How Highspot Became a Top Startup
Every successful business begins with successful sales. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for even the very best sales people to know exactly how to approach different products and customers.
That’s where Highspot comes in. This startup specializes in “sales enablement,” allowing it to help companies push their products. And it has become wildly successful, working with companies like Amazon and Twitter and being named “Top Startup” by Linkedin.
What, exactly, makes this company so successful? Let’s find out.
Knowing the Buyer
One of Highspot’s greatest strengths is that it understands the modern buyer. In short, the modern buyer is armed with more information than any generation has previously had.
In previous generations, a sales professional could be successful if they were simply persuasive. Now, though, the key to success is having more information than the average buyer.
This is ultimately what Highspot offers. Beyond the sophisticated AI and analytics, the heart of the company is simply making more information available to sales teams. This opens up sales opportunities that these teams wouldn’t otherwise have while making everything easier and more streamlined for the company.
Highspot Marketing and Sales Alignment
In theory, the marketing and sales departments of any given company should be in perfect alignment. Unfortunately, this is often not the case.
Highspot identified that the alignment typically fell apart because of failures to communicate. Sales and marketing teams might be using different touch points for customers or using buyer personas that did not fully align with the kinds of products the company is selling.
The way Highspot helps align these teams is by offering integration with existing software such as Salesforce and Sharepoint. And Highspot’s intuitive solutions (such as its SmartPage technology that creates interactive pages for sales professionals) make it easy to train sales and marketing teams while also reducing the cost of marketing overhead.
Increased Efficiency
For most companies, information about their business, products, and buyers is not the problem. Instead, the problem is information access.
A company’s sales professionals may not be able to easily access information exactly when they need it. And if this happens to be during a call with a customer, this can easily lead to a lost sale.
Something Highspot specializes in is bolstering sales efficiency. As an example, it took one company (Dun & Bradstreet) and gathered 6,000 pieces of content that were scattered all over the place. Highspot then placed this information in one location that was easily searchable.
Think of it as the “Google effect:” the sales teams could now find relevant content with a simple search instead of spending all day scouring for it.
Immediate Results
Another reason Highspot has become so popular is quite simple: the company delivers almost immediate results.
Sometimes, a business may be skeptical of taking on new software that claims to be the next “big thing” but doesn’t really deliver. With Highspot, businesses can immediately see stats such as higher sales performances paired with more efficient customer communication.
Furthermore, its interactive AI tools (like Smartpages, Seller Personas, and more) can change how a team approaches sales from day one.
Chris S. is an English Professor and freelance writer, spending his days in sunny Northwest Florida. He specializes in writing about marketing and media. In his spare time, he enjoys books, beaches, and buying way too many nerdy tchotchkes for any one office to ever contain!
