Highspot Blog

It’s a whole new world for sellers and marketers. With the dawn of the digital era and the evolution of buyers, forward-thinking companies are transforming their approach to engaging customers — a transformation that begins with analysis and anticipation.

Reflecting back on a successful past first requires looking forward. Agile companies pivot their approaches based on current trends and educated predictions that will shape the business landscape. Many of these trends will be shared at TOPO Summit 2019, where 2,000 leaders (Highspot included!) will come together to discuss critical topics in revenue.

With the conference around the corner, we dove into three of today’s — and tomorrow’s — hottest topics that are impacting the modern market.

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For our first Highspot Market Pulse survey, we chose to explore the state of sales and marketing alignment within the rapidly growing life sciences industry. According to KPMG, global annual sales for the medical device industry alone will reach nearly $800 billion by 2030. Our research found that there is a clear opportunity in life sciences for process improvement between sales and marketing teams.

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Picture this: You plod into a conference center expecting endless slides and nap-worthy sessions. Instead, you’re met with Journey bumping through the speakers, a breakfast buffet, and colleagues who have either had unhealthy amounts of coffee, or who are genuinely pumped to be at your company’s yearly sales kickoff (SKO) — or both!

This was the scene at Highspot Momentum 2019 — our excuse to spend two days celebrating (and analyzing) our collective wins, learning from customers including Apptio, SAP Concur, and PitchBook, and getting energized about the year ahead. Our goal was straight-forward: create an SKO experience this year that will still be the gold standard five years from now.

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What Is Buyer Engagement?

Buyer engagement describes the interactions between buyers and sales reps. Some examples of buyer engagement include opening an email, watching a video, reading content provided by a rep, and answering a rep’s phone call. The more meaningful the interaction, the more likely a buyer is to work with a rep.

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Effective sales strategies are developed through careful evaluation and constant improvement. At Highspot, we work with sales and marketing leaders every day to enable their success, so we know firsthand the importance of a strong sales strategy.

Below, we’ve answered the most frequently asked questions about developing a winning sales strategy.

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Winning a buyer’s heart is no easy feat. In today’s age, competition is fierce and mistrust abounds. As with most modern relationships, achieving lasting customer love requires both time and effort from sellers. Use the tips below to ensure that your buyers are feeling the love right from the start.

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Prospecting, pitching, tracking engagement — there’s no question that modern technology solutions have made it easier for sellers to complete these essential tasks. But even as the tools have improved, selling has become more complicated as buyers’ expectations have risen. With increased access to information, buyers today do more of their research independently and invite more internal stakeholders into buying decisions. To capture and win buyers’ attention, sellers must now research and present insightful solutions tailored to multiple decision makers’ needs. The result is that reps end up spending more time trying to keep up with increasingly complex sales processes, impacting overall sales productivity.

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Think back to the times you’ve gone through a new employee onboarding program (NEO) — chances are you got a pretty good feeling for how much the organization invests in its employees just from those first few days. Sales onboarding is no different. 49% of high-performing sales reps identify the availability of onboarding as “very to extremely important” when considering a new position, according to SiriusDecisions.

Sales onboarding not only matters to top sales talent, but to sales and executive leadership as well. Sales and executive leaders are responsible for ensuring that the company is hitting its quota targets; therefore, they need to ensure that they are preparing enough quota-carrying reps to be out in the field at any given time. Unfortunately, on average, new sales hires spend 10 weeks in training and development and only become productive after 11.2 months, according to Sales Management Association.

As a leader, how can you make the most of every chance to improve the sales productivity of your reps? Here are five important opportunities to keep top-of-mind.

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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 ›