OpenView Leads Highspot’s $35M Series C Funding
September 24, 2018
We’re thrilled to welcome Highspot to the OpenView family as we lead their $35M Series C. Highspot is the leading sales enablement platform that helps world-class brands like Amazon, Aetna, Dropbox and Starbucks optimize, organize and share sales collateral.
When technologists and investors idealize about revolutionizing archaic workflows, rarely do they consider the sales and marketing tech stack. They focus on vertical solutions in old-line industries like manufacturing, real estate and legal, all the while assuming sales professionals have had a front row seat to the latest and greatest solutions. You can’t blame them. Anecdotally, it feels like the sales ecosystem has been barraged with a flurry of tools that claim to optimize their funnel or improve their win rates. But empirically, observe any sales rep and you’ll notice their practices are riddled with inefficiencies based on old tricks that have been deeply ingrained.
That’s especially true when it comes to leveraging marketing-generated collateral throughout the funnel. Today, reps spend hours each week on the administrative burden of finding and building content to win over customers. They rely on general-purpose CMSs that house thousands of assets without any direction as to what has the highest probability of driving success. In turn, they recycle different form factors of the same four or five assets they’ve grown comfortable with.
Further upstream, marketing teams are forced to create new content without a structured feedback loop. They build decks and publish case studies based on what gets them excited rather than what’s proven effective because there hasn’t historically been a method to analyze adoption or content attribution. As a result, 60% of the assets they build go untouched by sales teams. Let that sink in. That’s time that would be better spent on the beach or, even better, creating additional content that can really drive win rates.
It’s a broken process that creates a massive opportunity for Highspot to get reps back to what they do best: sell.
Highspot’s sales enablement engine processes and organizes large volumes of content, makes it instantaneously searchable and shareable, and provides analytics on content usage and effectiveness. Its integrations with all major CMS, CRM, engagement, web conferencing and LMS providers aim to simplify reps’ lives rather than add complexity like most new tools do. Moreover, Highspot is an intelligent platform that changes the paradigm of leveraging collateral from pull to push. Their system surfaces content recommendations for specific product lines, customer segments and deal stage based on signals of what’s historically driven progress through the funnel.
It’s hard to overstate the value an intelligent sales enablement platform can have across all teams under the revenue category. There’s a reason virtually zero customers have ever churned from Highspot, and our belief is that in ten years, the lack of a sales enablement platform will feel to revenue teams as the CRM does today: a necessary utility whose absence makes doing your job feel next to impossible.
Seizing that opportunity takes bold visionaries with relentless grit and industry knowhow manifested in deep empathy for the end user. Highspot cofounders Robert, Oliver and David embody all of that and more. We’re honored to join them on their journey to define the category, and excited to once again partner with our friends at Madrona and Shasta.