Enablement Archives | Seismic https://seismic.com/explainer-categories/enablement/ The #1 Sales Enablement Solution Thu, 16 May 2024 14:10:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 What does Seismic do? https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/what-does-seismic-do/ Thu, 22 Feb 2024 02:01:49 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=218554 Learn how Seismic has evolved from a content management solution to a full suite of tools designed to support frontline teams. See what Seismic’s Enablement Cloud™ is used for, and how it works.

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Today’s go-to-market (GTM) teams require collaboration and alignment to deliver the consistent and relevant customer experience that buyers expect. This consistency builds trust and reliability, which are essential for customer satisfaction and loyalty. Driving collaboration and alignment across geographically dispersed teams isn’t always easy — especially without the right technology. 

In 2010, five forward-thinking colleagues saw an opportunity to help sales and marketing teams deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. They created Seismic, a new cloud-based technology focused on streamlining content creation and personalization with automation, making it easier for client-facing teams to consistently present their products and services. By orchestrating people, processes, and technology to improve sales efficiency, a new business category was born: enablement. Seismic’s content management system enables sellers to discover the right content and personalize it while staying on brand and compliant. Instead of wasting time rebuilding content over and over, sellers can focus on what they do best: selling.

More than content — meet the Seismic Enablement Cloud™

While content is an important component of enablement, the industry now focuses on other areas to ensure teams have access to the right information, tools, sales collateral, knowledge, and skills to do their jobs successfully. To address these needs, Seismic has evolved beyond the early days of content automation to a comprehensive platform. The Seismic Enablement Cloud is a unified solution built around five pillars, designed to empower customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to engage customers.

  1. Learning and Coaching: The pace of change and the complexity of today’s sales cycle makes delivering training to all reps — not just new hires — an important business priority. To help new reps ramp quickly, Seismic allows enablement teams to build a scalable onboarding program, tailored to each unique role. To support continuous learning and upskilling, Seismic’s readiness platform provides tools to create lessons, certification programs, real-life roleplay scenarios, and more. Managers can provide sales coaching and feedback in real-time, helping sellers improve their ability. 
  1. Strategy and Planning: Every good enablement program starts with a strategy and plan. Before kicking off an initiative, teams can centralize strategy and planning in Seismic. Enablement Planner helps enablers work smarter by streamlining workflows for playbooks, onboarding programs, sales plays, and more. Built-in sales content analytics give enablement teams the right insights to adapt their programs and maximize impact. 
  1. Content Automation: Producing content for buyers is a time-consuming process for GTM teams that rely on manual methods, legacy systems, and information from disparate sources. Teams use Seismic to automate the collection of data and assembly of documents, reducing errors and improving quality in a fraction of the time that it took previously. This is especially useful in industries such as financial services that rely on pitch books to articulate value during the sales process.
  1. Buyer Engagement: It’s a buyer’s world today, with more than 50% of the customer journey occurring before a buyer interacts with a seller. When buyers are ready to speak with a rep, they expect materials to be personalized and relevant to their unique needs. To help stand out from competitors, Seismic has a suite of personalization tools ranging from machine learning and AI for content recommendations to built-in wizards within PowerPoint and Google Slides that can quickly and easily personalize presentations. Seismic also enables client-facing teams with several delivery channels, including email, social, and digital sales rooms (think customized solution portal) to connect with buyers).
  1. Enablement Intelligence: It’s challenging to demonstrate enablement impact without a tool that centralizes your enablement efforts. The Seismic Enablement Cloud has the data and insights GTM teams need to demonstrate ROI and drive revenue growth. Seismic also integrates with common sales tools including CRMs, email tools, collaboration software, and data repositories to get visibility across the entire business.

Regardless of your organization’s enablement maturity, Seismic is purpose-built to meet the current and future needs of GTM teams. While your team may start small today, Seismic’s comprehensive platform provides everything you could need to build an effective and strategic enablement framework over time, reducing the need to purchase tools from additional vendors when needs evolve. 

How does Seismic work?

Seismic’s platform is built on a foundation of enterprise-grade technology that’s designed to scale as your business evolves. This technology includes:

  • Global Cloud Infrastructure: Seismic’s cloud-based technology connects users across devices, teams, and global geographies, delivering fast, available, and secure enablement.
  • Open Platform: The Seismic Exchange marketplace allows users to integrate the tools their go-to-market teams use daily, such as Slack and Salesforce, to create a streamlined and unified experience. Customers also have the flexibility to build and publish their own apps through Seismic’s extensive APIs.
  • Security and Administration: Seismic provides organizations with SSO (single sign-on) solutions so users have seamless access and control. Robust controls and governance features make it easy for highly regulated industries to maintain compliance.
  • Machine Learning and Data Infrastructure: Today’s go-to-market teams have access to an abundance of data. Seismic empowers them to collect this data and use machine learning to reveal patterns and insights around content, behaviors, and activities that accelerate deals.
The Seismic Enablement Cloud structure infographic.

Does Seismic use AI?

Generative AI has already started to transform the sales enablement space by performing time-saving tasks and providing sellers with insightful intelligence that improves the customer experience. Seismic is no stranger to AI, with capabilities dating back to 2015. Starting with predictive content recommendations for sellers based on sales stage, industry, or persona, Seismic has safely and securely expanded those capabilities across the entire platform. Powered by Aura, Seismic’s AI and machine learning engine, Seismic maximizes GTM productivity and success by providing:

Why Customers Choose Seismic

What teams use Seismic?

Seismic empowers customer-facing, frontline teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights needed to power their GTM efforts. Here’s how four key departments use Seismic to enhance the customer experience and drive business growth:

Enablement

Ensuring that customer-facing teams are prepared and have the information and resources needed to close deals is a challenge, especially if you don’t know what’s moving the needle. Seismic provides enablement leaders the resources and reinforcement they need in one place. By establishing a single source of truth, enablement teams have the insights around all their efforts, from planning and strategy to onboarding and content creation — arming them with the intelligence to iterate and improve.

Sales

Selling is a complex and multifaceted activity that involves close alignment and communication between teams to ensure sellers have the right education, content, and tools to effectively engage with buyers. Enablement and marketing can support sellers by storing all the information and resources they need in one place. For sellers, Seismic becomes their go-to hub for everything from training materials and customer-facing content to buyer engagement tools like Digital Sales Rooms.

Marketing

Every marketer knows the pain of creating content or messaging that goes unused. What’s even worse is that marketers often don’t know what efforts are contributing to revenue. With Seismic, marketers gain a sales content management system that supports content production, distribution, and governance, ensuring that sellers have access to relevant, approved content. Create templates that are on brand and customizable, enabling sellers to quickly tailor presentations for every customer. Understand how to prioritize your efforts with access to data-driven insights on what’s working and what’s not.

Customer Service

Onboarding customer service agents can be time-consuming and costly. Ramp new hires faster with compelling, personalized training. Provide continuous learning to agents to address skill gaps and help them find answers to questions in the moment. Coach them with safe, real-life scenarios and correlate an agent’s skill development with outcomes like NPS and CSAT with powerful analytics.

Can Seismic help highly regulated industries? 

Seismic is a permission-based platform, making it an ideal technology for our clients in financial services, insurance, wealth management, and other highly regulated industries. Seismic enables teams to apply content governance and compliance rules that work for their specific business, ensuring that the content that’s created and shared meets industry standards and organizational requirements. Content governance and compliance rules can be as broad or granular as you need, giving administrators the flexibility to implement controls. 

What are common use cases for Seismic?

Customers choose to partner with Seismic because we help them achieve key business goals and outcomes through a variety of use cases. Some common ways that we help our customers include:

  1. Control chaos: Seismic is great for teams that are looking to build a central foundation for efficiency and visibility. By storing content and resources in one place, teams can source relevant content easily, organize content effectively, and provide self-service tools for sellers to personalize content for buyers. 
“Seismic is really helping us with on-brand delivery by creating the repository where all the content that the reps are accessing is updated frequently by our marketing team. When they access any piece of content, it’s the most updated piece of content that’s available to them.”

