Pendo vs. Spekit: Solving Different Problems

At first glance, Spekit and Pendo may seem interchangeable. However if you take a closer look, the tools can play completely different roles in your tech stack. In fact, we have several customers who leverage both platforms.

When to choose Spekit

If you’re looking to streamline sales rep onboarding, roll out change management at scale, enable your reps in their flow of work, and launch new Salesforce processes, then Spekit is the right fit for you. In this case, your main goals will be:

• Sales Rep Onboarding & Training
• Sales Enablement
• Digital Sales Playbook
• Remote Knowledge Sharing
• Tool Adoption
• Salesforce Documentation
• Salesforce Training & Adoption
  

Spekit gives you a total in-app remote onboarding, digital adoption and knowledge sharing, and sales enablement platform. Spekit also offers embedded microlearning and guided walkthroughs that reinforce sales reps’ knowledge in the apps they use every day.  

With a ready-to-use Content Library, Spekit is built to be intuitive and highly usable from Day 1. So, if you’re looking for a comprehensive just-in-time sales enablement solution that cuts down rep ramp-up time and evangelizes learning-by-doing, then see for yourself how teams use Spekit to accelerate learning and drive productivity – from anywhere.

When to choose Pendo

If you’re looking to train and onboard your product’s end users, then Pendo’s Product Experience platform is an excellent option for you.

Pendo gives product experience teams visibility into where their users are dropping off as well as the barriers preventing one-time visitors becoming loyal, long-term users. Using deep user analytics, Pendo offers detailed insights into friction points and helps resolve them with tools to design and test new messaging and journeys based on a user’s experience level.

5 reasons why companies choose Spekit over Pendo

If you’re wondering whether you should invest in Spekit or Pendo, you’re not alone. In this article, we’ll walk you through each platform’s use cases and capabilities, and share insights to help you evaluate Spekit and Pendo based on your unique situation.

To start, Pendo is a digital adoption, product engagement, and user analytics platform. Pendo’s primary use is to increase the adoption of tools for both end users and internal users. In a nutshell, the platform enables product owners to see how users engage with their products. Beyond product engagement, Pendo gives product managers deep insight into user behavior. For instance, they can see where users are dropping off, where they’re getting stuck, which features they’re using, and use that information to conceive of and test new copy and user experiences (UX).

Spekit is a digital adoption and sales enablement platform with features that enhance sales onboarding, process rollouts, and real-time knowledge sharing. The primary reason people use Spekit is to onboard sales, customer success, and SDRs.

Spekit delivers  consistent microlearning experiences across the tools teams already use, thanks to one-click Salesforce integration and extensions to popular apps like Chrome.

Spekit also democratizes knowledge and scales change through in-app contextual content. With Spekit, learning and change communications occurs within the platforms sales teams already use, meaning users don’t have to leave Salesforce and log in somewhere else to access sales enablement resources.

However, despite these key differences, both Spekit and Pendo have some overlap, which include:

• In-app training
• In-app alerts
• Walkthroughs

What separates them is their approach.

1. Spekit is built specifically for internal enablement and adoption

Digital enablement solutions go a step further than product adoption tools because they focus on creating alignment and understanding across teams without disrupting existing workflows. In other words, Spekit helps teams quickly build and share training materials and messaging in easy-to-digest chunks (or Speks) using existing resources and processes.

Beyond that, what differentiates Spekit is its ability to embed knowledge alongside Salesforce-defined terms, fields, and picklist values. This game-changing capability teaches users as they go—so people learn by doing. As a result, Spekit not only notifies users when things change but also accelerates sales onboarding because it takes a proactive approach to learning.

Spekit addresses both enablement and digital adoption through the following capabilities:

• Spotlights – in-app notifications that can communicate company announcements, process rollouts, and new features
• Speks – icons across Salesforce that can be attached to any field object, picklist, or keyword in an application. The idea of Speks is not to define a field. Instead, Speks are contextual learning prompts that meet sales users at whatever sales stage they are.
• Spekit AI - automatically recommends the best case studies, playbooks, testimonials, and whitepapers based on the context of sales interactions, in real-time.
• Flows – in-app step-by-step instructions. Flows guide users through different processes. Flows are especially useful for change management and are easy to create, edit, and share.
• The Dock – contextual, collapsible sidebar follows users as they navigate Salesforce. This feature centralizes all the information users need and makes them more self-sufficient by giving them the ability to search for what they need, when they need it.

2. Spekit can be used across web applications

Spekit can be leveraged across many web-based applications (as long as users are in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge) and customers get access to Spekit on unlimited applications through pre-built Salesforce and Slack integrations. The benefit of cross-application learning is that Spekit delivers learning in small, highly focused nuggets. Speks only gives users must-know information and strips away the “nice-to-know” facts.

According to Shift Learning research, learning attention spans are at the highest in bursts of three to five minutes, and, if information can be delivered in under three minutes, it’s more likely to be retained.

