How DemandScience Grew New Hire Closed Revenue by 72%

DemandScience is a global leader in B2B data and pipeline growth. Prior to Highspot, DemandScience relied on grassroots information sharing. As it grew, so did the need for a scalable platform. “I moved into our first sales enablement role, and my first task was to identify a content management platform,” says Jeff Gunderson, director of sales enablement and training at DemandScience. Gunderson decided on Highspot, and it turned out to be a prescient choice. “Highspot offered the content management we needed now as well as training capabilities I knew we would need in the future,” he says. “I’m happy to say our needs matured with Highspot and we grew into the platform.”

Realising the Need for a Unified Platform

When Gunderson set out to find a new platform for sales reps at DemandScience, the foremost goal was to get content management under control. “Content management was a pain point the whole company was aware of,” says Gunderson. Often, new pitch decks were sent out in mass emails, and documents were stored on individual desktops. “There was no easy way to get aligned on the latest materials,” says Gunderson. “We even realised that, six months after a rebrand from PureB2B, people were still using materials associated with the old brand.” Keeping content up to date was a constant headache. “For years, the process was to email out pitch decks, and then mass email everyone again just to fix a typo,” remembers Gunderson.

While content management was the most pressing issue, Gunderson was also eager to find a learning platform. “I realised that, with Highspot, I could kill two birds with one stone,” he says. “What started as a quest for better content management grew into a realisation that we could onboard and train new reps efficiently all from one platform.”

Highspot Evolves Alongside the Business

As a quickly growing business in need of a scalable sales-enablement solution, DemandScience gravitated to Highspot as the platform that could evolve and grow with the business. “We’ve outgrown a lot of tech over the years,” says Gunderson. “With Highspot, it feels like there is always something new.” In one case of synchronicity, just as they were beginning to search for a learning management system (LMS), Highspot debuted a new training capability, Training and Coaching. “It’s one less piece of tech we have to roll out,” notes Gunderson. “I’m trying to cut down on the number of vendors we use and utilise what we already have. Highspot is a diverse platform that has helped us consolidate really well.” Not only does standardising on a single unified platform help DemandScience save costs, reps’ lives are easier when all the tools they need are in one place. “It means one less thing for people to navigate,” says Gunderson.

Gunderson is a fan of creating custom homepages for various user groups in Highspot—a feature he says helps the platform feel more personalised. “I like that it doesn’t have to be one size fits all,” he says. “When international sellers log in to Highspot, or when marketing folks log in, it feels like it was built for them.” SmartPages are another stand-out feature at DemandScience; in his roleas Director of Training, Gunderson uses a “new hire playbook” SmartPage tohelp new sales reps understand their role. “We use a SmartPage to embed video and all the information new hires need to hit the sales floor,” he says. “By the time they begin their first day, they know exactly what to do.” And, the existence of the SmartPages feature helped Gunderson consolidate yet again, replacing LucidChart with a capability available directly in Highspot.

Transforming the Go-To-Market Strategy

In the two plus years DemandScience has been using Highspot, the results have more than proven the value of the tool. “Highspot really helped us with our go-to-market strategy,” says Gunderson. “Instead of having endless team meetings and training, we used Highspot to get everyone ready in two weeks. In the past the same process would have taken more than a month.”

What started as a group of 30 users has grown to over 300. “Highspot has been instrumental in helping us grow our organisation,” says Gunderson. New hires use the tool, and the “new hire playbook” SmartPage, to ramp up faster. “Before Highspot and before the playbook, new hires were selling an average $58,000dollars in their first three months. Today that number is over $100,000,” says Gunderson. “That’s almost 100 percent year on year growth, due in large part to the use of Highspot.” And, DemandScience has leapt to the top 15 spot in RepVue’s assessment of B2B SaaS companies in the training and professional development category. Gunderson attributes the impressive rating to one thing: a great team who understood the value in the execution and management of the Highspot platform. The sales team also tracks opportunities along with revenue, another figure that grew when reps began to use Highspot. “On average, new hires created27 new opportunities in their first six months. After using Highspot, that number jumped by 44% percent.”

Today, Gunderson turns to Highspot to easily identify gaps in content and keep information fresh and relevant. “I can go into Highspot and quickly see what’s missing from our content repository,” says Gunderson. “For example, I can see if we don’t have anything in a particular category, like operations, and make sure we create content to fill that gap.” Greater visibility extends to who is engaging with content and taking initiative. “I see a definite correlation between high-achieving reps and a willingness to jump in and engage with Highspot,” says Gunderson. And, perhaps most gratifying is the way reps use LMS content live on sales calls, as scripted. “I can see reps are doing what they practised in the LMS, that’s been really strong,” says Gunderson.