Highspot Snags $60M to Help Sales Professionals Refine Their Pitches
Highspot, a startup developing collaborative software for sales and marketing teams at large companies, announced Tuesday it has raised $ 60 million from investors.
San Francisco-based Iconiq Capital led the Series D funding round, and was joined by new investor Sapphire Ventures, Highspot says. Other participants included return backers Madrona Venture Group, OpenView, Shasta Ventures, and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) Ventures, the investing arm of the customer relationship management software behemoth.
Highspot was co-founded in 2012 by a team that included CEO Robert Wahbe, a former Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) vice president in the company’s server and tools business. The startup says it is growing quickly, with hundreds of businesses using Highspot’s products and services and its customer count, revenues, and headcount doubling on a year-over-year basis.
The startup’s software helps sales teams at large companies pick pieces of marketing content to pitch to customers. At many such organizations, the marketing department is tasked with creating content that the salespeople send to customers in hopes of engaging them and eventually, closing deals. This content may consist of brochures, case studies, data sheets, presentations, white papers, and other media.
Highspot’s products track how customers interact with the content they receive from salespeople, who get real-time feedback on their pitches. The startup’s software monitors what email recipients do, if anything, with messages and attachments that land in their inboxes. The software can tell, for example, whether the recipient clicked on a link within a message, or forwarded it on to a colleague. For emails with attachments—a PowerPoint presentation, say—Highspot’s software can track whether the recipient opened the attachment, looked at a specific slide within the presentation, and other information.
Highspot’s software, which is designed for both computers and mobile devices, integrates with Salesforce to track whether a given piece of content helped or hindered a sale. That data can be funneled back into Highspot and pooled with other information its customer organizations have on file to score the effectiveness of a particular piece of content. Over time, other salespeople can see what content is working for certain types of customers, feedback that marketing teams can take into account for future campaigns. The goal is an ongoing cycle that makes content more effective and precisely targeted.
“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,” Wahbe says in a prepared statement.
Other software products, including Slack and Microsoft Teams, can also be configured to work with Highspot, the startup says.
The new financing comes less than a year after Highspot announced its $35 million Series C round, in September. The startup also raised funding rounds of $15 million and $9.6 million in 2017 and 2014, respectively.
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