Highspot Blog

What is sales effectiveness?

There isn’t one single answer. Some might say effectiveness comes down to performance against goals, while others might define it in terms of revenue or profit. Sometimes, it even gets conflated with sales efficiency. While both sales effectiveness and sales efficiency relate to the improvement of sales performance, efficiency reveals how fast sales reps complete tasks — but not whether they’re performing the right tasks. That’s the focus of sales effectiveness.

Because sales effectiveness is variable and unique to each company, it can be difficult to assess your sales team’s efforts. But without a clear definition of sales effectiveness, it’s impossible to get started measuring and, most importantly, improving.

To help with this conundrum, we’ve written a guide to provide a straightforward explanation of sales effectiveness and the metrics that matter. Read on and we’ll walk you through the process of identifying, measuring, and improving your sales effectiveness.

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In the early days of sales operations, sales ops professionals measured financial analytics, conducted reports, and predicted sales forecasting. Mainly, they were problem-solving number crunchers.

These days, they do all that and much more.

Modern sales ops professionals play a vital role in the success of a sales organization by staying ahead of problems and enabling the sales team to focus on selling. When implemented alongside strategic training, tools, and engagement techniques, sales operations can help sales teams become more productive and efficient and have a positive impact on both the top- and bottom-line performance.Continue reading article ›

To traditional sellers, consultative selling can feel intimidating. Instead of maintaining power in the selling process, the seller must yield it to the buyer. It’s certainly not easy to do, but consultative selling can pay off because it provides the personalized experience that modern buyers have grown to expect today. It requires selflessness and time, but implementing consultative selling techniques can help grow an organization’s sales team, increase customer loyalty, and solve each customer’s biggest needs.

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What can today’s leading companies do to build more inclusive, diverse teams? How can we make real progress toward closing the gender gap in the technology space?

We ask these questions at Highspot because we already believe these challenges deserve our attention and action. It can be daunting to know where to begin, but as Highspot’s head of engineering I contend that with a committed leadership team and a culture of inclusivity on your side, some strategic investments can make a big difference.

One such investment that the team and I are enormously proud to announce is Highspot’s sponsorship of Ada Developers Academy. In sponsoring Ada, we join more than fifty companies including Google, Zillow, Amazon, and others who share a common mission.

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As a Highspot Account Development Representative, I know it is no longer the case that sellers get to control the buying process — rather, it’s the reverse. In many ways, the role of the salesperson has shifted from being the pitcher in baseball, where they get to dictate when and how to deliver the pitch, to the batter, where they now must be ready for anything the prospect decides to throw at them. In fact, it’s estimated that 50 to 80% of the buyer’s decision-making process happens before the sales rep gets involved.

For salespeople to combat this paradigm shift in buying patterns and behavior, we must be ready for any conversation, question, or objection, no matter where our prospects are in the buyer’s journey — and we have to be able to turn on a dime. That’s why Highspot is designed to empower sales reps like me with modern sales plays and sales playbooks.

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In our fast-paced world where modern-day buyers are more demanding than ever, sales enablement comes to play a crucial role in sellers’ success. But there’s more to it than that. Not only do companies need the right sales enablement solution — they need the right approach.

This is one reason why we’re excited to share insights and advice from Matt McClendon, President of DSG, as part of our Highspot “Hot Shots” series. Matt has a passion for creating sales-friendly playbooks and helping clients provide their sales channels with the content, tools, and training required to lead compelling customer conversations. DSG has provided professional services, creative services, and enablement tools to hundreds of B2B companies and more than 100,000 salespeople.

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Artificial intelligence is the next big thing for sales. Sales leaders know it, but many aren’t sure what to do with sales AI yet.

A recent MIT survey found that 85% of executives believe that AI will give their companies a competitive advantage, yet only about 20% have incorporated AI into their business.

Although hype is building around the potential of sales AI, business leaders are struggling to find a starting place.

If you’re a sales leader looking to give your team an edge over the competition, these six opportunities will give you the guidance you need to begin using AI to streamline your sales processes.

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If you’re a sales professional or support a sales team, you live with a common challenge every day: The pace of change is relentless. New and changing products, updated processes, management directives, competitive intel, pricing changes — the list goes on.

For those of us in the supporting cast, this means there is a constant stream of opportunities to share knowledge and improve the skills of our front-line teams. Anyone in sales enablement or sales readiness knows there will never be a shortage of learning to develop and deliver. The challenge is that we too often choose the wrong methods to effectively enable our teams to leverage new skills or knowledge. We’re all guilty of forcing mandatory, one-size-fits-all training because it’s “more efficient” (pronounced “easy”). Let’s take a look at some common scenarios.

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Everyone knows that a company’s success depends on customers — and specifically, customers’ experience. However, sustaining customer interest can be difficult. Companies must compete for customer attention in a world where consumers have more options then they have ever had before. In the last ten years, customer experience has become increasingly more important in this new world where customers want to have more of a say in how corporations portray themselves.

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More great news coming out of Highspot: We’ve won an American Business Award for Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year from the Stevies^®!

According to the American Business Award judges, “Highspot created integrations across learning management platforms to further enhance the ability for sellers to sell. Highspot has further developed its artificial intelligence capabilities over the course of last year.”

“All of us at Highspot are honored to be recognized by the American Business Awards alongside many other impressive companies,” said Jake Braly, vice president of marketing at Highspot. “The fact that this award is focused on innovation highlights the hard work of our product and engineering teams — dedicated to building beautifully designed sales enablement software with a spark of magic, that marketers and sales reps love.”Continue reading article ›