How HackerOne Took Active Learning to 99%

Economic Forces Inspire New Approach

Recurring market volatility led HackerOne to realize it needed to architect a future-proof sales technology stack. “Right now, from a go-to-market perspective, we’re all struggling to figure out how to repeat year-over-year growth and get back to equilibrium,” explained Tiffany Jones, vice president of sales strategy and field operations at HackerOne. “Often, the revenue operations part of the organization gets swept under the rug when it comes to thinking about the solutions for this.” As HackerOne realized, revenue operations is essential in this endeavor, capable of supplying the back-end strategy that powers sales productivity, no matter the market condition.

As such, HackerOne sought a solution that could help its revenue teams hone both their strategy and existing processes. “Productivity starts with the sales process, thinking through what you actually want your sales team to do on a day-to-day basis — how you want them to interact with customers, with other people internally, and with your tools,” shared Jones. “You need it to not only work from a theoretical perspective, but you need the backend architecture of your systems to work together to deliver that experience for them to operate in.” In short: It needed a solution that could organically guide reps to align with its processes and perform desired behaviors. 

To curate a tech stack that did so, HackerOne knew it needed to prioritize both user experience and business value. “It’s about optimizing the experience for sellers so that you’re asking them to do what’s most beneficial for not only themselves but also the company — and do so with the right tools at the right time,” continued Jones. Redesigning its tech stack to secure future growth would be a challenging process, but for HackerOne, Highspot’s intuitive, integrated platform offered a solution.  

Strategic Architecture Powers Productivity

In hopes of creating a technology stack that could adapt to new challenges and weather the storm of continually changing marketing conditions, HackerOne chose Highspot. In its view, Highspot’s unified platform brought together once-disconnected processes into a single source of truth that reps actually wanted to use. For the team, standardizing seller execution required a customizable platform that could map to the needs of the organization while providing the style of support that resonated with reps. 

To find that right-fit tool, HackerOne had to consider what that might look like for both the business and its teams. “Does your tool meet sellers where they’re at?” asked Jones. “Does it fit into that sales process appropriately?” By integrating directly with its CRM and other tools, Highspot provided that right-fit alignment to both strategy and process — a successful match that 88% of reps quickly began to consistently use. “The reality of measurement is: How much is my team on the platform?” explained Jones. “How much are they actually using it? Are they doing it because I’m forcing them into it, or are they doing it because it’s where they want to be?” 

Highspot’s native analytics empowered HackerOne to answer this question. With instant insights into engagement, usage, and impact, its teams can better understand how their efforts support its strategy and processes and, from there, drive consistency in the field. With that data, HackerOne can tell that sellers aren’t using the platform because they have been mandated to — they’re using it because they recognize its value. For instance, once HackerOne began creating Sales Plays to provide standardized support for every selling scenario, Play adoption quickly rose by 68%. It’s just one example of how HackerOne’s new enablement architecture is simultaneously simplifying workflows and building a future-proof sales force equipped to operate amid uncertainty. 

Future-proof System Paves a Path Forward

HackerOne customized its Highspot instance to align with its ideal systems architecture. In doing so, it has offered more opportunities for collaboration between its revenue operations and enablement teams, which are working together to create new support and processes that power sales performance and productivity. “It’s not a waterfall effect where someone’s working on this, and the next team takes it over,” explained Jones. “They very much partner hand-in-hand to deliver an optimized solution for the sales team.”

With a tech stack designed to increase process alignment and support reps’ needs, HackerOne has created an engaging workflow architecture that has transformed 99% of reps into active learners. With high usage and adoption across the board — and the data to prove it — it’s clear HackerOne’s curated tech stack is driving new engagement and, in doing so, creating future-proof teams ready to rise to any challenge. As the sales landscape continues to change, HackerOne is already making plans to evolve its architecture to adapt alongside it. “We’re very much in the discovery phase of what works for us with AI,” concluded Jones. “For us, it’s about using the tools we’ve seen to be smarter about our content governance.”