In 2010, five forward-thinking colleagues saw an opportunity to help sales and marketing teams deliver personalised 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 personalise 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 programme, tailored to each unique role. To support continuous learning and upskilling, Seismic’s readiness platform provides tools to create lessons, certification programmes, real-life roleplay scenarios, and more. Managers can provide sales coaching and feedback in real-time, helping sellers improve their ability. 

2. Strategy and Planning: Every good enablement programme starts with a strategy and plan. Before kicking off an initiative, teams can centralise strategy and planning in Seismic. Enablement Planner helps enablers work smarter by streamlining workflows for playbooks, onboarding programmes, sales plays, and more. Built-in sales content analytics give enablement teams the right insights to adapt their programmes and maximize impact. 

3. 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.

4. 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 personalised and relevant to their unique needs. To help stand out from competitors, Seismic has a suite of personalisation tools ranging from machine learning and AI for content recommendations to built-in wizards within PowerPoint and Google Slides that can quickly and easily personalise presentations. Seismic also enables client-facing teams with several delivery channels, including email, social, and digital sales rooms (think customised solution portal) to connect with buyers).

5. Enablement Intelligence: It’s challenging to demonstrate enablement impact without a tool that centralises 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 organisations 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.

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 maximises GTM productivity and success by providing:

Contextual information

Aura analyses large and complex data sets, giving sellers insights and context-driven recommendations that are personalised for every opportunity.

Auto-tagging and content descriptions

Generative AI auto-tags content properties and generates a description, helping content creators accurately and quickly publish content that’s discoverable for sellers.

Just-in-time intelligence

Within Seismic, sellers can search for the answers they need during customer interactions and instantly get summarised results and natural language responses at the top of their search.

AI-generated lessons

To create high-quality training content in less time, Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly) generates lessons, questions, and summaries that trainers and enablement professionals can easily tailor and refine for their needs.

Meeting preparation and follow-up

Seismic for Meetings helps sellers prepare for meetings, generate post-meeting summaries, recommend follow-up content, and suggest next-best actions. The tool also generates insightful analytics for the rep and managers on content usage, sales behaviours, and trending topics during conversations.

Social posts

To help sellers engage with customers on social media, Seismic LiveSocial uses AI to generate a post for every article, intelligently crafting appropriate starting text based on the article’s length, tone, and personality.

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 organisational requirements. Content governance and compliance rules can be as broad or granular as you need, giving administrators the flexibility to implement controls. 

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 organisations 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 organisation? See Seismic in action by getting a demo. 

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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.

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 cycles 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 a number of 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

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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:

Training effectiveness

Effective training should include hands-on practice and role-playing. AI in sales training replicates real-life sales scenarios so sellers can practice sales calls and product demos.

Real-time assessments

During these practice sessions and sales calls, AI can monitor performance, identify skills and knowledge gaps, and provide tailored training to improve development.

Personalized feedback

AI powered sales training and coaching also enables managers to identify where gaps exist among their team and deliver personalized coaching plans at scale to improve performance.

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.

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.

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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Content personalisation 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-personalised messaging that acknowledges the buyer’s particular business needs or past behaviours. With customer expectations higher than ever, the use of personalised content creates a unique and highly targeted experience that is key to the success of every deal.

Why is personalised 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 personalised experience, and 76% will move to another organisation if they’re unhappy with their experience. 

So while customers certainly expect it, it’s also proven to be more effective. Personalisation 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 personalisation empowers sellers to effectively engage with buyers and customers. Our report, The Personalization Payoff, found that more companies are sending personalised content than ever before. This includes an 89% increase in personalised 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.

Challenges of delivering a personalised experience

While personalisation 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 personalised enough for customers.

Customer-facing teams 

Sellers are in frequent communication with prospects and need content to provide personalised 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 personalised. Building systems to create content at scale and finding the right delivery methods are two common roadblocks that must be solved to support a personalised content program.

