Category: Data Science

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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Digital transformation — two words anyone who has so much as dabbled in the tech space has heard time and time again. Dubbed by SiriusDecisions as the “buzziest buzzword in B2B,” digital transformation means different things to different organizations. One of the areas where digital transformation is becoming increasingly relevant is in how sellers relate to their customers.

The results of SiriusDecisions’ 2018 Digital Transformation Survey showed that 55 percent of respondents believed that the goal of digital transformation should be on changing engagement with buyers and customers. In other words, how we relate to our customers is rapidly changing. Your buyer needs to be reached quicker with exactly the information they’re looking for, and now more than ever it’s important to invest in digitizing your sales force. Continue reading article ›

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 ›

Last week, Highspot attended Sales 3.0 in San Francisco. For those that don’t know, Sales 3.0 is a long running — and evolving — conference run by Gerhard Gschwandtner, the founder and CEO of Selling Power. It’s devoted to introducing B2B sales leaders to sales technologies, trends, and strategies to produce increased revenue and improved sales performance, and it delivered hugely this year!

Photo of Gerhard Gschwandtner kicking off Sales 3.0

According to Gerhard, Sales 1.0 was about hustle. Sales 2.0 was when everything went online and became a science. And now, Sales 3.0 centers around the app explosion (think Salesforce App Exchange) and the inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) in all aspects of our lives, while balancing technology with our innate human qualities.

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In any new project or technology, one business metric stands above all others: ROI. It is the ultimate measure of whether or not value is created. Today, we’re illustrating an example of how a modern sales enablement platform generates superior return on Iivestment against performance targets we’ve found highly attainable.

The following infographic, Deconstructing Sales Enablement ROI, showcases the two primary lenses through which customers evaluate their investment: sales efficiency and sales effectiveness. It also lists assumptions based on real-world customer experiences, starting with Highspot’s industry-leading usage rate.

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At Highspot, we’re committed to continual product updates and enhancements in our quest to make sales reps’ jobs more effective and efficient. Last month, I shared that the Highspot Sales Enablement solution now offers inline editing within Microsoft Office 365,  and today I’m excited to unveil two more important product advances: Integration with Microsoft Outlook and automatic content filtering by language based on machine learning capabilities.

The Outlook integration is a “best of both worlds” scenario, as sellers now have the option to decide if they’d like to send content directly from Highspot’s sales content management system or from their corporate email client.Continue reading article ›

What if every time your marketing team produced a piece of content, you knew its inherent value? If every one-sheet, whitepaper, presentation, and infographic was so measurable you knew if it worked or didn’t? Imagine the productivity improvements and bottom-line impact (not to mention employee satisfaction) that could result in such progress.

In a recent post on the SiriusDecisions blog, Sharon Little explains how using revenue as a north star for content production can transform an organization’s quality and performance of sales content. She argues that this approach saves time, minimizes production of unnecessary content, and creates more value for both customers and the sales team.

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A new research report just surfaced from Aberdeen Group confirms what we at Highspot have known all along: Best-in-class organizations view sales enablement as a must-have.

Aberdeen’s research shows that best-in-class organizations have:

• 99% overall team quota attainment – 62% higher than average companies
• 75% reps achieving quota – 50% higher than average companies
• 13% year-over-year revenue growth – 205% higher than average companies
• 3% reduction is sales cycle time – 725% better than average companies

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Almost 20 years ago, a tech industry luminary proclaimed with confidence that “content is king.”

The luminary’s name is, of course, Bill Gates, and he was spot-on. Gates spoke of a world in which the sheer breadth of information available on the internet would be the factor that made it compelling. He noted that “those who succeed will propel the internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products — a marketplace of content.”[1]

While Mr. Gates was talking specifically about monetizing the internet, the idea of content leading the charge when it comes to all aspects of marketing has made its way into the lexicon in an undeniable way.

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In the Mad Men era, marketing was considered a cost center where “creative types” made glorious advertising campaigns but had very little ability to measure their impact on sales.

Now, thanks to the Internet, marketing automation, and other technology, we can measure nearly everything in marketing, tracing our impact all the way down to influence on revenue and ROI. This ability to measure marketing’s performance and receive instant feedback on what works has revolutionized marketing.

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