Highspot Strengthens Executive Team Amidst Record Business Growth
Four experienced leaders join company to drive innovation, customer experience and operational excellence
Highspot, the sales enablement platform that increases the performance of sales teams, today announced the expansion of its leadership team with four industry leaders across engineering, product, account management, revenue strategy and sales. Their deep functional expertise will further extend the company’s category leadership as millions of users leverage the Highspot platform to drive scalable, predictable revenue growth.
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Demand for sales enablement is skyrocketing as companies around the world embrace a remote or hybrid work model, and Highspot platform usage has more than doubled over the past year. “Gartner estimates that revenue in the sales enablement market came to $1.7 billion in 2020, an increase of approximately 12.1 percent over the prior year. Relative to the overall category of sales which was down to 10.9 percent growth, sales enablement is a high-growth segment within the overall sales category.” (Gartner®, Market Guide for Sales Enablement Platforms, 2021)*.
“Fueling our People Engine with top talent is the foundation of our strategy.”
“Fueling our People Engine with top talent is the foundation of our strategy,” said Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot. “These proven leaders will further enrich our vibrant company culture and play an instrumental role in achieving our vision of transforming the way millions of people work.”
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Highspot’s four strategic hires include:
- Arvind Prakash, Vice President, Product Management: As a global product and technology leader, Prakash joins Highspot to accelerate product innovation and solve complex customer challenges through technology. Prakash brings an entrepreneurial spirit and more than 20 years of experience partnering with diverse stakeholders to set product vision and strategy. Previously at Compass, Expedia Group and Microsoft, he built and led teams to successfully incept and ship innovative products to solve customer needs and deliver tangible business results.
- John Zhang, Vice President, Engineering: Zhang comes to Highspot with deep engineering and product expertise gained from prior roles at Microsoft, Twitter and Weibo. As the General Manager at Weibo, Zhang led a team of more than 300 software engineers, data scientists, product managers, operations managers and UX designers, where he was responsible for a technology portfolio that contributed 90 percent of Weibo’s total revenue, equaling $1.5 billion annual revenue.
- Julie Valenti, Vice President, Account Management: Valenti has spent more than 20 years building effective customer-facing teams as a customer success leader at DocuSign, Oracle, Responsys and Yesmail. Having experienced how important effective employee enablement is for driving a company’s strategic initiatives, Valenti’s focus is on delighting Highspot’s customers and helping them achieve value-driven results.
- Kelly Lewis, Vice President, Revenue Enablement: Lewis brings more than 15 years of experience in revenue leadership and technology sales. Lewis joined from Amwell, where she led the sales strategy, enablement and inside sales teams through the 2020 IPO. As a former Highspot customer, Lewis is passionate about the company’s product and people.
Highspot achieved numerous milestones over the last year, from raising its Series E round at a $2.3 billion valuation to winning multiple Fortune 500 customers. The company recently ranked one of the fastest growing businesses in North America on the Deloitte Fast 500, as well as appeared on multiple lists by Glassdoor, Forbes and Fortune Magazine for its renowned workplace culture.
