At Shift 2023, experts from our award-winning Professional Services team led breakout sessions designed to help our customers navigate complex enablement journeys. In our “Shift into the New Year” series, we’re continuing to share best practices to help you develop plans for 2024 and beyond. If you haven’t already, please check out the first, second, and third posts in the series.
As you embark on your journey to achieve “best-in-class” enablement with Seismic, remember that success is contingent on a critical factor: understanding your current state of enablement maturity and aligning your business outcomes accordingly.
In today’s noisy marketplace, enablement promises more efficient and effective teams, elevated brand recognition, and accelerated growth. We’ve come to realize that enablement isn’t just a destination – it’s a journey.
Our journey as a leader in the enablement space began over a decade ago, with financial services customers across banking, wealth management and insurance. We’ve partnered closely with industry giants, sharing our expertise and developing technology and plans that address the unique needs of Financial Services clients.
While we drive for today’s success, we look for tomorrow’s opportunities (and challenges). Our internal teams collaborate to share best practices, and develop functionality that increases efficiency and productivity, while maintaining compliant and complex processes and workflows. Furthermore, we keep a close eye on the macro business environment, pivoting as necessary, but also remaining as a stable partner and resource.
We understand that regulations shape the way financial services firms do enablement and automation. What we’ve realized is that challenges in any vertical are often quite similar: how do we mature our efforts, ensure we get the value out of innovations and create a strategic plan for the future?
The path to enablement maturity can be summarized in three steps. In this post, we’ll share how your organization can crawl, walk, and eventually run as you uplevel your enablement programs.
First, we crawl
In partnership with Seismic’s Professional Services team, your journey toward building a robust content management foundation starts with taming chaos and optimizing content utilization during the “crawl” phase. With Seismic’s expertise, a comprehensive analysis of your organization’s current content management practices is conducted, identifying pain points and inefficiencies to pave the way for subsequent improvements.
A pivotal collaboration with Seismic involves establishing a centralized repository that serves as a unified hub for storing all relevant content. This repository, facilitated by Seismic’s platform, acts as the definitive source of truth, minimizing confusion and ensuring that teams can readily access the latest and most accurate information.
Many of our financial services clients work hand in hand with Seismic’s services professionals for best practices around categorization and tagging to improve content organization. This approach fosters an intuitive and consistent method for content classification, augmented by metadata such as keywords and descriptors, to streamline content retrieval and maximize efficiency. Seismic’s expertise ensures that access control and permissions are meticulously defined, aligning with industry regulations and safeguarding sensitive information according to user roles and compliance requirements within the financial services sector.
Seismic’s Professional Services team also collaborates closely to develop a streamlined distribution strategy tailored to your organization’s needs. This bespoke strategy involves creating automated workflows for content distribution, personalized content recommendations based on user roles or preferences, and seamless integration with other tools in your tech stack. Optimizing content distribution gives teams access to the most relevant materials precisely when needed, bolstering productivity and decision-making capabilities.
As you reach the end of this phase, a continuous improvement process or feedback loop is suggested, actively seeking input from users to identify areas for refinement. Iterative changes are implemented to enhance the usability, efficiency, and overall effectiveness of the content management system over time. This approach ensures that the content management strategy remains adaptable and responsive to the evolving needs of the organization, creating a foundation for successful, sustainable content management. Throughout this process, Seismic’s Professional Services team ensures that your content management strategy remains flexible and scalable.
Next, we walk
As your organization advances to the “walk” phase, the emphasis shifts toward improving efficiency and gauging the impact of initiatives. To maintain momentum during this critical phase, Seismic – in partnership with its Professional Services team – has introduced several impactful solutions and features.
First, Fund Report Orchestrator, which accelerates time-sensitive commentaries, streamlining the assignment, creation, approval, and distribution processes to clients. This not only expedites the delivery of product-specific commentaries, research reports, quarterly investment reports, and topical POVs but also significantly reduces compliance risk. Through collaborative efforts with Seismic Professional Services, your organization can explore automation strategies that inspire efficiency and compliance in content production.
Seismic Learning keeps client-facing teams informed about new initiatives and content. We’ve enhanced the learning experience with AI, video capabilities, and automated coaching. Teams have access to cutting-edge learning resources, ensuring they remain at the forefront of industry and organizational knowledge.
Seismic Learning serves as a vital ally in navigating the intricacies of regulatory compliance. The platform ensures data security and privacy compliance by incorporating robust encryption and secure data handling mechanisms, aligning with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, as well as entities like FINRA & the SEC. Seismic Learning enhances the learning experience for client-facing teams, equipping them with tailored content to stay well-informed and adept in the dynamic regulatory landscape.
Imagine a scenario where your teams receive the training they need precisely when it’s required – where compliant content can be easily surfaced and where content production is a seamless, efficient process across all collateral.
Finally, we run
In the “run” phase, we focus on expanding value messaging and driving transformation. Seismic empowers your teams to craft personalized and engaging messages at scale, truly embracing customer-centricity.
Seismic Professional Services’ thought leadership and expertise – coupled with the innovations of digital sales rooms (DSR) and LiveSend templates – provide client-facing teams with repeatable, compliant, and scalable methods to easily produce external-facing communications that inform and engage their audience. Your personalized messages will resonate deeply across various channels, enhancing engagement and delivering meaningful value.
Our journey takes us to enablement maturity, where our most advanced clients optimize revenue growth. It’s all about getting teams to operate against data-driven insights, allowing for strategic and operational alignment between Marketing, sales reps, and advisors while obtaining a holistic view of revenue activities.
At this stage, we integrate Aura AI seamlessly into your workflows, providing teams with just-in-time compliant answers at their fingertips – a vast knowledge base replete with accurate and timely responses to client inquiries.
The goal is that your entire organization operates seamlessly, leveraging data-driven insights to ignite revenue growth, aligning marketing, enablement, and advisors, while automating time-consuming manual tasks. This phase is the epitome of enablement success.
Our firm belief is that addressing these foundational aspects of your enablement program holds the key to reducing the noise. It’s akin to unveiling a window into the inner workings of your operations – a window that enables you to clearly ascertain the efficacy of your efforts.
As financial services clients, you have an incredible opportunity before you. By strategically utilizing Seismic and embracing partnership with our Professional Services team, you can confidently progress through this crawl, walk, run approach to exceed your enablement outcomes and transform your business operations.
Automation, platform efficiencies, cutting-edge, compliant solutions, and industry-leading best practices – our enablement experts are ready to partner with you to win as one.
