Increases sales velocity and predictability in seller success with Seismic

The challenge

Sellers using old and outdated materials

When Eileen Brooker first began at Informatica as GVP of Global Corporate Sales, Enablement and Strategy, she sought out Seismic to replace a content repository system that saw little adoption across the organisation.

“It wasn’t a delivery system by any means. It was a filing cabinet that wasn’t doing the job. We had reps all over the globe using what was on their laptops. It was old. It was outdated. It didn’t resonate. We didn’t have user adoption because they couldn’t find what they wanted to find so they just stopped using it,” explained Brooker.

Without user adoption, Informatica had no opportunity to know what actions sellers were taking or what the top-performing sales reps were doing and were unable to understand what actions were correlating to the velocity of their business. “We got executive buy-in [to engage with Seismic] because the executives saw where we were going,” said Brooker. “We needed behavioural analytics and we didn’t have that [with our current solution].”

In their sales organisation, measuring velocity to revenue is a top priority. Data is always front and centre. In order to move the needle on measurements, like decreasing new rep ramp time and time to revenue or increasing rep productivity, the metric Brooker was focused on was adoption.

“The Holy Grail measurements are what you want to get to. You cannot begin to measure or infer influence unless you have adoption, behavioural metrics, understanding of what your reps are doing and how that produces or doesn’t produce the right results,” said Brooker.

The solution

Delivering targeted content right where sellers work

Informatica turned to Seismic as an industry-leading platform to increase enablement adoption within their organisation and become a clear place for sellers to go and find the newest and greatest content. A system that only acted as a repository wasn’t enough. It was clear Seismic was the change needed to support their business goals and help Informatica leverage more information about how their sellers were doing. They needed the ability to deliver content while meeting sellers where they worked by integrating directly into Salesforce and SalesLoft.

To achieve the user adoption Brooker was focused on, she knew early on that seller buy-in was of the utmost importance. “When you go through the adoption of process, procedures and platforms you really have to involve your sales reps continually,” noted Brooker. In her approach, they began to treat their sellers like their customers.

And by treating their sellers like customers, Informatica created advocates. Through the effort of continually getting their “customers” to be part of what they were building from creation to delivery in Seismic, Informatica has achieved an 83% adoption rate. Seismic has become the trusted source of truth for sellers.

Big wins through automation

Informatica thoughtfully rolled out Seismic in a tiered approach. They started with the simplest version of the product first and gradually activated new features internally to make the transition smooth and have an overall greater impact at the organisation.

How do you know it’s working? “When you can have a sales leader call what you rolled out ‘legit’ [to their team], that’s pure gold,” said Brooker. This reaction came after Informatica rolled out an automated proposal builder through Seismic’s LiveDocs, which was implemented to reduce time spent on admin tasks by sellers.

“Through all the work we did with Seismic, we were able to surface the right type of information where someone could create a proposal for a customer including pricing, competitive information, customer references in about 10 minutes,” said Brooker. “And this took them hours before.”

From hours to minutes. Informatica was delivering a solution to their sellers that allowed them to be more effective in their day-to-day while improving velocity.

Creating predictable success through data

To create more predictability in the success of their sellers, Informatica integrated their CRM, Salesforce and sales readiness tool, SalesLoft, with Seismic. For Informatica, integrating Seismic within the main places sellers live was critical.

As Brooker points out, “What’s super important here is integration. It’s a holistic view of your systems and your data. If I can tell the leading indicators, if I understand the behaviours of the reps, what they’re doing and what the results of that are; I can then have predictability in their success. That’s magic.”

To stay on top of the “Holy Grail” metrics and closely track the amount of time a customer is spending in each sales stage, integrating Seismic within the sellers’ workspace helped support Informatica in their goals to improve velocity.

“We are fortunate enough to have integrated not only Seismic into Salesforce, but Seismic into SalesLoft. It allows us to take all of those leading indicators and figure out how our reps are making one stage to the next a much quicker process. And that gets you to revenue much faster,” explained Brooker.

Creating laser focus with Seismic’s LiveSend Insights

Informatica is a company built on providing data integration software and helping other companies fully leverage their information assets. As such, Seismic’s LiveSend capabilities and LiveInsights have allowed sellers to understand how prospects and customers are engaging with their materials, and how their actions are moving deals forward, contributing towards revenue. Informatica uses key data points and benchmarking metrics to focus their attention on areas where they can make a small change that could lead to a significant impact on their business.

For example, they updated the messaging in their outbound emails through SalesLoft cadences and tracked the results. The Informatica team condensed the messaging in these emails, shortened their subject lines, and added LiveSend links that would give them LiveInsight data to track their leading indicators.

“With LiveSend we know who read it, where they were, what page they were on, how much time they spent. We can really laser focus our folks so they don’t spend time on leads that aren’t going to result in anything,” explained Brooker.

These small changes led to big results. Open rates for their outbound emails doubled from 9.9% to over 21% with the click-through rate tripling. Above all, their Positive Conversation Rate, the amount of positive conversations they had once a prospect got on the phone, went up 220%.