Highspot Blog

Sales enablement has revealed itself to be an increasingly critical contributor to B2B sales growth, giving businesses a powerful advantage in connecting with today’s modern buyers. This is just one of the many insights that come out of this year’s State of Sales Enablement report.

This year’s report shows the gap in success between those with and without formal sales enablement programs is widening.

In the report, which is now available for download, you’ll see that sales enablement is transformational in companies. This tectonic shift is creating more empowered and productive sales organizations, and it further illustrates the importance of enacting or updating a sales enablement strategy quickly—before competitors gain the edge.

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We are delighted to announce a $15 million investment in Highspot, the sales enablement solution that sales reps and marketers love.  This Series B investment, led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and existing investor, Madrona Venture Group, will help us extend our ability to provide reps with capabilities that result in more effective customer conversations.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve grown our customer base by 300% and are now the solution of choice for enterprise companies seeking to increase buyer engagement by optimizing their sales and marketing content and improving the readiness of their sales reps.Continue reading article ›

ABM. Social Selling. Predictive Analytics. Sales Enablement. Which one is most effective at boosting sales performance?  Hard to compare, exactly, as the best practice is to do them all.  But a recent survey found that those companies focused on sales enablement, on average, saw a 10% improvement on pipeline conversion rates.

A new Highspot/Heinz Marketing survey of nearly 400 B2B respondents titled “The Sales Enablement Practitioner Survey” shows a heightened investment in sales enablement teams, initiatives, and technology directly—and in many cases dramatically—increases sales conversion rates for B2B companies.

According to the survey, more than 50% of companies that have committed to sales enablement efforts have experienced improved sales conversion rates of greater than 10%. A full 23% of companies have seen conversion rates increase by 20% or more, and 11% have increased their conversion rate by greater than 30%. That’s a 30% increase in revenue from existing pipeline!

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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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Welcome to Highspot’s Best Practices in Sales Enablement.  This is where you’ll find guidance on planning, selecting, deploying, and optimizing the sales enablement solution that’s best for you.

We’ve designed this page for sales enablement pros who rely upon field-tested tools and techniques.  Topics range from finding sales enablement analysts and vendors to accelerating sales performance, improving content management, measurement, and more.  Our experiences and the insights they’ve yielded are now yours to reference.

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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 ›

There are many types and uses for sales portals, but the one we run into the most is the ‘sales content portal,’ the place where internal sales teams and external partner organizations manage their sales content–product sheets, sales presentations, FAQ’s, sales playbooks, videos and more–that fuels the sales process.

We’ve talked to hundreds of companies and what we’ve heard is remarkably consistent. If they have a sales portal, they hate it. If they don’t have a one, it’s because they are pretty sure they’re going to hate it.  …and in most cases, for good reason.

Everyone knows that there must be a better answer…and it’s true. We live in a time when sales technology has gone through a revolution in effectiveness and design, making it incredibly easier to implement, manage and use a sales content management platform–the modern answer to yesterday’s sales portal.

A modern sales enablement platform connects sellers to the most effective content and makes sure that it is working hard to deliver the sales results you need. You can take advantage of the same techniques that Internet services use to connect millions of people to the information they want. The right solution also integrates with and enhances the tools your company already relies on – services that track your sales activities (like Salesforce), that manage your files (like Box), and that you use for Web conferencing (like join.me).

Why do traditional sales portals so consistently fail to deliver, even really expensive ones and what can be done to fix them?

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Based on our discussions with prospects, buyers at tradeshows, and industry experts, there is still a lot of confusion about “What is Sales Enablement?”

As a 20-year practitioner of marketing, and some times sales leader, I have done sales enablement (little ‘s’, little ‘e’) in some capacity in every company throughout my career. But in the last 5 years it has become increasingly common for companies to have dedicated teams with the title of “Sales Enablement” or “Sales Readiness.” And in that same time, the emergence of a clear marketing technology segment has arisen.

Regardless of whether there is a dedicated team or it is a shared responsibility, sales enablement bridges the divide between marketing and sales. It provides marketing a platform to publish and analyze the effectiveness of their content. It enables sales enablement to monitor sales readiness. And it empowers sales reps to find the most effective content, share it with prospects, and get real-time alerts on customer engagement.

We wrote “The Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement” to help clarify the confusion about the space and give interested parties a foundation from which to drive improvements, adopt best practices and assess tools. The ROI for sales enablement is compelling. On average 65% of content goes unused, representing a $2M waste for the average mid-sized company. On the Continue reading article ›

Engagement is the lifeblood of the sales conversation – an indifferent customer is a deal waiting to fail. And in our hyper-informed age, you can’t deeply engage your customer without content. Every interaction with customers involves content and more content – pitch decks, white papers, case studies and on and on. To meet the insatiable need, marketing teams are churning out a sea of material. Sales teams are overwhelmed by it all and feel like they are drowning .. but still don’t have exactly what they need.

Everyone knows their content isn’t moving the sales process forward as effectively as it should, but nobody is sure exactly why or how. We have met with many, many customers to understand how they use content to drive sales. Virtually all of them complain about three problems that constantly hold them back from closing more deals.Continue reading article ›