectively manage and optimize the performance of their teams.
“Before Groove, we could tell who was using the tool, but we didn’t have any meaningful analytics to tell us what was going on in the field,” said Mitch. “One of the most exciting Groove features for me is being able to see how our Flows and templates are performing.”
We now have a 360-view of all the deals that reps are chasing, and sales leaders can now coach and assign tasks right out of Spaces so nothing gets missed.
Mitch Thomas, Sales Enablement Manager, Brooksource
Groove has also played a major role in helping Brooksource achieve alignment between its sales and marketing teams. Brooksource is now able to roll out approved marketing messaging across a variety of Flows and templates, while still giving reps the flexibility to personalize them for each opportunity.
“Being able to put messaging into Flows and templates, immediately arm my reps with them, and then immediately see the performance of those has been a huge game-changer for us,” said Mitch.
Groove really helps us connect our sales strategy with execution, which is not always easy to do in a fast-moving, high-energy organization.
Mitch Thomas, Sales Enablement Manager, Brooksource
All of the challenges Brooksource has been able to overcome with Groove has enabled them to achieve an impressive array of measurable results, including a significant impact on revenue.
“We also saw our revenue growth jump 20% in the first quarter of using Groove,” said Mitch.
Brooksource’s sales team is particularly happy with another key result. Since switching to Groove, Brooksource’s reps have improved their quota performance by 63%.
Since rolling out Groove, we’ve seen the average production, or gross margin, of our reps increase by 83% from our last full quarter with our previous solution.
Mitch Thomas, Sales Enablement Manager, Brooksource