On the Radar: How Patrick Bradshaw Is Bringing Marketing Into the Deal

Sales enablement has traditionally focused on preparing reps with content, training, and playbooks before a deal begins. Patrick Bradshaw, Sr. Director of Acquisition and Growth Marketing at Highspot, says that the model is evolving as AI and better data make it possible to support teams up to the end of the sales process. We caught up with Patrick to discuss how AI is changing enablement, where marketing and sales alignment really happens, and why operational discipline still matters more than shiny tools.

Q: How is Highspot changing from sales enablement to go-to-market enablement?

Patrick Bradshaw

Highspot has always lived in the sales enablement space, and traditionally that meant helping reps get ready for the deal: giving them the content, training, and plays they’d need before the moment happened. But there was always a disconnect there. You’d do all this prep in hopes it would be useful later when the actual deal conversation came up.

What’s changing now is that AI makes it possible to enable people in the moment. Instead of just preparing a rep for some future scenario, we can help them with the actual deal they’re in right now. That’s where our Deal Agent comes in. It can pull together deal context, summarize what’s happening, surface the best content, help craft follow-up messaging, and even generate role-play scenarios based on the personas involved in that account.

That’s a big shift for us. We’re still serving enablement teams, because they’re building the foundational content and structure behind all of this, but now we’re also much more focused on the broader go-to-market motion—sales leaders, reps, marketing, all working together in the deal itself.

Q: What other AI use cases have been useful for your marketing team?

Patrick Bradshaw

Content creation has probably been the biggest one. We do quarterly launches, and our product marketing team built a messaging GPT internally. Now we can take a launch document, drop it in, and ask it to generate something like a three-touch email series for a specific audience. That’s sped things up a lot.

It’s also been helpful for industry messaging. We’re trying to do more vertical-specific work, and AI can help synthesize research quickly. Even if you’re not a product marketer by trade, you can use it to get quick information on an industry and start applying that knowledge to messaging frameworks. You still want an expert refining it, of course, but it gets you much further, much faster.

That said, not every AI use case has been a home run. We tested an automated outbound tool last year, and while parts of it were promising, the reality is inboxes are flooded with generic AI emails now. People can tell. So for me, the best use cases are the ones where AI is helping with context, speed, and scale, not replacing judgment.

Q: How have you tightened sales and marketing alignment?

Patrick Bradshaw

Marketing sits in weekly pipeline calls to walk through upcoming programs and surface needs. That gave reps visibility into upcoming programs and gave us a direct line into what they actually needed.

We also built better infrastructure inside Highspot itself. We created smart pages for field marketing and events, organized by goals like pipeline generation, acceleration, or account expansion, so reps could quickly find the right programs and materials. That made things easier operationally, but the bigger thing was visibility. We could actually see whether people were engaging with the plays and using the assets. That’s huge for alignment. Without data, sales and marketing can end up in the usual blame game. With data, the conversation changes, and you can tell what work needs to be done.

Q: Any practical advice for marketers this year?

Patrick Bradshaw

Practice what I call “ruthless inspection.” We spend a lot of time looking at funnel fluidity—how leads move from one stage to the next, where things are stalling, whether routing is working, whether reps are accepting and engaging leads the way they should.

That level of inspection helped us spot real gaps. For example, we realized we had a stage where prospects were interested but not ready to buy, and we didn’t really have a strong next conversation for them. That insight led us to build a go-to-market maturity assessment to help continue those conversations and create more value before pipeline was fully formed.

I think marketers are often so busy launching the next campaign that they don’t make enough time to really study what’s happening after launch. But if you want to be efficient, you can’t afford a leaky system. The hard, repetitive work of checking the handoffs, watching the data, and refining the process—that’s what actually drives performance.

If your team is thinking about how to better connect marketing, sales, and real-time data to drive results, we’d love to help. Reach out to the team at REQ to learn how we help organizations turn insights into action and build marketing strategies that move deals forward.