Speks focus on key takeaways or just-in-time information a user needs to finish a particular task. Microlearning through Speks surfaces content contextually across the applications your teams are using. Speks also enable you to embed in-app training so users can learn on the job, while carrying out tasks, instead of completing long, irrelevant training that gets forgotten because the information isn’t reinforced during onboarding or beyond.

Traditional onboarding results in a non-stop barrage of emails and Slack messages to your admins and learning development professionals for answers to what are often mundane  questions. Speks eliminate scattered information and enablement resources by giving sales reps on demand access to knowledge in any workflow.

3. Spekit provides out-of-the-box, customizable training

Spekit comes with free out-of-the box training content for tools like Salesforce, Salesforce CPQ, Outreach, LinkedIn, and  other common web applications that can be cloned or customized to UpStack’s needs.

Spekit Content Library

If you’re like most RevOps teams, you’re probably short on time and don’t have a runway to create content for tools like Salesforce, Outreach, and other popular apps. Spekit’s Content Library is full of pre-built, customizable training content that you can upload and start using right away.

The only one-click Salesforce adoption solution

Spekit is the only Salesforce adoption solution with one-click integration. You don’t need to be a coder or a technical wizard to integrate, manage changes in Salesforce, and intelligently embed training where it belongs.

4. Spekit provides just-in-time sales enablement

Just-in-time sales enablement gives your sales team on-demand, self-service access to the information they need. In addition, by giving sales teams opportunities to master situational learning, you can reduce their ramp-up time and continuously reinforce their knowledge and your methodologies on platforms they already use.

Spekit cross-application integration also enables you to eliminate scattered and out-of-date information by giving reps access to what they need from any workflow. You can finally say goodbye to the 80-slide PowerPoint deck you made, but nobody revisits. Instead, effortlessly embed playbooks, field-level guidance, and frameworks into your CRM for any stage of the sales lifecycle.

5. Spekit acts as your central knowledge management system

Spekit has a Team Spaces feature, which gives users access to topics and Speks (bite-sized pieces of information) based on their team. Team Spaces gives admins a unified view of all their content and topics. As a result, they can identify content gaps, assess where users are dropping off, and use that data to keep improving their sales enablement resources.

Spekit’s connection to Slack simplifies knowledge sharing because it centralizes resources within the app, which translates into higher productivity and self-service learning. Spekit also makes learning more accessible to everyone, reducing the burden on your sales enablement teams, so they can focus on improving onboarding and training materials instead of being the daily go-to for FAQs.

To Recap:

Today’s work environment is highly volatile, with the global pandemic prompting workers to change or upgrade their roles in search of flexible and safer work conditions. This wholesale shift in workforce personnel means effective sales onboarding and enablement will be key factors for business success in 2022.

Sales enablement platform Spekit differs from Pendo in five key ways:

• It’s built specifically for enablement and adoption with its bite-sized easy-to-digest learn-as-you go approach
• Ability to be used across web applications
• Offers out-of-box customizable training via integrations and extensions
• Provides just-in-time sales enablement with on demand and self-service access
• Centralized knowledge management within the tools sales teams are already using

Pendo is a product engagement, digital adoption,, and user analytics  that may be a good fit for companies looking to:

• Train and onboard product end users
• Gain manager insight into user behavior and friction points
• Have tools to design and test flows based on user experience

Don’t take our word for it

Customer success story: OwnBackup

OwnBackup, a successful SaaS company with an expanding customer base, had raised a Series E funding round of $240 million and added 200+ employees. Unfortunately, despite having an incredible product and experiencing overall growth, their sales methodology could not scale at the same pace.  

OwnBackup uses Winning by Design’s “SPICED” framework, which stands for Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, and Decision. But they were running into problems with new hires unfamiliar with the framework.

Initially, Spekit started as a solution for their sales team, “now everyone wants to use Spekit. Alliances, Product, everyone is messaging me asking how they can get content inside of Spekit for their teams. So yes, it helped roll out our new sales methodology, but it’s since expanded company-wide, ” said Shira Osdoba, Sales Enablement Content Manager.

Customer success story: Outreach

Outreach is a sales enablement platform that helps sales teams efficiently engage prospects to drive more pipeline and win more deals. Outreach hired Whitney Sieck as its Sr. Director of Revenue Enablement to drive employee onboarding and cross-functional collaboration. Outreach had doubled its revenue every year since 2014, but sales reps were struggling to keep up with (re)learning enablement tools.

Consider the typical onboarding process for a rep. After a few weeks, their trainer moves on to specifics like building quotes. The problem is that the rep won’t need to prepare a quote for months after they start working. By then, they won’t remember specifics of the training and will need to relearn the process by attending an onboarding session with a new cohort or scheduling one-on-one time with their trainer. Neither option is very efficient.

“With Spekit, we’re equipping sales enablement to cope with different learning styles and competing factors people have in their life. This allows us to embed training content within the tool a rep is using, empowering them to learn on their own,” said Sieck.

“Using Spekit means we can now deliver information right when the rep needs it, reducing retraining requirements, and driving a much higher return-on-effort from my enablement team,” added Sieck.