Ester Friend

VP of Sales Efficiency and Transformation, Five9

  1. Understand impact: Organizations use Seismic to improve field effectiveness and drive buyer engagement. To help sellers hone their craft, managers can leverage Seismic to coach team members. With prescriptive advice from their manager and access to time-saving tools such as content automation, sellers can focus on delivering impactful meetings.
“Our enablement team loves the analytics functionalities so that they can take a data-driven approach when designing their strategies. Seismic makes for more productive work days all around… and stronger productivity means we can spend more time with customers, helping them grow better with HubSpot.”

Rob Giglio

Chief Customer Officer, HubSpot

  1. Drive transformation: Seismic serves as the launchpad for your GTM efforts, helping you efficiently deliver the latest training and content to sales. Robust platform analytics make it easier to demonstrate and measure marketing and enablement impact. Optimize tactics when needed to drive transformation and maximize revenue growth.

See what you can do with Seismic

How does Seismic make your job easier?

Investing in a new technology can be a daunting decision, especially in today’s economy when every purchase is under scrutiny. To better understand the value of enablement tools, Seismic surveyed more than 1,200 full-time sales, enablement, and customer success professionals in managerial and leadership roles throughout the United States and Europe. The study found that 

99% of those who use a sales enablement tool believe it makes their job easier. In fact, 88% of users say an enablement tool makes them more productive and drives stronger results, and 89% say an enablement tool improves confidence.

In addition to making their jobs easier, respondents cited that enablement tools improve efficiency, helping them save time. The study found that enablement tools save an average of 13 hours a week; and in that time:

  • 83% said they can focus on revenue-generating activities
  • 51% have time to find metrics for planning/forecasting

To learn more about how a tool like Seismic could save you time and money, read the Value of Enablement Report.

Do more with Seismic

Teams across the globe use Seismic to empower entire customer-facing organizations with the skills, content, tools, and insights they need to delight customers and grow businesses. We’ve evolved to offer the Seismic Enablement Cloud, incorporating the latest innovations around AI and machine learning to help you enhance the customer experience, accelerate the sales cycle, and increase revenue. 

Curious how the Seismic Enablement Cloud could help your organization? See Seismic in action by getting a demo

Don’t just take our word for it

See why Seismic has earned a 4.7 out of 5-star rating from customers on G2.

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Sales document best practices https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/sales-documents/ Thu, 04 Jan 2024 22:04:23 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=214458 Ready to unlock synergy between your sales documents and sales enablement efforts? Dive into this article to learn how strategic sales resource management can supercharge your sales team and drive more wins.

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What are sales documents?

Sales documents are written materials that are used in the sales process to communicate information and facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers. These resources — which are also known as sales collateral or sales assets — help reps move buyers through the sales funnel. They convey value, build trust, and provide the information a prospect needs to know when deciding whether or not to buy a product or service.  

Ideally, frontline teams have access to many types of sales documents for their buyers’ various needs and stages. Common examples of sales documents include:

  • Pricing documents: One of the most fundamental of all sales assets, a pricing document outlines the cost structure and financial terms associated with a product or service. One excellent resource is a sales contract template that outlines the terms and conditions of a sale, including payment details and a detailed breakdown of the pricing structure. Sales documents like these offer potential buyers an overview of expected expenses.
  • Case studies: Case studies focus on the success of a customer who is currently using the product or service a prospect is considering. It details the challenges the customer faced, the solution implemented, and the positive results achieved.
  • Product demos: Sales reps use product demos to showcase the features, functionality, and benefits of a product to potential customers. Product demos can be delivered in written formats and through other channels, such as webinars, video tutorials, or interactive online platforms.
  • Competitive battle cards: These are the most strategic item every sales organization should have in its list of sales documents. Competitive battle cards are used internally and They equip sales teams with valuable insights of market competitors so they can make informed decisions when engaging with customers or prospects.

The role of sales documents in the sales process

Sales documents play a critical role throughout the sales process. Done right, they not only provide essential information about a product or service but also address a potential buyer’s specific concerns, offering tangible evidence of the benefits that can be expected from the proposed solution. Aligning sales documents with each stage of the buyer’s journey establishes trust and confidence, ultimately increasing the likelihood that a prospect will convert to a sale.

To better understand the role sales documents play in the sales process, consider a scenario in which a technology company is trying to secure a deal with a potential client in the healthcare industry. The client needs a software solution that can streamline data management and improve operational efficiencies. 

In this context, a well-crafted case study can be highly effective. In an ideal world, this case study would feature a current customer who faced similar challenges to the potential buyer. It would also include details about how the technology company’s software was successfully implemented, the specific problems addressed, and the positive outcomes achieved. 

This example illustrates just one of the many uses of sales documents. Incorporating a case study and other relevant sales documents at key points in the sales cycle significantly enhances a seller’s ability to connect with prospects and demonstrate the practical value of their solution. Ultimately, this leads to faster deal cycles and increased win rates.

The connection between enablement and sales documents

Because sales documents are so vital for winning deals, sellers need easy access to them. That’s where sales enablement comes in. Sales enablement centralizes sales documents, ensuring that the latest, most relevant resources are at sellers’ fingertips. That way, sales reps don’t have to waste time searching for the right assets or worrying about which version is the most up-to-date — approved materials are quickly discoverable and ready to use. 

In addition to organization and accessibility, sales documents must be customized according to each buyer’s unique needs, challenges, and objections. Sales enablement tools help sellers tailor their pitches to each buyer, contributing to a positive customer experience. Prebuilt templates with approved messaging and customization options enable sellers to quickly personalize presentations for maximum impact.

Today’s sales enablement tools also provide organizations with the insights and data needed to understand content effectiveness. Robust analytics assist enablement leaders in tracking internal content usage while helping frontline teams identify buyer preferences. 

In a nutshell, sales enablement empowers sellers to use sales resources strategically and enhance their effectiveness. It optimizes the entire document lifecycle from discovery to delivery and unlocks the full potential of your sales team to connect, convince, and close deals.

Sales Content Reimagined

Best practices for sales documents

Sales documents can vary widely in performance. The most effective ones are well-crafted, compelling, and delivered at the right time. For guidance, here are five best practices to keep top of mind as you prep sales documents and fine-tune your sales documentation process:

Incorporating these best practices into the preparation of sales documents and your sales documentation process can enhance the effectiveness of your sales strategy overall, helping your teams achieve growth.

Save 360+ hours a year with Seismic.

Deliver the right sales docs at the right time

At Seismic, we make it easy for clients to organize a central hub for sales documents for quicker discovery, personalization, distribution, and tracking. Our sales enablement solution ensures sellers are equipped with the knowledge and resources needed to deliver the right sales documents at the right time. To learn more, check out Seismic in action by watching these short, led-by-you demos that address common sales challenges.

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How to create an effective sales enablement process https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/sales-enablement-process/ Tue, 19 Dec 2023 23:50:35 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=213682 If you’ve ever wondered how to improve the sales enablement process at your organization, then you’ve come to the right place. Read on for step-by-step instructions for crafting an effective sales enablement process that leads to higher performance and growth.

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What is a sales enablement process?

A sales enablement process is the set of activities, tools, and resources that organizations use to empower frontline teams throughout the entire sales cycle. It includes various stages, from onboarding and training to content management, technology implementation, and ongoing support. 

When launching an enablement program, a sales enablement process serves as a guide for aligning teams, defining the buyer journey, and identifying resources to support the sales team. This ensures that sellers have what they need to engage buyers, close deals, and drive growth.

