Traditional sales practices no longer apply. Now is the time to adopt modern tools and processes to sustain through the downturn.
Today marks our Summer 2020 Release, bringing to bear robust enterprise capabilities that empower revenue teams to make every customer conversation count. The new features improve sales performance, empower digital selling and virtual enablement, and deliver an unmatched Salesforce experience.
What’s perhaps most unique about this product release is the environment in which it has been delivered. COVID-19 has changed our lives. The future remains uncertain. However, your business still has goals, and your potential customers still have challenges. Connecting the two requires fresh thinking and execution.
Selling in Today’s Environment
In Gartner’s new report “Top CRM Sales Technologies for the New Realities of Selling in the COVID-19,” analysts explain the sales challenges brought on by the global pandemic.
Gartner continues to recommend leveraging the power of sales enablement in the current landscape: “Sales enablement solutions can provide great value to sellers, as they are enabled to address new ways of selling. Without face-to-face meetings, sellers will need to rely on alternative technologies to communicate with their prospects and to assess buyers’ commitment to deals.”
For many businesses, new customer acquisition is now more difficult than ever. In parallel to sales efforts to land new customers, your business is undoubtedly doubling down on your existing customer base — doing everything possible to delight and retain your base. The good news: Sales enablement can uplevel both of these motions, giving sellers the ability to maximize each prospect conversation while giving account managers, services, and customer success personnel the ability to more deeply engage existing customers with delightful experiences and valuable insights.
How Our Customers Are Maximizing the Power of Sales Enablement
Amidst the shift to a potentially long-term use of digitized selling and virtual enablement, we heard firsthand from our customers about the new obstacles they were facing in the field.
Our product enhancements are designed to help them sustain revenue streams in the near-term — and position their business to thrive in the long term. As these features have rolled out, we’ve received both quantitative and qualitative feedback in the form of increased Highspot platform usage, reviews on third-party sites, and competitive switches. Customers are reporting industry-leading levels of success and satisfaction driven by the accelerating innovation, demonstrated in Highspot recently earning the number one ranking in Momentum and Customer Satisfaction on G2’s Summer Reports. And in the last year and a half, more than 47 companies have switched from competitive platforms.
Let’s take a closer look at how customers across industries and geographies are using sales enablement to their advantage.
Improve Revenue Team Performance
The new selling reality requires next-level efficiency and effectiveness as companies transition from in-office to a virtual work environment. A rampant challenge in the enterprise is platform fatigue and the inefficiency that stems from jumping from tool to tool — this challenge is only exacerbated in a digital world.
Integrations present a solution to this problem. When your sales enablement platform seamlessly integrates with other applications, such as your CRM, salespeople have everything they need at their fingertips. This is one of many reasons why Highspot continues to deepen its investment in supporting Salesforce’s expanding product suite. From our new Quip integration to Content Targeting, we are proud to offer our customers an unparalleled Salesforce experience that has led to Highspot being the most reviewed and highest rated enablement platform on AppExchange.
Additional product updates that help revenue teams perform better in their existing workflows include new enhanced integrations with Turtl, Prezi, and vPlaybook, along with a deeper integration with Brainshark that allows customers to access Brainshark Coaching from directly within Highspot.
Uplevel Customer Experience Through Personalized, Digitized Selling
As our VP of Product Jon White says, “The ability to deliver tangible customer value by solving real problems is what separates great products from good products. More than ever, revenue teams need to authentically connect with buyers wherever they are.”
Even before COVID-19, modern buyers expected salespeople to provide a personalized, value-driven experience. Now with an even noisier digital space and a plethora of online channels, sellers need a way to cut through the clutter and delight prospects at every stage of the journey — this is accelerating the transition from traditional “spray-and-pray” outreach tactics to personalized pitching.
To stand out from the crowd, sellers are leveraging Highspot’s AI-infused technology to augment their human touch. In fact, since customers embraced digital selling in early March, Highspot has seen a 62% increase in the use of its Pitching feature. What’s more, reps are visually enhancing their outreach with one of Highspot’s latest updates — PowerPoint and Google Slides viewed or presented from Highspot now support embedded animated GIFs, videos, and audio files.
Turn Revenue Strategies into Action with Virtual Enablement
Sellers require more than great content and compelling pitches to win over buyers — they need guidance that helps them understand what to know, say, show, and do to make every customer conversation count.
Using Highspot’s industry-only SmartPage technology, enablement teams can create dynamic sales plays that pair interactive content alongside guidance. When sellers are prepared to add value, it not only increases the likelihood of deal progression, but builds customer loyalty that lasts.
In the current climate, SmartPages and the Guidance Framework have been game-changers for customers of all industries and sizes, which is why our Highspot team is committed to making this technology even better. With new SmartPage customization capabilities that arrived with the Summer ‘20 release, content publishers have more flexibility in creating engaging and usable experiences that help reps find the right content for the right conversation.
Sales Success Tomorrow Starts with Today
We are all navigating a different world than we were a few months ago — and the decisions we make now define our future success. For every unknown, there is a definitive action that can be taken today to prepare your company to weather the unpredictability of tomorrow. For our Highspot team, the commitment we make every day is to deliver enablement technology that people love.
Take action now by reading about transformative technologies and approaches to engaging customers in a digital world in Gartner’s “Market Guide for Sales Engagement Platforms.”
