Today’s sales organisations have a performance problem. Despite their best efforts, sales reps are missing opportunities and struggling to close deals.
According to Highspot’s recent data report, The GTM Performance Gap, 98% of leaders say their GTM strategy is active, but only 10% see it driving results. Even sales teams that perform well throughout the pipeline struggle to close high-stakes deals.
AI has the potential to supercharge your sales closing strategy, but it’s not a silver bullet. After two years of experimentation, most sales organisations continue to report underwhelming results. While 77% of organisations are investing in AI, only 28% of companies have reported that AI has improved their performance.
Your sales organisations can’t afford to keep experimenting without impact. By focusing on how reps prepare for sales conversations, 2026 can be a turning point: the year you start to see real, consistent returns on your AI investments.
Preparation lays the foundation for performance: the stronger your tools and processes for preparation, the better your outcomes across the organisation.
Highspot’s Agentic Platform delivers the AI-powered insights and guidance your reps need to make the most of every opportunity and start closing more deals with continuous performance.
Seize opportunities with deal agent
No two sales opportunities are the same, and your reps need to know when the moment has come to move in for the close. Trying to close too early could cause you to overlook critical objections or damage buyer trust. If you wait too long, you may lose out to more aggressive competitors.
A casual question about payment structures or delivery timelines might indicate that a buyer is moving into the final stages of the sales cycle. In contrast, a prospect who mentions they’re looking at multiple options might not be ready to take action. But when you’re trying to keep the details straight across dozens of conversations, it’s easy to miss valuable signals.
Highspot’s Deal Agent makes sure your sales reps catch the key messages hidden between the lines. By drawing on information from your CRM and buyer interactions, AI Deal Agents turn every signal into actionable guidance that will help keep deals moving forward at the right pace.
Applying Highspot Deal Agent across your entire sales organisation helps teams focus on the opportunities that matter most. Instead of waiting weeks to close deals that are ready today, reps can take action before the opportunity starts to wobble. On the other hand, your reps can avoid wasting time and resources on low-priority deals that aren’t yet close to a result.
Role play your make-or-break moments
Some opportunities are too important to leave to chance. A basketball team wouldn’t go into a winner-take-all game without studying the opponents’ scouting report, and your sellers shouldn’t be engaging with high-value buyers without practising first.
AI role play gives sellers the ability to practise important conversations in a low-pressure environment, work through potential objections, and get immediate feedback on their performance. While most role-play tools generate random conversations, Highspot Role Play simulates scenarios that reflect your real-world sales environments. Our Role Play uses the content, messaging, and training already in Highspot to deliver practice tailored to your teams.
When you’re managing dozens or even hundreds of sales reps, you don’t have the bandwidth to offer one-on-one coaching after every conversation. AI Role Play provides the personalised feedback your reps need to refine their skills and prepare for complex sales scenarios without taking hours of your time.
Once your sellers have honed their messaging and approach with AI role play, handling the same scenarios with real buyers becomes a self-reinforcing system. After practising across multiple deals, your sellers will gain confidence and mastery, improve win rates, and help your whole organisation close more deals faster.
The performance era — powered by AI
Until now, many sales organisations have been experimenting with multiple AI solutions for different sales enablement tasks. That could mean one tool for conversation intelligence, a different tool for onboarding and training, and yet another for creating sales content. When your tools aren’t built to work together, fragmented data and inconsistent insights will limit how much you can achieve.
To get the most out of AI, leading organisations will bring their tools together into a single sales performance system. This unified approach helps eliminate data silos and create a single source of truth to inform every part of the sales process. For the sellers themselves, a unified AI performance platform will be key to preparing for every high-stakes conversation with precision and winning more deals.
Ready to race ahead of the competition with an AI-powered performance system for your organisation? Read our latest eBook: The Future-Ready Seller’s Playbook: Turning Preparation into Performance to find out more.