Getting Started on your Enablement Journey

Crafting an effective sales enablement process

To build an effective sales enablement process, organizations need to implement a diverse range of strategies and sales enablement best practices. Whether you’re looking to create a new enablement process from scratch or improve your existing process, some essential steps  include:

Why it’s important to have a well-structured process

Teams with a well-structured enablement process improve sales effectiveness and prove the value of their contributions. It’s important to have a structure in place for several key reasons:

  • Enhance sales performance: Equipping sellers with the right resources and support maximizes their potential, leading to better performance.
  • Drive consistency: Enabling frontline teams to follow consistent messaging and processes improves consistency across the customer experience, resulting in higher trust and customer satisfaction.
  • Improve productivity: Making mission-critical sales enablement materials readily available via the right technology and tools drives productivity and efficiency among sellers. 
  • Quickly adapt to market changes: Delivering just-in-time training with supportive coaching prepares sellers to quickly adapt to business and market changes. 
  • Measure impact and drive improvement: Proving the impact of your enablement efforts is critical to getting buy-in and funding from the C-suite; in addition, it gives you the insights necessary to make improvements to your sales enablement process over time. 

Never stop growing

Create and scale your enablement process with Seismic

Creating a sales enablement process has never been easier with the Seismic Enablement Cloud™. Seismic’s Enablement Planner serves as a central location for frontline teams to plan, execute, and iterate on a process. Seismic also supports critical activities such as content management, training and coaching, and communication and collaboration, complete with robust analytics to measure your success. Together, these tools streamline enablement efforts and empower you to create repeatable and scalable processes that lead to growth. Ready to see how Seismic can benefit your organization? Schedule a demo today. 

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The Impact of AI in Sales Enablement https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/the-impact-of-ai-in-sales-enablement/ Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:31:05 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=204198 Discover how AI is transforming enablement and get tips and strategies on using advanced tech to boost efficiency, improve buyer engagement, and revamp seller coaching.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting industries across the globe, automating tasks and providing advanced analytics and insights. Enablement is no exception. Leading GTM teams are using AI technology to improve effectiveness, scale processes, and make strategic decisions for their business. But before your organization decides to make the most out of AI in sales enablement  it’s important to understand the risks and benefits, how it can be integrated into the sales process, and how to leverage it effectively.

What is generative AI?

Talk of artificial intelligence is practically inescapable these days. And while it’s been around for nearly seven decades, the topic has exploded with the emergence of generative AI. Generative AI is a type of AI that focuses on creating and generating new content. This includes text, images, sounds, animation, and other types of media that are very similar to human-created content. It also leverages machine and deep learning to spot patterns, understand speech, make choices, and answer questions. 

From smart personal assistants to autonomous vehicles, AI-powered tools and tech are already a part of daily life. However, generative AI has made more significant advancements as more industries and organizations identify ways that it can help people work more efficiently and effectively. 

Understanding AI in sales enablement today

As generative AI continues to evolve, it has the potential to greatly impact the future of enablement and other GTM operations. This potential is exciting, but it can also be overwhelming for leaders since there’s still a lot of uncertainty and speculation as to what the long-term impact will be.

To get a better understanding of how organizations currently leverage AI, we surveyed 1,400 full-time sales, enablement, and customer success managers and leaders—many of whom use enablement technology at work. The State of AI in Enablement: 2023 Report found that 50% of organizations surveyed currently utilize some type of AI-powered tool in their enablement process. Of these users, 82% of them are impressed with the results they’re seeing and plan to double down and implement more AI-powered solutions in the next year. 

This uptick in implementation is validated by other industry studies. In fact, Forrester projects a meteoric rise for AI-powered platforms, estimating the market value will climb to $37 billion by 2025. And as these tools mature, so will the adoption of AI among businesses. In other words, while there is some uncertainty, organizations are already leaning into the possibilities of leveraging AI within their enablement efforts.

Did you know?

63%

of teams that have adopted AI report an uptick in revenue.

How AI benefits GTM teams: Doing more with less

The organizations that make an effort to embrace and leverage AI already have a leg up on their competition and will only continue to extend their lead. Many organizations are already leveraging AI in other areas of their business, including:

  • AI for sales prospecting uses algorithms to analyze historical sales data and prioritize the highest-converting leads. 
  • Conversational AI for sales such as an AI sales assistant or AI sales bot can handle customer inquiries and questions 24/7. 
  • AI forecasting detects trends and patterns and creates more accurate forecasts.
  • Generative AI enables sales email creation, scheduling, and personalization.

The average seller only spends 28% of their time on actual selling. The rest of their time is spent on manual tasks and processes. So, if you’re still wondering how to use AI in sales enablement at your organization, these areas are natural opportunities to leverage AI and take some of that busy work off the table. 

Additionally, many organizations are being asked to hit the same goals (or even more aggressive targets) with fewer resources. In the face of these challenges, leaders are looking for ways to scale their programs, streamline and automate processes, and equip sellers in the best way possible. That’s where AI for sales really shines. Here are the outcomes that respondents said they’d like to achieve with AI.

  • 63% of leaders want to achieve operational optimization. This includes higher enablement efficiency, improved content usage, and tech stack consolidation. 
  • 54% want to enhance the buyer experience. Improved experiences can lead to increased deal sizes, better win/renewal rates, and decreased sales cycle times.
  • 48% of respondents would like to improve agility and speed to market. This includes the time to market, adaptability to change, and team alignment.
  • 40% want to drive GTM efficiency through faster seller ramp times, higher quota attainment, and more time spent on high-value activities. 

When it comes to achieving these outcomes, there are different areas where enablement teams can apply AI. Let’s take a closer look at some of these areas.

The State of AI in Enablement

The State of AI in Enablement: 2023 Report

Using AI to improve the buying experience

AI isn’t just an efficiency tool. It’s a powerful way to improve the buying experience, earn trust, and set the stage for lasting customer satisfaction. In fact, 88% of respondents who have implemented AI have seen an increase in their customers’ satisfaction. Here are a few ways sellers can use AI-based tools to engage buyers throughout their journey: 

  1. Recommend relevant content: Sellers occasionally struggle to identify the best content to share with buyers. As a result, they may create their own materials on the fly. Integrating AI with a sales content management system can make this a thing of the past, with automatic content suggestions based on your buyer’s profile and sales context.
  2. Personalize customer interactions: More than 70% of today’s consumers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences. AI makes this easier. By integrating your sales content management tool with your CRM, it can pull relevant customer information and use these insights to personalize content for each customer, making your interactions more targeted.
  3. Respond faster: Imagine a buyer having a question about a product feature, but you aren’t sure of the answer. With AI, you don’t have to find a product manager to get the right information. Instead, AI can provide you with the right resource, in a shareable format, so you can follow up swiftly with the correct information.

Delivering sales training and coaching programs powered by AI

Coaching and training programs are known value-drivers. Companies with effective programs experience annual revenue growth of 16.7% and retention increases of more than 20%. AI for sales teams enables more personalized training and coaching programs. Here’s how: 

Leveraging AI for data-driven insights

AI can analyze huge amounts of data in real-time — far more and far better than a human can. This data can reveal trends and patterns that leaders can use to tailor their enablement strategy, optimize sales tactics, and target marketing efforts. This also allows for a more agile way of working. By leveraging AI to track content analytics, leaders can easily identify:

  • The most and least shared content by sellers
  • What content buyers engage with
  • What content is most effective throughout the deal cycle
  • What type of content is missing

As AI sales tools  track this information, GTM teams can piece together a more comprehensive picture of prospect engagement, gather actionable insights, and share key data across the team. 

Tips for implementing AI

From improving meeting efficiency to providing just-in-time enablement, there’s no shortage of new and exciting opportunities that are prime areas for adoption. By leveraging AI in these mission-critical areas, revenue teams will have more time to focus on other high-impact, critical, and strategic areas that will lead to greater efficiency and productivity. But careful consideration is essential. Here are three key factors to keep in mind:

  1. Data quality and integration: Because AI tools heavily rely on data for accuracy, you need to ensure that your organization’s data is high-quality and organized. It’s also best to assess the integration capabilities of the tools your team uses.  
  2. Training and adoption: It’s important to prioritize training to ensure your team is proficient in using AI-powered sales tools. Create training resources and supportive content that addresses challenges and answers common questions.
  3. Transparency and ethical considerations: Prioritize transparency in how AI algorithms work and the data they use. Then, establish clear guidelines for ethical practices within your organization to ensure compliance and safety. 

