AI-powered sales enablement startup Highspot raises $35 million to fuel global expansion in rapidly growing market

If you don’t work in sales, chances are you don’t really have a good understanding of the term sales enablement. Every for-profit organization has a sales team or sales department. Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping the sales teams or organization with the information, content, and tools that help sales people sell more effectively. Sales enablement analytics provide marketing and sales teams with data-driven insights to optimize their business and drive revenue. Highspot is a Seattle-based startup that helps businesses modernize their sales and marketing by giving them a powerful sales advantage to engage in more relevant buyer conversations and achieve their revenue goals.

Today, Highspot announced it has closed a $35 million Series C round to fuel market expansion as demand for sales enablement skyrockets. The latest round is led by new investor OpenView with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Salesforce Ventures and Shasta Ventures. To date, Highspot has raised a total of $64 million in funding. The startup will use the new investment to fuel its market expansion.

Founded in 2012 by David Wortendyke, Oliver Sharp, Robert Wahbe, and Scot Gellock, Highspot is the industry’s most advanced sales enablement platform, helping organizations close the loop across marketing, sales, and the customer. Through AI-powered search, analytics, in-context training, guided selling, and 50+ technology integrations, the Highspot platform delivers enterprise-ready sales enablement in a modern design that sales reps and marketers love. Using Highspot, sales teams can quickly find the best-performing content, and customize it for each opportunity—while marketers gain insights on content use and effectiveness to develop a data-driven strategy. Highspot has 90 percent average monthly recurring usage and global support in 125 countries.

The demand for sales enablement technology has skyrocketed, with the percentage of companies with a dedicated enablement person, program or function having increased by 180 percent last year, according to the 2017 CSO Insights Sales Enablement Optimization Report.

With the company’s deep understanding of the market need, superior technology and customer-first focus, Highspot has seen more than 300 percent user growth year-over-year and experiences 90 percent adoption and usage on average.

“Highspot is the ideal investment for us, given our firm’s focus on product led growth and rapid market expansion,” said Blake Bartlett, a Partner at OpenView who will join Highspot’s Board of Directors. “After speaking with Highspot’s customers, it was clear that the company is changing the sales enablement landscape in a fundamental way by creating a product that is indispensable to a seller’s daily workflow.”

Highspot is helping companies win more business and achieve unparalleled ROI on sales content and training investments by solving crucial needs for sales, sales enablement and marketing teams. With Highspot’s best-in-class enablement capabilities, teams can effectively organize, personalize, discover and share content. Highspot’s platform also provides the capabilities to prepare sellers for any conversation with readiness materials, engage buyers with personalized content and track engagement, and identify and optimize best practices with end-to-end analytics.

“Having achieved a leadership position in the sales enablement space, Highspot is poised to scale globally,” said Robert Wahbe, Highspot co-founder and CEO. “Our growing team is attracting industry top talent, which is accelerating innovation and fueling our hyper growth. We are excited to partner with OpenView, and we look forward to taking our sales enablement solution that sales reps and marketers love to new markets.”

Sales and marketing leaders now regard sales enablement as a competitive necessity and a new standard for doing business, as B2B buyers expect more from their engagements with sellers. CSO Insights reports that salespeople at companies with a formal sales enablement charter achieve 1.3 times higher quota attainment than those approaching sales enablement informally.

As a leading platform for enterprise companies, Highspot stands apart with artificial intelligence technology that powers industry-leading search and recommendations, a flexible approach to content organization, advanced analytics, dynamic guided selling experiences and more than 50 certified technology integrations.

“Highspot discovered a market pain point and answered with an innovative, advanced sales enablement solution,” said Matt Garratt, Managing Partner at Salesforce Ventures. “We are proud to be partnered with a pioneering company that has highlighted the importance of sales enablement.”

The investment has followed a year of notable achievements for Highspot, including being recognized as the Best Sales Enablement Platform and the Best Content Management Platform by the CODiE Awards, winning the MarTech Breakthrough Awards’ Best Overall Sales Enablement Solution category, earning recognition as one of Seattle’s Best 100 Companies to Work For and being named a LinkedIn Top 50 Startup.