Commerce

Highspot raises $60 million to apply AI to sales enablement


Highspot, which bills itself as an AI-driven sales enablement platform vendor, today announced that it’s secured $60 million in series D financing led by Iconiq Capital, with participation from Sapphire Ventures and existing investors Madrona Venture Group, OpenView, Salesforce Ventures, and Shasta Ventures. CEO Robert Wahbe said the infusion of fresh capital, which doubles Highspot’s total raised to over $120 million following a $35 million series C round last September, comes as the company’s revenue, customer base, and employee count continue to double year-over-year.

“Enablement is the new customer battleground,” said Wahbe, a 16-year Microsoft veteran who launched Highspot in 2012 with former colleagues Oliver Sharp, David Wortendyke, and Scott Gellock. “Yesterday’s sales technology was all about systems of record and workflow. Now, all customer-facing teams need a system of truth for content that makes them trusted advisors to their own customers. This is what Highspot does, giving our users a real competitive advantage in today’s market.”

Toward that end, Highspot’s AWS-hosted suite of tools leverage AI-powered semantic search, in-context training, guided selling, and over 50 integrations with products like Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to generate playbooks, custom seller and buyer experiences, and deep analytics. Its algorithms analyze historical data, data sheets, marketing presentations, brochures, training videos, case studies, and other company materials for effectiveness, and inform recommendations regarding ways the selling process might be optimized. Additionally, Highspot provides communication tools to streamline talks and closes with current and prospective clients, and its dashboards enable sellers to see how buyers might interact with sales content and walk them through guided experiences (such as interactive sales plays) designed to aid with meetings and pitches.

Highspot

Above: Highspot’s cloud-hosted dashboard.

Image Credit: Highspot

Moreover, Highspot delivers insights about what content sales teams and team members are using, and it tracks modified content back to its original source so that usage and engagement analytics aren’t lost along the way. All this data feeds into prebuilt and custom reports for ongoing business optimization.

Highspot has sales enablement rivals in platform vendors like Guru, Seismic, and Showpad in a market that’s anticipated to be worth $2.6 billion by 2024, and it’s not letting the competition get the best of it. Highspot claims that “hundreds” of companies in software, financial services, manufacturing, and life science currently use its solutions, including heavy-hitting brands like Aetna, Siemens, Zillow, Twilio, Redhat, TripAdvisor, Hootsuite, Starbucks, Monster, Adobe, Twitter, Dropbox, Workday, Apptio, Procore, Dun & Bradstreet, Milliken, Playcore, SAP Concur, and Fiserv. Furthermore, the company says it’s seeing 90% average monthly recurring usage across a userbase in 125 countries.

“Highspot epitomizes our core focus on clear product leaders that can make a global impact,” said Iconiq general partner Matthew Jacobson, who intends to join Highspot’s board of directors as part of this latest funding round. “They’re poised to capitalize on two major technology trends — ongoing marketing automation and increasing adoption of AI for sales — and usher in a renaissance of sales and marketing productivity.”

Highspot is based in Seattle, Washington, where it last year leased a new 55,000-square-foot space to complement its existing offices in the city, and it recently opened a headquarters in London.

Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday.



READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.