If you’re still not exactly sure how AI fits—or can fit—into your business, check out Seismic’s Enablement AI Evaluation Checklist which can help you determine if you need AI, what you need it for, and how to get started.

See what AI can do for you.

The leader in AI-powered enablement

AI has been part of Seismic’s platform since 2015 when we introduced AI-guided selling that surfaces content recommendations based on deal context. In the years since, we launched Aura, our AI/ML engine that fuels AI-powered enablement across The Seismic Enablement Cloud.™ Our robust  tool provides GTM teams with intelligent content curation, smart searches, just-in-time enablement, AI-powered coaching, and so much more. Get a demo and see Seismic’s AI features firsthand. 

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Essential sales enablement tools for modern revenue teams https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/sales-enablement-tools/ Mon, 14 Aug 2023 22:03:21 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=192298 Simplify your tech stack with the top sales enablement tools and transform your team’s workflow in order to boost productivity, engagement, and revenue across the org.

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Sales enablement for go-to-market teams

Sales enablement empowers revenue teams with the right tools, resources, and knowledge to sell more effectively. But it goes beyond that — a sales enablement strategy aligns your entire go-to-market (GTM) team around improving sales performance. It helps sellers anticipate customer needs and close deals, while giving leaders a clear focus on top priorities. In a crowded marketplace, this differentiates effectives organizations from low performers — and ultimately helps companies succeed. 

What are sales enablement tools?

Sales enablement tools are technology solutions specifically designed to streamline workflows, reduce workload for customer-facing professionals, and provide teams with valuable insights for improved performance and revenue growth. These tools include many capabilities and features – from sales content management and automation to training and coaching, buyer engagement, strategic planning, and analytics and intelligence. Let’s take a closer look at some of these tools and functionalities.

Did you know?

99% of leaders who use sales enablement software say it makes their jobs easier.

Organize sales enablement materials

One of the most critical capabilities of a sales enablement solution is sales content management,  a centralized hub for storing and organizing sales enablement materials. Beyond organizing content, sales enablement solutions also surface content for sellers, allowing them to find, personalize, and share relevant information quickly. Some tools even allow for dynamic personalization to aid in the delivery of tailored content based on the prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey. 

This hits a key pain point for reps. The Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report showed that GTM leaders without enablement technology spent an average of 10 hours weekly searching for, comparing, or revising content. And 77% of respondents stated that the time they spend finding content could be better utilized to advance their team’s goals. 

The outcome of good content management is huge: 97% of leaders report that quick access to information ensures they’re better informed when engaging clients. 

Provide sales onboarding and training

Onboarding and training are the stepping stones to success in any sales role. 84% of leaders told Seismic that a little more training, coaching, or upskilling could help their teams close more deals. But delivering training at scale can be a challenge. That’s where sales enablement tools come in, providing:

  • Easy onboarding: With structured online lessons and quick access to company assets, enablement tools can help reps ramp quickly, without much hand-holding from operational teams. 
  • Personalized training: 45% of leaders say their company doesn’t offer coaching. Digital sales enablement tools can step in to bridge this gap with digitally hosted training sessions, interactive coaching practice, and coaching plans. This ensures that all sellers, whether newbies or veterans, can stay competitive and up-to-date.

Get insights on your sales enablement strategy

It’s crucial to measure performance and benchmark progress against past results. Sales enablement tools support teams in this process by providing insights to help optimize their sales enablement strategy. Robust analytics and reporting capabilities make it easy for teams to measure key areas, including: 

  • Content usage: Gather actionable insights around content usage, such as the average time spent per sales asset and which documents are accessed most frequently. This information helps identify high-impact materials and those that may need improvement.
  • Sales performance: Monitor performance indicators like the number of closed deals, conversion rates, or the length of the sales cycle. This allows you to pinpoint successful strategies and highlight areas that could benefit from changes. 51% of teams told Seismic that enablement tools save them time on finding metrics for planning and forecasting.
  • Buyer engagement: View metrics such as the timeline of interaction with prospects, types of approaches that convert, and progression through the funnel, allowing reps to take actions that have the highest likelihood of success.  

Simplify the tech stack with an enablement tool

With new tools and tech emerging frequently, it can be easy for sales teams to end up juggling too many tools and applications. A sales enablement platform can alleviate this overhead, unifying functionality under one roof and streamlining workflows. This approach brings a number of benefits.

  1. Consolidate tools: Centralize all your tools and applications in one platform to reduce clutter and improve focus. By simplifying the tech stack, sellers are more likely to adopt the technology and maximize outcomes.
  2. Create streamlined workflows: Integrations with technologies that sellers rely on daily – like a CRM or productivity tools – make it possible to reap the benefits of sales enablement in the flow of work. As a result, workflows become more efficient, reducing complexities and boosting productivity.
  3. Integrate and leverage data: Eliminate manual reporting by pooling together data from different sources, creating a more holistic view of your sales process.
  4. Make data-driven decisions: Integrate and consolidate data to provide a clearer view of trends, bottlenecks, and opportunities. Flexible dashboards and reporting make it easy to dissect this data and take action.

Stack the Tech in Your Favor

Stack the tech in your favor ebook.

The value of sales enablement software

Implementing sales enablement software can significantly transform your sales operations, as is evident in the Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report. Leaders told us that better enablement tools: 

  • Make work easier: 99% of respondents who use a sales enablement platform stated that it makes their job easier because they can manage tasks efficiently.
  • Increase productivity: 88% of respondents noted that sales enablement software makes them more productive and keeps the sales machinery running smoothly.
  • Drive results: 88% of users reported that enablement software drives better outcomes. 
  • Save time: Sales enablement technology saves teams an average of 13 hours per week. 

Remember, sales enablement software isn’t just a tool. It promotes a strategic and efficient way of work that’s expected in today’s digital-first world, ultimately improving the effectiveness of sales teams and helping the business grow. 

Tackle more with Seismic.

Take enablement to the next level

The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is the top sales enablement platform to empower teams with the right skills, content, and insights. As an all-in-one unified engagement platform, Seismic features six essential sales enablement tools across content management, learning & coaching, strategy & planning, content automation, buyer engagement, and enablement intelligence. It’s the premiere resource to help rapidly growing organizations accelerate sales and cultivate growth. Ready to learn more? Get a demo to explore all of the benefits and capabilities of the Seismic.

Don’t just take our word for it

See why Seismic has earned a 4.7 out of 5-star rating with over 1,200 reviews on G2.

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The importance of enablement for financial services https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/enablement-in-financial-services/ Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:17:12 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=185864 Financial services firms that embrace and leverage modern enablement will ultimately unlock valuable client experience and achieve business outcomes.

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The growth of enablement in financial firms

The financial services industry is experiencing a tremendous evolution. Evolving client expectations, uncertain economic conditions, and the proliferation of digital tools have fundamentally changed the way firms engage with clients.

As the industry becomes more client-centric and competitive, it’s critical for client-facing professionals to create remarkable client experiences. Financial institutions are also facing a new set of challenges. Longer buying cycles, new products and services, and complex compliance requirements mean that firms and financial professionals need to evolve to remain competitive. Those that rely on what worked yesterday will fail to adapt and win the clients of tomorrow.

Firms and client-facing teams need tools that will enable them to operate more efficiently, elevate client experiences, and optimize operations. This is why modern enablement is mission critical for success. Effective enablement provides client-facing teams the right resources, processes, and technology to win business, retain clients, and adapt to change — all at scale. Increasingly, leaders across banking, asset management, wealth management, and insurance agree that enablement is mission critical to their firm’s operations. 

Unifying the tech stack with enablement

Like many other industries, the financial service industry is experiencing a digital transformation. The right mix of technology can help firms deliver high-touch experiences across digital and virtual channels, as well as in-person interactions. At the same time, the struggling economy and tightened budgets mean that firms need to make strategic investments in order to build the most modern tech stack possible. 

