Why Hootsuite's Enterprise Sales Team Begged for Accord

The Company

Hootsuite is a leading social media management and advanced social listening solution that enables organizations to manage complex engagement strategies and gain deep insights into consumer behavior and market trends.

Niki Phillips, Hootsuite's VP of Enterprise Sales, leads the North American enterprise team, responsible for all new enterprise customers in the region. With seven and a half years at Hootsuite, Niki has been instrumental in building out the enterprise segment from the ground up. As she prepared to scale complex enterprise deals, which require dozens of coordinated steps and alignment from multiple stakeholders, she knew the team needed better infrastructure—but was hesitant to add yet another tool to an already crowded tech stack.

The Challenge: Tool Fatigue While Building Enterprise Capabilities

As Hootsuite expanded its enterprise business, Niki faced a classic dilemma: her team needed a way to systematize deal execution, but sales representatives were already managing multiple tools.

"I was thinking, 'How do I get mutual plans in place? How do I get the sales team to be process-oriented and keep track of deals and complex enterprise selling?'" Niki explains. "Being able to keep track of all of the dozens of steps that have to go into closing an enterprise deal."

The existing approach wasn't sustainable for enterprise-level complexity. The team was sending emails without engagement visibility, using ineffective Google Sheets for planning, and sending PDF plan letters with no collaboration or tracking capabilities. Reps were already juggling ZoomInfo, 6sense, Highspot, and other essential tools.

"The last thing I needed was to introduce another tool to the sales team," Niki recalls.

This created a tension between the operational needs of complex enterprise selling and the practical reality of tool adoption fatigue—a challenge many revenue leaders face when scaling their teams and processes.

The Solution: A Pilot That Changed Everything

Rather than mandating a new platform, Niki ran a pilot program and let the team decide.

The Pilot Strategy

After evaluating solutions, including Trumpet, Niki chose Accord based on its intuitive user experience. But before committing, she made adoption contingent on team buy-in.

"I told Ross (Accord’s CEO and co-founder) that I'll throw it out to the team—let's do a trial," she explains. "If they find it valuable and they're receptive to this, we'll have another conversation."

The user experience immediately stood out. "It was so easy to use. When I first clicked on the Accord invitation on my phone, there was no wall or gate to get into it. It was just so easy to use, and I thought about it from a customer perspective—this will be great."

The Unexpected Result: Team Demand

What happened next surprised even Niki. Within weeks, the sales team wasn't just using Accord—they were demanding leadership purchase it permanently.

"The team begged me to buy this," Niki explains. "After a couple of weeks, they were like, 'We're obsessed with this. We need this.' So, I didn't even have to get over the objection of adding a new tool. They found immediate value in it.”

This bottom-up adoption solved the classic implementation challenge that plagues many sales tools: instead of leadership pushing reluctant reps to adopt a new platform, reps were pushing leadership to invest in something that genuinely improved their daily workflow.

The platform immediately streamlined complex enterprise deal management. Instead of scattered communication and lost documents, everything was centralized in deal-specific workspace where rep and buyer work together to close a deal.

"Accord has changed my day-to-day so much. It has made me a more effective leader because I don't have to be looking through Google Docs trying to find the plan letter or requesting access to it. I can just go into Salesforce because the team has linked their Accord to every one of their opportunities," Niki explains.

Deal reviews became efficient: "If we are having deal meetings, I ask for the Accord so I can review it beforehand and triangulate what's going on without running around to get all these different documents."

From Niki’s team:

“I’ve noticed that the strongest deals always have the highest engagement in Accord—which has become a reliable signal for me when forecasting deal strength. It’s a huge advantage to know which opportunities are most engaged and likely to close. I also get great feedback from my clients too—they love using Accord and have asked if Accord stays with them through the implementation phase too!”

- Sara Duholke, Account Executive

“I’ve used Accord for my most strategic deals with lots of moving pieces, and it’s been a game-changer. It not only helps me stay organized, but my clients love it too. In fact, the Social Media Director on one of my biggest deals JUST emailed me to say the summary page I provided is fantastic and makes it incredibly easy to share updates with her leadership team.”

- Jared Bramhall, Account Executive 

“Accord transformed our chaotic process of juggling Google Docs and resource folders into a streamlined, centralized hub. I love that for each account, I can create a detailed and customized timeline, organized folders, and specific summary pages for everything from the business case to call follow-ups with screenshots and recordings. What used to take me hours after a call now takes five minutes.”

- Niki Najafi, a Strategic Account Director

The Impact: Real Revenue Results from Genuine Love & Adoption

Because adoption was driven by value recognition rather than mandated compliance, Hootsuite achieved exceptional results across its enterprise motion:

• Universal Coverage Without Mandates: "80% of the deals now run through Accord"—with exceptions only for regulated industries that prefer not to work in third-party workspaces. This high coverage came naturally as reps chose to use Accord because it made their jobs easier.
• Accelerated Enterprise Sales Cycles: "On large deals, I would say the sales cycle is two weeks shorter on average." The clear next steps in each Accord, and the accountability for rep and buyer makes deals run so much more smoothly.
• Enhanced Stakeholder Engagement: Enterprise deals now include more stakeholders: "We’re getting executive engagement that we normally wouldn't have had." Niki estimates "two or three more stakeholders" per deal on average.
• Competitive Advantage in Complex Deals: "I feel like it puts our best foot forward in deals. Our sales reps come off as professional and organized, and you have to be all of those things in these hyper-competitive deals. There's not a lot of room to make mistakes."
• Improved Performance and Forecasting: The platform contributes to "an extra 10k per rep" in productivity while providing better forecast accuracy. "It helps me give a temperature check on deals. If deals are forecasted, I can go into the Accord, I can see if there's a business case, if people are involved with the next steps."
• Customer Validation: The buyer experience has been overwhelmingly positive: "They love it. A prospect asked if they could buy Accord during a demo—they're like, 'Oh, is this Hootsuite? Can we buy this?'”

What's Next for Hootsuite & Accord

The success of the bottom-up adoption model has created momentum for broader organizational use. RevOps, initially excluded from the pilot, now champions expanded implementation.

"I first tried tackling this on my own as a side project, but after seeing some early success with the trial, we brought in RevOps. They’re now exploring additional use cases across other parts of the organization," Niki explains. 

The team is exploring applications in customer success, centralized content management, and potentially replacing existing platforms.

Plus, Niki is exploring ways to utilize Accord to improve performance management across the team—using it as a tool to more closely monitor process adherence and identify coaching opportunities.

Advice for Other Revenue Leaders

For leaders facing similar scaling challenges, Niki's advice centers on not waiting for perfect conditions or for the sales process to be "perfect" first:

"Don't wait, because this helps instill good habits and process and gets the team thinking strategically about stakeholder management and next steps. If I were building a sales team from scratch, this would be one of the very first tools I’d implement because it lays the foundation for successful selling.”

The Hootsuite experience demonstrates that when sales tools genuinely solve real problems, adoption becomes organic rather than forced. As Niki concludes: "This is a sales tool that the team tells me they can't live without anymore. They would be so upset if we took it away from them, which I never hear about tools."

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