Highspot Blog

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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For sales reps and marketers, survival skills begin with the ability to separate long-term signals from short-term noise.  This influences where reps invest their time, how marketers construct their awareness and demand gen strategies, and the prioritization criteria for sales enablement leaders who need to manage everything from in-context training to playbooks and more.  

Today we’re going to dive into AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its evolution from a trend-making concept to a core feature of any modern sales enablement platform. Continue reading article ›

Modern sales enablement solutions make their predecessor versions unrecognizable.  Not because they’re solving different problems, but because they present radically improved approaches to delivering what sales reps need. 

Today we’ll illustrate the significant limitations of legacy solutions, as well as the fragile characteristics of platforms claiming to be modern. For sales and marketing teams evaluating technology alternatives, understanding the evolution from legacy to truly modern is essential to making informed decisions.  It also provides a view into how Highspot has rewritten the definition of modern sales enablement. 

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High-performing sales organizations quickly adjust to the buying environment of their customers and the dynamic needs of their business.  Now more than ever, they rely upon data to accomplish their goals. With new 3rd party BI integration capabilities, Highspot is bringing deeper insights to business leaders by enabling the combination of sales data with other company data.  

The catalyst is Highspot’s BI Kit™, which permits sales data to be seamlessly imported into 3rd party BI solutions and data warehouses and combined with data sets from other teams, such as finance, HR, and operations. This ability to include sales, content, and customer engagement data from the Highspot platform with other company data will provide business leaders with valuable insight to improve sales and go-to-market performance.

Our most recent integration is with Microsoft Power BI.  Announced this morning at Build, Microsoft’s premier event for developers, the combination of Power BI and Highspot will provide 360-degree perspective into content performance and its impact on business goals.  This will allow sales teams to monitor results and optimize effectiveness as never before.

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Amazon is incredible at helping you find the right product among its catalog of 200 million items.   

Within minutes Amazon will have you looking at relevant products, reading reviews, getting recommendations, and seeing related items.

Your sales enablement platform should perform the same magic.

So how does Amazon do it?  There are four foundational capabilities that work together to produce the magic of Amazon. As the saying goes, the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Start removing one or more of these capabilities and the results quickly break down.Continue reading article ›

The winds of change are blowing rapidly through the sales and marketing hallways of your company. Technologies come and go, and some, like the mp3 player, take a few iterations and some macro-level changes in order to get right. Sales Enablement technology is one of those.

While the efforts of sales enablement—helping sales professionals be more effective and efficient, through better content and knowledge training—have been around for nearly two decades, the technology to support this effort has gone through a series of attempts and misses.

It has been proven, however, when organizations get it right, there are incredible benefits to be gained. Aberdeen’s research shows companies with proper sales enablement can improve sales performance in very meaningful ways:Continue reading article ›

Today Highspot has announced revolutionary new technology critical for accurate analytics in Sales Enablement solutions.

Content Genomics™ tracks the DNA of content as it evolves across an organization and it is the first application of machine learning to marketing and sales content.

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Where does it come from? How do you measure its effectiveness?  Is it different than marketing content? Salespeople are in a unique position as they deliver materials and messages to prospects and receive real-time feedback on it whether that be via actual discussion or the fact that a prospect moves through the buying cycle as a result. Often they create their own content derived from assets supplied by the marketing team that reflect these learnings as well as their personal spin on things.  In most cases, this feedback fails to make its way back to the marketing team and the problem just reinforces itself including no visibility to the gaps being filled by the salesperson’s own efforts.

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Sales and marketing operations have progressed to a point where we can readily access the contact information of those who we are trying to target with our sales pitch or offer.  In best-in-class scenarios, there is an active mapping of buyer personas to the buying journey so an intelligent mapping of who is going to be involved is any decision process is understood.

We even have the ability to “score” these leads based on implied interest like web site visits, email campaign activity like opens or clicks, and downloading of collateral pieces.  There are even advanced scenarios where predictive analytics can be used to intelligently lead score prospects based on their potential interest and match to your target customer.  This is all done in an effort to improve targeting – who should be contacted first, who has the greatest probability of converting into an opportunity and ultimately becoming a customer.

This is fantastic technology for getting the customer to engage and become a sales opportunity.  The signals, activities and demographics that these technologies leverage are great pieces of information to be maintained as the lead is passed to sales.

How can we better leverage this information in the sales and sales enablement processes to help close deals?Continue reading article ›

Companies have made significant investments to date in tools and technologies to enable their marketing and sales processes.  Usually the core of this investment is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system deployed with high expectations of streamlined selling and new insights.  Unfortunately, CRM systems are rarely fully utilized and often fall short of these expectations. Shouldn’t sales technology actually help salespeople sell?

Rather than become a chore to update and merely a means to provide activity and pipeline reports to management, why not make an investment in something that actually drives and optimizes sales activity?

Companies need to embrace the sales technology stack to truly take advantage of technology-enabled selling.

The concept of a sales stack has been around for a while with sales expert Jim Keenan sharing a great post on “The Sales Stack” back in 2012 on his A Sales Guy blog.  His seven layers include both enabling technology as well as rewards, recognition, and compensation programs.  Max Altschuler published a more recent take on it on the Sales Hacker blog titled “Welcome to the Era of the Sales Stack.”  He maps the stack to each stage of the sales lifecycle and highlights some great tools to enable the various pieces of it.

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