By investing in enablement technology, firms can unify the applications they already use for maximum ROI. Enablement tech connects with customer relationship management, marketing automation, and collaboration tools. As a result, firms can connect crucial sets of data that live across different systems. Instead of trying to connect disparate pieces of information and insights to make business decisions, firms can better identify which strategies work and where opportunities lie. The right enablement tool also helps firms streamline workflows, optimize operations, and achieve key internal and external outcomes. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key business outcomes firms can achieve by making an investment in enablement. 

Improve efficiency and effectiveness

One of the largest impacts enablement has is its value on efficiency. We recently surveyed more than 1,200 leaders across the United States and Europe to determine how enablement tools impact their business. The study found that 84% of those who use an enablement tech say it’s integral to operating more efficiently. Let’s take a closer look at two key reasons why this is the case. 

Automate and streamline tasks

A key component of efficiency is saving time. Firms that use enablement tools can automate and streamline tasks that take up crucial time so that advisors, bankers, agents, and relationship managers can spend more time on high-value activities. In fact, firms that use enablement tools save 13 hours, or nearly two business days, each week. By automating tasks around quarterly commentary, content personalization, and approvals, client-facing teams have more time to build  relationships with their clients. 

Decrease new hire ramp time

Knowledgeable advisors, bankers, agents, and relationship managers who deliver relevant and helpful advice to clients are more important than ever. With higher expectations and complex financial situations, advisors need to be experts who can instill trust with their clients. However, it takes most firms nearly a year to fully ramp a new hire to productivity. This negatively impacts their time to revenue attainment and productivity.

As a result, more firms are investing in platforms that allow them to deliver training and coaching to new client-facing teammates. These tools help firms create engaging and interactive training experiences that allow new hires to develop competency and expertise quickly. Firms can also accelerate readiness with quizzes and immediate scoring to confirm that employees have retained and understand training materials. It’s worth noting that the need for training doesn’t go away once new hires ramp in their roles. Firms can also leverage enablement technology to provide essential training and coaching on an ongoing basis. This ensures client-facing teams keep their knowledge and skills up to date amid industry changes and evolving client preferences. 

Enhance the client experience

The ultimate goal of enablement is to help client-facing teams provide guidance and support in various ways — from in-person meetings and phone conversations to email updates and compelling social media posts. Today’s macro-economy means that clients have more questions and need more guidance that they can trust. As a result, firms need their client-facing teams to engage meaningfully with their clients and offer a deeper level of expertise. Gartner found that more organizations are investing in tools that enable their frontline teams to find answers when clients’ needs and questions are more specialized. Enablement tools provide just-in-time access to content and even AI-powered answers to questions so reps can find the most relevant information and correct information right when they need it.

Deliver personalized content 

Enablement software also ensures that client-facing teams can create highly relevant and personalized content in just a few clicks. In today’s market, growing wallet share and retaining current clients is extremely important — and difficult. 

Clients already do plenty of research on their own before they even reach out to an advisor, banker, agent, or relationship manager. When they finally do, they expect information they receive to be relevant and useful to them. 85% of firms agree that clients will dismiss a seller in the first interaction if they don’t receive tailored information. Modern enablement gives client-facing teams central access to digital collateral and dynamic assets that they can edit and personalize at scale. It also gives them the chance to integrate useful data and information from a CRM and other sources for even greater customization.

Optimize key operations

We’ve also heard from more financial services leaders that they need to “do more with less.” It’s now more important than ever to optimize current operations so client-facing teams can focus on achieving business goals. But, that’s easier said than done, especially in an industry that’s highly-competitive and quickly evolving. Let’s take a closer look at two areas where enablement can help firms better optimize key business processes and operations.

Reduce compliance risks

Content control is extremely important for highly-regulated industries like financial services. Advisors, bankers, wealth managers, and agents should only have access to the most relevant materials needed in their roles. Enablement software allows leaders to apply role-based permissions that ensure departments, teams, and individuals only have access to the content they need. It also gives them the opportunity to to control the extent that content can be modified. Gone are the days when marketing teams could create tailored assets for each and every client. Instead, firms can use enablement tools to give client-facing teams the ability to personalize content in a controlled environment. It also provides marketing and compliance teams peace of mind in knowing that these assets still meet brand and regulation standards.

Measure and track impact

Once marketing teams create content and hand assets over  to be used during client interactions, they often don’t know if it’s actually used or effective. This is an inefficient use of time and money for every firm. Enablement software helps marketing teams better understand the impact of the content they create. Detailed tracking and content analytics provide visibility into what collateral is sent to clients the most, what clients find most engaging, and what is helping their firm close deals. By measuring the ROI of marketing materials, firms can leverage the content that’s working the most and focus on improving content effectiveness in the long-run. 

Accelerate speed to market

Firms are faced with a number of time-consuming tasks and obstacles that prevent client-facing teams from working efficiently. Not only do they need to quickly produce time-sensitive content that’s crucial for advisors, they also need a way to improve alignment, refine their sales methodology, and close more deals. An enablement tool creates a process that standardizes, automates, and scales all of these initiatives. Let’s dive into one of them in more detail. 

Refine sales methodologies — quickly 

In order to bring and keep client-facing teams up-to-speed with new changes, firms need to create new time-sensitive materials and update existing assets as quickly as possible. But without an enablement tool, these pieces likely live in multiple places and across numerous departments within a firm. Enablement tools automate the content creation and updating process by pulling in data from disparate sources to produce pitchbooks, factsheets, client review documents, proposals, and much more.

Enablement tools also become a single source of truth for all sales-related content. This gives client-facing teams a one-stop-shop to prepare for client interactions and stay up to date on the newest sales frameworks within their firm. As a result, client-facing team members are on the same page and using the same information which is crucial for effective client engagement.  

Ready to better serve clients?

Smarter enablement leads to better outcomes

Enablement will continue to evolve as a critical part of a firm’s business strategy. And firms that successfully adopt the use of enablement tools to address their challenges and support their most important goals will achieve better outcomes. And that’s why we created the Seismic Enablement Cloud™. Seismic’s unified platform provides client-facing teams with the right skills, content, and insights to win business and retain clients at scale. It’s purpose-built to meet your firm’s current demand and grow with you as your needs evolve. See why more than 400 financial services clients choose Seismic for their enablement needs. Get a demo today, or check our Financial Services Hub for more great resources.

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The power of personalized content in sales https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/content-personalization/ Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:07:03 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=184711 Unlock personalized content at scale — learn how to masterfully create and deliver tailored content experiences that help your brand stand out and win business.

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What does content personalization mean?

Content personalization tailors brand messaging and communications to reflect the unique needs and characteristics of individual buyers. This includes content that is relevant to specific stages of the buyer’s journey, or it may go a step further with hyper-personalized messaging that acknowledges the buyer’s particular business needs or past behaviors. With customer expectations higher than ever, the use of personalized content creates a unique and highly-targeted experience that is key to the success of every deal.

Why is personalized content important?

Buyer engagement and the sales cycle have drastically evolved over the past few years. Modern buyers are more informed and have had an average of 27 information-gathering sessions before they ever speak to a sales rep. When buyers finally interact with a seller, they expect the rep to provide tailored and hyper-relevant information. In fact, McKinsey found that more than 70% of today’s buyers expect companies to deliver a personalized experience, and 76% will move to another organization if they’re unhappy with their experience. 

So while customers certainly expect it, it’s also proven to be more effective. Personalization cuts through the clutter, allowing brands to get the attention of buyers who are constantly bombarded with marketing and advertising messages. We’ve seen firsthand how personalization empowers sellers to effectively engage with buyers and customers. Our report, The Personalization Payoff, found that more companies are sending personalized content than ever before. This includes an 89% increase in personalized content sent by companies with fewer than 1,500 employees over a one-year period alone. These same companies saw their efforts pay off, with buyer engagement increasing by 57%, underlining the power of tailored content to generate higher conversion.

