The last mile of the customer journey is critical – it’s the final stretch that decides if a deal is won or lost and if a relationship is forged or broken. The deciding factor at this critical juncture is simple – conversation.
Human-to-human conversation creates a connection and is the cornerstone of customer experience. And today, when you can get anything with the click of a button, experience is a key differentiator.
Every business-to-business company faces the challenge of delivering incredible customer experiences. Solving the challenge begins with people-centricity. At Highspot, putting people first is in our core. It’s why our sales enablement platform is the highest user-rated technology in our category. It’s why hundreds of companies use our platform to have compelling conversations that lead to lasting relationships. And, today, it’s why we’ve reached another important milestone – we’ve closed our $60 million Series D.
The renowned investment team at ICONIQ led the round, with participation from new investor Sapphire Ventures and all our existing investors. We’re grateful for their confidence and support. Now we can push even harder to uplift customer conversations – across different geographies, deep into new industries – and make enablement the new frontier for customer experience.
Transforming the Way Millions Work
Modern sales enablement is helping go-to-market teams have dramatically better customer engagements than ever before, resulting in increased value for buyers and higher revenue growth for businesses. Sales enablement has moved from nice-to-have to must-have – Gartner predicts that by 2021, 15% of all sales technology spending will be applied to sales enablement technology, up from the 2017 level of 7.2%.
Despite the skyrocketing demand, we’ve only scratched the surface. There are 20 million sales and marketing people around the globe who need sales enablement, and we’re here to help them for years to come.
But we see something even bigger at play. No matter the industry, geography, or organisation size, it’s a universal truth that throughout the sales process, sellers are dealing with humans – and those humans deserve an amazing experience, which takes more than sales and marketing alone.
Sales enablement is big. Where the category goes will be huge. We see enablement expanding to help at least 50 million people across sales, marketing, services, and support roles collaborate and deliver on their customer experience initiatives. Enablement technology, practices, and teams will unify everyone who interacts with the customer as holistic customer experience defines business success today and tomorrow.
Taking a People-First Approach
The modern marketplace is littered with tools and technologies that help sellers and marketers work faster and smarter. While the Highspot solution succeeds in helping teams be more efficient and effective, the real power of our platform is in making our customers trusted advisors to their customers. Our AI-powered platform brings together content, guidance, engagement capabilities, and deep analytics to help teams cultivate long-term customer relationships, giving them a true competitive advantage.
What’s exciting is that our core technology can be naturally extended to empower anyone who interacts with a customer. From cross-team alignment to unified analytics, there will be tremendous benefits to expanding what is now called sales enablement to all customer-facing functions in the coming years. As our company and software evolve to advance the category, people-centricity will remain at the root of everything we do.
We also know that products don’t build themselves – brilliant minds do. We’re increasingly investing in growing our team of experts who understand machine learning, AI, and cloud, and who have a deep sense of customer delight. Our employee headcount has doubled year-over-year, and we predict we’ll be 400 people strong by the end of our fiscal year. Maintaining our award-winning culture as we scale is a top priority, and we’re excited to do this in style from our newly leased HQ on the Seattle waterfront – a space that we feel will energise and inspire our team.
Inventing the Future
In the simplest terms, better experiences mean better relationships, which translates to better business. People value people – whether you’re a seller reaching out to a buyer, a marketer designing content for your sales team, or an entrepreneur creating technology that helps teams be their best.
The next chapter has begun. We invite you to join us as we invent a future where people come first.
