I’ve seen Highspot used in a couple different organizations. One implemented really well, one a little quirky, and one terribly. However, one thing that struck me in retrospect was that the sales team in all three organizations always talked about how much they loved Highspot. This is in contrast to massively popular sales tools like Salesforce. When implement well, Salesforce can be a powerful tool for enhancing a sales team. Implemented poorly…I’ve seen sales teams go to great effort to create work arounds to avoid it entirely. Highspot seems to delight sales teams no matter what.

Why does it exist?

There are various channels to reach a customer or for a customer to discovery a product. This is great for  dramatically increasing the number of potential customers in the pipeline. However it also increases the the effort to qualify those potential customers into those which should be persued. Combine this with the different variations of content which are shared with customers; product datasheets, teaser videos, product demo, customer use case whitepapers. Every good sales professional knows the best time to follow up with a customer is when they are already looking at your product materials, but how do you know when that is?

What did the sales team share with customer A, and when did customer B actually watch that product demo video?

The number of things to keep track of for all the different potential customers quickly becomes mind bending. Managing content and customer touchpoints are the problems Highspot targets to solve for sales users.

Who are the targeted users? What problem are they solving for?

Since Highspot is a sales enablement platform, it almost goes without saying that the platform is primarily designed for sales and marketing teams. But more specifically; the Highspot platform focuses on all the content sales and marketing teams use to be successful. It allows users to present content in a variety of formats, offers real-time customer engagement visualization, results analysis, and integrating directly with popular CRM systems like Salesforce.

Highspot then helps connect sales teams with understanding of what their most effective content is. A salesperson then optimizes content to present materials focused on the personalized customer needs, with tracking to understand the users engagement.

According to some customers, Highspot is doing a pretty good job at it too. For instance, Global Sales Enablement Manager Shamis Thomson says that the platform allows them to analyze content and rep activity quickly, thus enabling them to continue learning, improving, and growing revenue.

Using the Highspot Sales Enablement Tool

It can never be stressed enough the tremendous amount of value of sales enablement. Even the best products in the world disappear if the customers who would love, them never learn about them.

The important thing is to avoid “boiling the ocean” right away. First identify the most painful challenges holding back sales efforts from connecting with interested customers. Once these challenges are sorted out, and the system is working successfully, extend into new areas.

Highspot is deployed in three phases: develop, launch, and operate. Develop phase entails planning, which is determining project scope, the design which is defining how content will be organized according to the buyer’s journey, and lastly, implementation, which is basically adding the content to the solutions and integrating with other systems.

Launch phase, on the other hand, includes validation of the solution, which is testing the solution with selected members of the targeted audience. Also, this phase involves training user communities like admins, sellers, and analysts. The last activity carried out in the launch phase is rolling out the solution, which is going live with the solution and making it easily accessible.

In the last phase, managing, analyzing, and optimizing are carried out. Managing is about making sure key content is available and up to date. It also entails tracking the solution’s health and how it has been adopted. Analyzing involves tracking activity and measuring engagement while optimizing is all about maximizing the business impact of the tool and training investments.

Major components of Highspot Sales Enablement Tool

Highspot sales enablement tool gives a variety of capabilities to optimize the way sales teams interact with customers and seal deals. All of these components are designed to give teams the resources and knowledge to make the most of every engagement with a potential client. These components include:

Content management and publishing component

This capability allows sales teams to manage all the content they need enabling effective customer interactions.

Pitching

Highspot allows sales reps to do email and live pitching. With email pitching, a rep know when and how often a customer interacts with the content emailed to them. Email pitching also comes with email templates, rich text formatting, CRM integration, activity notification, etc. Live pitching allows sales reps to present live to customers by sharing his/her screen in person or over the internet.

Training and onboarding

Organizations can develop training materials in different formats and media using authoring tool support with the ability to make recommendations based on a user’s role, team, current activity, and previous training. Highspot can also integrate with other systems to support employees and sales processes.  For instance, it can integrate with systems used to set and track team and employee goals or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). This has the potential to help employees make clear progress toward their goals all year long and not some disconnected annual review.

What are the “next best alternative” users use to solve the problem?

There are numerous sales enablement software options available to help with content creation, templates, advanced search, and customer tracking. But then you need to find out first whether the software you choose will serve you right. Some other alternatives to Highspot include Guru, ClearSlide, Seismic, DocSend, MindTickle, among others. The main difference to each of the alternatives is their focus on very specific sub-niche’s related to marketing and sales materials.

According to reviewer ratings, Highspot is one of the leading platforms in the market right now. With Highspot’s focus on solving key sales team challenges it is no wonder it has been rated number one across the G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and the AppExchange.