The Personalization Payoff

Challenges of delivering a personalized experience

While personalization is critical to buyer engagement, both customer-facing and marketing teams encounter unique operational challenges in executing a successful approach. Additionally, 63% of GTM leaders say that the content their teams use is not personalized enough for customers.

Customer-facing teams 

Sellers are in frequent communication with prospects and need content to provide personalized and helpful content needed to close a deal. Often, the overall lack of time and/or a clear understanding of what content is available and approved causes sellers to reuse old decks and collateral. Or, they may even resort to creating their own content, which may not be compliant or  consistent with the latest messaging. 

Marketing teams

Marketing’s goal is to produce engaging content that is accessible to sales. Catering to every individual request for content isn’t realistic, and 42% of B2B marketers say that their marketing efforts aren’t fully personalized. Building systems to create content at scale and finding the right delivery methods are two common roadblocks that must be solved to support a personalized content program.

Did you know?

Companies that prioritize personalization experience a 57% increase in buyer engagement.

Content personalization strategies and tips 

Let’s explore three key strategies that support marketing and sales teams in addressing these challenges and delivering exceptional personalized content:

1.   Know your buyer

At the heart of personalization is a deep understanding of the buyer. Building a research phase into your content personalization strategy will ensure that teams are aligned on buyer needs and preferences, so that the content can be as relevant and relatable as possible. Marketing can support this by building out personas and a customer journey map, while sales can provide perspectives from their more frequent communications with prospects. 

2.   Make messaging relevant

Once teams have a strong understanding of the buyer, it’s time to create content. It’s helpful to segment audiences into groups based on defining characteristics, like demographics, company size or job title, or even past engagement with your brand. Brainstorm what messages will be most effective for each group and the types of content that would most likely be consumed. The more data points you have on the customer, the more relevant you can be. 

3.   Curate content carefully

Discoverability is a key piece of the puzzle. As the volume of content grows, marketing teams will need to find a way to manage the library of content, organized by segment or buyer’s stage, and provide easy access for customer-facing teams. It will also be critical to keep content up to date over time and remove or add new assets as needed to support the business. 

Effective personalized content examples 

It can be challenging to know where to start with content personalization. Here are a few examples to help you tailor your messages to the your buyers:  

  1. Incorporate the buyer’s logo or brand elements in pitch decks or proposals.
  2. Reference the buyer’s past interactions or purchases to offer relevant recommendations or insights, reinforcing their connection with the brand.
  3. Tailor messaging based on the buyer’s role. — For example, use technical language for an IT decision-maker, or share high-level business implications and data to show a return on investment for a CFO.
  4. Implement dynamic content in emails or on your site that change based on user behavior.
  5. Use case studies and testimonials relevant to the buyer’s industry or role. 

The value of enablement tools for content personalization

Sales enablement tools are powerful resources that companies can use to generate personalized content and manage it effectively. Recently, Seismic found that sellers at companies without an enablement tool spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down and revising content. Here are a few ways enablement tools can reduce this workload and boost productivity: 

Save reps 360 hours per year

Ready to make your content stand out?

The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ features solutions that make it easy for go-to-market organizations to build content at scale and harness the power of personalization. These tools help marketing teams streamline content delivery so it’s more efficient and impactful. As a result, enablement teams can ensure the right messages and content is delivered to sellers precisely when they need it. And with our robust self-service tools, sellers can quickly and easily create personalized content that resonates with buyers and stands out from competitors. Ready to learn more? Read how Salesloft experienced a 35% increase in win rates after implementing Seismic. Or, get a demo where you can get a deeper dive on our sales content management and automation features.

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What is sales efficiency? https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/what-is-sales-efficiency/ Thu, 02 Mar 2023 01:13:27 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=146349 Sales efficiency tracks revenue against how much it costs an organization to close a deal. See how your team can improve efficiency here.

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What is sales efficiency?

Before we dive into how to improve efficiency, it’s important to understand what the term means. Sales efficiency measures the speed of your sales team during a specific time period. It’s one of the most important sales operation metrics to track as it also helps leaders identify how much it costs to close a deal.

How to measure sales efficiency

Measuring your efficiency is simple if you follow the sales efficiency formula. First, you need to gather these numbers:

  1. The gross revenue earned during the amount of time you want to track, such as a quarter or fiscal year
  2. Sales and marketing expenses including salaries, training, and tools from the same time frame

Once you identify both figures, divide the gross revenue by expenses to calculate your overall sales efficiency metric. For example, if an organization generates $3 million in revenue and spends $1.5 million, the sales efficiency calculation is 2 or 200%. This is also easy to calculate for individual reps, a group of new hires, and entire sales forces. 

Sales efficiency vs. effectiveness

Sales effectiveness measures seller performance throughout the sales cycle. Organizations need to track a number of different sales metrics and KPIs in order to measure effectiveness. These include lead conversion rates, win-loss ratios, and quota attainment. So, the more effective a seller or team is, the more conversions and wins they’ll have at each stage of the pipeline. 

While sales efficiency and effectiveness aren’t the same thing, it doesn’t mean that organizations should focus on one over the other. Instead, sales leaders should leverage efficiency and effectiveness in order to reach business goals. 

Why sales efficiency matters

If an organization’s efficiency is stagnant or declines from one quarter to the next, it’s an indicator that there’s a problem with your existing sales process. As a result, sales leaders should investigate what’s working and where there’s room for improvements.

Additionally, sales efficiency directly correlates to an organization’s revenue. Efficient sellers have the resources they need to interact with buyers, answer questions, and close deals more quickly. As a result, organizations can expect to reach quotas and revenue goals. However, organizations with lower levels of efficiency have longer sales cycles and require sellers to put in more time and effort to close a deal. Therefore, they’ll likely experience lower profits and slower revenue growth over time.

The 2023 Value of Enablement Report

How to improve sales efficiency

Given today’s economic uncertainty, leaders are tasked with identifying ways to maximize efficiency while minimizing costs. As a result, many organizations believe cost-cutting equates to operational efficiency. But all too often, reducing costs and investments in technology isn’t the answer.

Sales efficiency isn’t simply about decreasing spend. Instead, it’s about ensuring what you spend has a return on investment (ROI). It’s also worth noting that some technology will always remain mission critical to the success and efficiency of your organization.  According to McKinsey, CEOs believe that technology is a key component to business growth and should remain a priority even in the most turbulent times. We couldn’t agree more.

When it comes to non-negotiable investments, enablement technology should be at the top of the list for every GTM organization. Sales enablement technology includes tools that reduce the workload for sales and customer service teams. They also help GTM teams:

  • Strategize and plan campaigns 
  • Manage sales content 
  • Deliver learning and coaching 

All of these tasks are key to driving and operationalizing efficiency at scale.

The value of enablement tools on sales efficiency

We recently surveyed more than 1,200 full-time sales, enablement, and customer service professionals to gain better insights on how enablement tools directly impact sales efficiency. In The 2023 Value of Enablement Report, 9 in 10 respondents report using enablement tools in their job, and 99% of them agree that it makes their jobs easier.

99% of leaders agree that sales enablement tools make their jobs easier.

The survey also confirmed McKinsey’s findings on the importance of technology during turbulent times. 85% of organizations are retaining or increasing their investment in enablement technology this year. But why is this the case?

According to responses, 84% say that enablement is integral to operating more efficiently.

Let’s take a closer look at why respondents said that enablement technology is imperative to sales efficiency.

Saves time

A key component of efficiency is saving time. Unfortunately, sellers in organizations without enablement tools spend an average of 10 hours searching for and updating content they need to drive buyer engagement. However, respondents at organizations that use enablement tools save 13 hours, or nearly two business days, each week.

80% of leaders use sales enablement tools to focus on high-priority items.

Increases productivity 

88% of respondents say that enablement technology allows them to be more productive in their roles. When sellers can quickly locate the right content at the right time, they can shift their focus to other high-priority and revenue-generating activities. However, productivity significantly decreases at organizations without enablement technology. 91% of respondents agree that not having access to the content they need makes them feel less productive. 

