DemandScience Creates Its First Sales Enablement Function With Highspot

DemandScience is a global leader in B2B data and pipeline growth. Yet, the company that is focused on helping others grow struggled to address the challenges of rapid growth. DemandScience had a small sales team that relied on grassroots information sharing and a lot of institutional knowledge. “Everything on the sales team was very much ‘hey, do you have that document?’” remembers Jeff Gunderson, Director of Sales Enablement and Training at DemandScience. “When you are a small team, you can get away with that.” However, as the business grew, so did the need for a content management platform that would bring scalability to the sales function. “That lone wolf mindset isn’t replicable when you want to hire more people and fit them into a process,” says Gunderson.

Fast forward to 2019, when DemandScience created a brand-new sales enablement function and began the search for a new platform that ultimately led to Highspot. “I moved into our first sales enablement role, and my first task was to identify a content management platform,” says Gunderson. After evaluating other tools, including Dropbox and VOX, Gunderson decided on Highspot in large part for its scalability. “I knew that, as a sales team, we were going in a certain ramped up direction,” he says. “Highspot offered the content management we needed in the here, and now as well as training capabilities I knew we would need in the future.” It turned out to be a prescient choice. Says Gunderson: “I’m happy to say our needs matured with Highspot, and we grew into the platform.”

A quest to improve content management and employee learning all from a single 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 realized 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 realized 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 realization that we could onboard and train new reps efficiently all from one platform.”

“It feels like there is always something new” – 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 utilize what we already have. Highspot is a diverse platform that has helped us consolidate really well.” Not only does standardizing 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.