Highspot nabs $9.6M to enter more customers' minds with the right content

“Getting inside the mind of the customer.”

That’s the goal cloud-based sales engagement platform Highspot has set for itself, by helping salespeople find, share, and repurpose content — brochures, slide presentations, product sheets, and the like — for customers. Today, the Seattle-based company announced it has raised $9.6 million so its platform can help enter more customers’ minds.

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“Marketing produces a lot of content, and sales grabs the most appropriate content and shows it to the customer,” CEO and cofounder Robert Wahbe told VentureBeat.

The problem, he said, is that marketing often doesn’t know what sales is doing — and neither of them know if the content is effective. The company’s platform is designed to get the most appropriate marketing materials to sales and then to customers, Wahbe said.

The idea of Highspot, he said, is to “help companies have better conversations with their customers, and help customers have a more relevant experience.”

A key differentiator Highspot uses to distinguish itself from such competitors as Brainshark, Clearslide, and Fileboard is its machine learning, which scores content on how well that material convinces customers to make the purchase. There are also such tools as intelligent search of content, recommendations of similar content, and alerts about how customers are engaging with provided content.

What about content that has multiple versions? Wahbe said his system makes judgments about what versions are essentially the same and which are different enough to be scored separately.

The Series A funding, led by Madrona Venture Group, will be used for product development to add some of the most asked-for features and for increasing sales, in part by hiring more salespeople.