Improves effectiveness

The time it takes for sellers to access and revise content severely hinders their effectiveness. Additionally, the majority of respondents who use enablement technology at work believe they’re more confident. 97% of respondents say that quick access to information and content helps them speak to buyers from a more informed standpoint. Comparatively, 51% of respondents at organizations without enablement say that they have misspoken during a sales or customer call. 

What can Seismic deliver?

The bottom line

GTM teams invest in enablement technology because they want to boost their bottom lines. And while the majority of respondents said they use enablement technology at work, 80% of them don’t believe they use their tools effectively. Instead of cutting an investment in enablement tools altogether, organizations need to identify how to leverage their tools to their fullest potential. As a result, they can optimize operations, enhance sales processes, and ultimately improve sales efficiency.

Operate efficiently with Seismic

Sales enablement is a key driver behind efficiency. That’s why the Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is purpose-built to help GTM organizations optimize their programs and leverage the resources they already have. Visit our Product Innovation Center to learn more about our latest features and capabilities. Or, if you’d like to learn how to achieve greater efficiency with Seismic, get a demo today.

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How to create a sales enablement content strategy https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/sales-enablement-content-strategy/ Tue, 31 Jan 2023 22:32:08 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=143566 Learn how to create, distribute, and measure an effective sales enablement content program.

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What is sales enablement content?

No seller should work alone — they require the support of marketing teams that can enable them with content to effectively engage prospects. Sales enablement materials are critical for reps to confidently communicate the value of a product and demonstrate their industry expertise. Sales content is both internal and external-facing; internal sales content is aimed at educating employees, while external content showcases a company’s products or services to prospects.

Sales enablement content examples

What is sales content? Sales content can cover everything from foundational persona documents all the way to product training, sales scripts, and customer-facing marketing. Here are a few examples of sales enablement content you’ll want to consider for your team:

  • Persona documents: To communicate effectively, sales reps need to understand a buyer’s motivations, needs, and pain points. Buyer personas equip reps with research and insights on each target audience, allowing them to connect the dots on how a product solves a buyer’s challenge and helps them achieve their goals. 
  • Product training: Product training, such as product marketing one-pagers, manuals, and use case demos, delivers information on features and benefits, as well as context on how a company’s product fits into the broader industry. 
  • Competitor research and analysis: Battle cards and competitor marketing materials help reps understand the market and set them up to better communicate product differentiators or persuade clients to switch.
  • Scripts: To scale outreach while maintaining consistency, call scripts, demo presentations, and email templates get your sales team on a consistent path. Standardizing this type of sales enablement deliverable ensures a strong brand message and makes it easier to update them in the future. 
  • Customer-facing marketing materials: These assets provide education on an industry challenge or topic rather than overtly promoting your products. Whether it’s a blog post, case study, ebook, or video, injecting thought leadership into your sales enablement assets drives engagement with prospects. 

Did you know?

81%

of B2B marketers find a documented strategy beneficial because it aligns team members around goals.

What is a sales enablement content strategy?

A sales enablement content strategy lays out why you’re creating content (goals and audiences), what you’ll do (formats, tactics, schedules), and how you’ll measure impact (metric-based benchmarks). A content strategy is most effective when documented. This allows you to track progress, make updates as needed, and align stakeholders. The Content Marketing Institute found that 81% of B2B marketers believe a documented strategy is beneficial since it aligns team members around goals.

Why is a sales enablement content strategy important?

Sales enablement content is proven to benefit seller confidence, prospect engagement, and bottom-line revenue. Here are just a few of the ways content can support your business: 

  1. Improve the sales process: 57% of the buyer’s journey takes place before a prospect ever reaches a rep. Sales enablement content can prime the prospect with information and education before they reach the rep, as well as ensure that reps are ready to come out of the gate strong when they connect with the prospect for the first time.
  2. Enhance go-to-market alignment: A sales enablement content strategy ensures that every rep is working off the same information, including clear audience analysis, product definition, and strategic brand messaging. Organizations with strong alignment are shown to deliver “38% higher sales win rates and 24% faster revenue growth.”
  3. Increase seller performance: Sales content helps reps address challenges and offer solutions, as well as improve the efficiency of the process by providing templates and scripts that reduce manual effort and increase the scale of their outreach. 

Reimagine your Sales Content

What does great sales enablement content include?

Not all content is created equal. Effective content creation for sales enablement requires a targeted approach that considers the needs of your audience and communicates a consistent message with clear and concise language, engaging stories, and data-based evidence:

  • Tailor content to the persona and buyer’s journey. Use examples and language that are relevant to each buyer’s needs. Content that’s tailored to a specific audience and their stage in the funnel is more likely to get a response and build trust with your prospects. 
  • Bake consistent, repetitive messaging. Before writing anything, make sure to identify your core messages. Highlight these clearly throughout the piece. Repetition ensures that your message sticks and is remembered by readers as a key takeaway. 
  • Use clear and concise language. Straightforward language is easier to read for busy buyers. Content should be quickly digestible, with sub-headings and short paragraphs.
  • Include engaging stories. Use engaging stories to draw in your prospects. Including examples and customer stories will help them envision themselves using your product.
  • Build in data-based evidence. Prospects are looking for validation, so don’t hesitate to include statistics and studies from reputable, recent sources.

How to create a winning content strategy

It’s time to put your strategy in place, and while it might not always be a linear process, there are a few steps that are critical to creating a strategy that delivers results. 

  1. Audit existing content. Review your organization’s existing sales enablement content, and identify which assets are still relevant and usable. Some may just need an update, while it may be time for others to retire. 
  2. Analyze usage and performance. Take time to review sales enablement content analytics to see how it’s used and how it performs. If you don’t have a tracking tool in place, you might survey your sales team for anecdotal feedback. 
  3. Talk to your sellers. Gather feedback from your sales team on their biggest challenges and what types of content might be most effective for them. 
  4. Prioritize customers. The primary goal of your strategy is to meet the needs and pain points of your audience. Frequently ask yourself, “Is this content valuable for our customers?”
  5. Create a scalable and repeatable process. The key to an effective, long-term program is developing a consistent and efficient system for creating and distributing sales content. This includes a means of producing content, as well as infrastructure, like sales enablement content tools, that make content discoverable to sellers. 
  6. Organize and store content easily. Nothing is worse than docs that get passed around over email or lost on a personal Google Drive. As your content program grows, make sure you invest in infrastructure, such as a sales content management tool, to manage sales content. 
  7. Enable sellers. Provide sales the tools, training, and resources they need to effectively use sales enablement content. Don’t forget to establish a way for them to give feedback. 
  8. Evaluate metrics and performance over time. Implementing a reporting/tracking system for your content will allow you to understand its performance over time and make informed decisions on when to create new content or retire what’s not working. 

Ready to do more with your enablement content?

The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is a unified solution that streamlines the process of creating, managing, and distributing sales enablement content. At Seismic, we provide the rights tools that enable sellers to find, personalize, and share memorable content with prospects or customers, including: 

  • Content management: Organize your content in one centralized location, and give your reps the ability to search for materials in an always-current content library.  
  • Content personalization: Reps can easily personalize content and deliver a targeted message to prospects based on their persona and stage in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Content distribution: Send content faster, while maintaining compliance – helping alleviate the workload on reps and enabling them to scale. 
  • Content analytics: Track the performance of sales content and access detailed analytics on its usage and effectiveness.

Discover Seismic’s sales content management capabilities, or get a demo

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The essential sales kickoff planning guide https://seismic.com/enablement-explainers/sales-kickoff-guide/ Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:57:04 +0000 https://seismic.com/?post_type=explainers&p=140439 A sales kickoff (SKO) is an event unlike any other. Here’s how to plan and deliver the best sales kickoff that motivates, inspires, celebrates, and enables your team for the year ahead.

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What is a sales kickoff?

