Starting from the point they first contact a prospect, salespeople rely on presentations and other carefully crafted marketing materials to underpin their value propositions. A Seattle-based startup called Highspot Inc. argues that analytics can go a long way toward making such content more compelling.

Its pitch has attracted a $15 million investment from Shasta Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Madrona Venture Group that was announced today. The capital will help widen the adoption of Highspot’s namesake content management platform, which provides an environment where sales and marketing teams can collaborate on creative assets.

At the heart of the service is a reporting console that provides the ability to quantify the effectiveness of each item. Highspot enables users to check what percentage of recipients open an email or presentation and how many went on to download complementary materials. It also offers visibility into other relevant engagement metrics. Salespeople can carry over key elements from their company’s most successful content into other assets to make them more convincing. 

Improving open rates by a few percentage points here or there has the potential to make a big impact across an organization. To help customers make the most out of the feature, Highspot offers several complementary features designed to ease the task of distributing sales content.

The first is a dashboard through which salespeople can customize how sales materials are presented to make them more appealing. Highspot provides a choice between embedding content directly in an email, which is facilitated by a built-in design tool, or share items through a web-based presentation app. Over on the backend, the platform enables team leads check that the different content assets used by their peers are consistent with the company message.

This extensive feature set helped Highspot triple the size of its customer base over the past year. The startup now works with more than 100 companies, including Starbucks Corp., Booking.com B.V. and Nvidia Corp.

Image: Highspot