In the enablement world, there’s one event that stands out from any other — the sales kickoff (SKO).

A sales kickoff is an annual event for your entire go-to-market (GTM) team. The event should coincide with the start of your organization’s new fiscal calendar, so it usually takes place in January, February, or mid-year. While the main objective of a SKO is to motivate your sellers and lay the groundwork for the new sales year, it’s also the perfect time to:

  1. Celebrate team and individual seller success.
  2. Deliver product and service enablement.
  3. Energize teams for the year ahead.
  4. Outline goals and roadmaps. 
  5. Align the entire GTM organization.

Whether your GTM organization has a small number of reps or consists of thousands of sellers, a sales kickoff is one of the most impactful ways to drive future business growth and success. 

Features of a great sales kickoff meeting

There are a number of different factors that go into a successful sales kickoff, but every event should feature the following:

Enablement

Enablement is crucial for any SKO, so take advantage of this time by delivering essential enablement and training. Be sure to keep your audience in mind and focus on enablement content and sessions that are tailored to specific roles. 

Inspiration

A SKO should also inspire your attendees for the year ahead. Many organizations share product roadmaps, new tools or strategies, and other business updates during this time. This information should be clearly communicated so attendees understand why it’s important for your organization. And, if shared effectively, your team will leave the event excited and inspired for the year ahead.

Collaboration

If your organization is remote or dispersed across multiple locations, this may be one of the few times that your entire team will be together at once. Take advantage of this opportunity by giving everyone the chance to meet and collaborate with their peers. This can be done through team building exercises, breakout sessions based on roles, and networking breaks.

Celebration

A sales kickoff is a great time to celebrate company, team, and individual success. Celebrations can take place throughout the event or during a few dedicated sessions. For instance, some organizations may want to recognize top performers during a dedicated awards ceremony while others will plan a special dinner or happy hour.

Planning your sales kickoff event

A lot of preparation goes into every great sales kickoff. Because there is so much planning involved, we don’t suggest waiting until the last minute to get everything ready. As a best practice, we recommend that small and midsize businesses (SMBs) start the planning process three months in advance. For larger and global enterprises, the entire process will take approximately four months to complete. Regardless of your company’s size, here are some important steps to take for planning your sales kickoff event. 

  1. Align with key stakeholders: It’s important to sync with your executive and leadership teams before planning gets underway. This will help you align on top priorities and ensure that everyone agrees on what needs to be accomplished and addressed during the event. 
  2. Create a sales kickoff committee: Once you have a list of priorities, it’s time to form a cross-functional sales kickoff committee. A great sales kickoff event needs the coordination and collaboration of your marketing, sales, and enablement teams. 
  3. Define goals and objectives: Does your organization need to focus on new product offerings or tool enablement? Once you identify what your goals are, you’ll need to identify key metrics that you’ll review in order to determine success.
  4. Decide on a format: Prior to the pandemic, many organizations hosted in-person sales kickoffs. But now, you may find it more efficient to hold your SKO as a virtual or hybrid event. Regardless of the format you choose, it’s an important decision that needs to be made early on in order to help inform the rest of the planning process. 
  5. Determine your budget: Determining your budget goes hand-in-hand with choosing your format. If your company is working with a smaller budget this year, it’s appropriate to focus on a hybrid event. But, if your budget allows for travel, venue space, and on-site meals, you may be able to move forward with an in-person or hybrid event. 
  6. Identify a theme:. A theme ensures that your sessions and messaging are consistent throughout the event. It also adds an element of fun and entertainment. Remember, your sales kickoff theme should be unique to your company and the current state of your business. For example, Seismic’s 2021 SKO theme was “One team. One mission.” which reinforced our commitment to our customers and their enablement goals. Once you identify your theme, work with your marketing team to create fun assets and collateral for the event.
  7. Find energetic sales kickoff speakers: Your event should also include speakers from your company and beyond. Look for ways to invite engaging keynote speakers who fit with your event’s theme who will deliver engaging content that leaves your attendees energized and motivated. It’s also a good idea to spotlight some of your customers and partners throughout the event.
  8. Outline your agenda: Choosing the right sales kickoff agenda can make or break the event. While your agenda will likely change throughout the planning process, it’s best to create a rough outline to help you identify the time frame, number of speakers, session types, and more. 
  9. Remember the logistics: There are a number of logistic considerations that you should expect during the planning process. For in-person events you’ll need to think through lodging, transportation, meals, and event spaces, while virtual and hybrid events will require additional technology logistics. 
  10. Pitch the event: Once you’ve determined when and where your sales kickoff will be, share that with the rest of your GTM organization. Send a save the date placeholder for their calendars, and share information as early as possible in order to encourage participation. 

GTM Alignment: Forging a Stronger Future

Delivering engaging and compelling SKO content

Content is the cornerstone of every great event. Here’s how you can effectively deliver content leading up to the event, at the meeting itself, and after it concludes.

Before

  • Prep your sales playbook: Your SKO should have a dedicated sales playbook that provides all of the information your team needs to know. This will act as a single source of truth and go-to resource for what they need to do in order to prepare for the event.
  • Provide pre-work: A sales kickoff shouldn’t overload attendees with information during the event itself. Instead, determine what content warrants a live session and what content should be reviewed ahead of time. Then, create pre-work that provides foundational knowledge that you plan on covering in greater detail during the event. This content should be organized and stored on your organization’s content management system so everyone can quickly and easily access it.
  • Track completion and comprehension: We also suggest creating training lessons for any pre-work content. This will help you keep track of who completes any required pre-work assignments. You can also include knowledge checks and quizzes to assess how well everyone comprehends the information. By reviewing this data, you’ll be able to better tailor your sessions and content during the event.

During

  • Keep things interactive: Whether your SKO is an in-person, hybrid, or virtual event, interactivity is key. Look for ways to mix up each session format so that attendees aren’t sitting and listening to presentations for hours at a time. Breakout sessions are a great way to encourage Q&A and in-depth discussions among teammates. It’s also a good idea to incorporate fun games or contests to encourage interactivity.
  • Feature hands-on learning: We believe that the best sales teams practice. So, look for ways to leverage practice scenarios and peer-to-peer feedback during your sales kickoff. For example, if you have a new product or service launching, ask reps to practice pitching a demo with a small group of their peers. Then, ask teammates to vote on the best pitch until a winner is identified.

After

  • Keep the momentum going: A great SKO sets your team up for the upcoming year, so it’s a good idea to keep the energy and momentum going after it ends. Build an enablement plan that reinforces and expands on information that was covered. For example, if you record sessions or share materials during the event, add them to your SKO content hub so everyone has access on an ongoing basis.
  • Provide ongoing training and coaching: Learning shouldn’t stop once your event is over. Create follow-up training lessons that give everyone the opportunity to review knowledge as much as they need to. It’s also helpful to schedule follow-up coaching sessions to ensure that your seller’s skills are where they need to be after attending the event
  • Gather attendee feedback: A SKO is only as good as the results, so take the time to get feedback from your attendees. Send a survey that asks them to rate the quality of content delivery, speakers, and specific sessions. It’s also a good idea to provide a free response area where attendees can share more specific feedback that will come in handy when it’s time to plan your next SKO.

Virtual sales kickoff ideas

Over the last few years, we’ve helped sales teams across the globe plan and execute their virtual and hybrid sales kickoffs. Here are some tips and best practices to keep in mind if you’re holding this type of event. 

If you’re looking for even more tips, check out this post which features 20 of our best sales kickoff ideas for virtual events! 

Make your next SKO one to remember

These sales kickoff ideas are just the beginning of what it takes to hold a great event. If you’re looking for a partner who can help you maximize your sales kickoff and deliver content to your entire GTM organization, Seismic can help. Teams use Seismic’s platform to organize and store SKO content and deliver ongoing training that’s useful before, during, and after the event. Get a demo to see how. Or, if you’re a current Seismic customer, contact your Customer Success or Account Manager to learn more about our expert advisory SKO support.

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