Content personalisation strategies and tips 

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

1.   Know your buyer

At the heart of personalisation is a deep understanding of the buyer. Building a research phase into your content personalisation 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, organised 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 personalised content examples 

It can be challenging to know where to start with content personalisation. Here are a few examples to help you tailor your messages to 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 changes based on user behaviour.
5. Use case studies and testimonials relevant to the buyer’s industry or role. 

The value of enablement tools for content personalisation

Sales enablement tools are powerful resources that companies can use to generate personalised 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: 

Produce content at scale

Marketing teams often struggle to create enough content to serve the entire sales organisation’s needs, let alone with the level of personalisation required for today’s buyers. Content personalisation tools store and organise existing content and allow easy edits and updates to adjust for different segments and use cases. They essentially function as a vast digital library that allows for easy discovery. 

Personalise content

Enablement tools often include dynamic content features that allow for the fast personalisation of content based on buyer characteristics. In many cases, sellers can do this without the help of marketing and pull personalised content into different formats, such as PowerPoint presentations or Google Slides. Putting more power into the hands of reps allows them to focus on selling, not searching for content, and reduces the burden on the marketing team. 

Measure effectiveness

Content personalisation tools provide organisations with quantifiable data on their content performance and usage. For example, these tools can track everything from, click-through rates on a specific piece of content to the time the buyer spent reading the content. They also help attribute collateral to conversion and buyer decisions down the road. This wealth of data and insights helps organisations fine-tune their enablement strategy and build a plan for developing the most engaging content. 

Ready to make your content stand out?

The Seismic Enablement Cloud features solutions that make it easy for go-to-market organisations to build content at scale and harness the power of personalisation. 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 are delivered to sellers precisely when they need it. And with our robust self-service tools, sellers can quickly and easily create personalised 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 into our sales content management and automation features.

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What is client engagement?

Client engagement is the act of cultivating impactful connections with prospects. It encompasses any interaction that takes place between sellers and buyers – from connections on social media to direct 1:1 sales calls. When done right, it’s a powerful strategy: reps who effectively engage prospects can foster long-term relationships, improve the sales process and close more deals.

How engagement has changed

The rise of technology and shift toward remote work has drastically impacted client engagement in recent years. Let’s take a look at some of the major evolutions.

• Proliferation of digital channels: In the past, client engagement activities often took place in person over happy hours, dinners or conferences. Now, with more people working remotely, as well as a global customer base, engagement largely happens over  digital channels. For example, a seller may reach out to a prospect on LinkedIn, exchange emails and eventually set up a time to connect on a virtual meeting.
• Consultative selling: Traditional selling has been transactional. Reps were laser-focused on closing a deal and often used assertive pitches to do so. Now, consultative selling is more common, with emphasis on understanding a prospect’s specific needs and developing tailored solutions for them, all to build trust over time.
• SaaS sales technology: Advanced enablement and sales engagement tools allow teams to better track interactions, send personalised communications and measure progress. The proliferation of technology in this space can be overwhelming, but the right tools can empower busy sales teams to reach buyers at scale.

Why is client engagement important?

Effective engagement has many positive benefits, from spurring prospects to action to building long-term advocates for your brand. Here are just a few of the benefits organisations see:

• Higher conversion rates: Consistent and targeted engagement can guide potential customers through the sales funnel more effectively, improving conversion rates. In fact, Salesforce found that companies with strong customer engagement strategies saw a 40% increase in conversion rates.
• Revenue growth: When sellers create meaningful interactions during the buying process, prospects may be open to current and future spend. One study showed that buyers who were fully engaged in the sales process accounted for a 23% increase in company revenue.
• Post-purchase advocacy: An exceptional customer experience can transform satisfied customers into eager brand advocates. 77% of customers who’ve had a positive experience say they will recommend the company to a friend. These customers also may be open to participating in case studies or speaking on behalf of the company, creating influential word-of-mouth testimonials.

Rewriting the Rules of Engagement

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The client engagement process

Successful sellers take a thoughtful approach to engagement by understanding their buyer’s needs, tailoring their pitches and working to build a relationship that goes beyond the sale. Consider these five key steps reps can take to build a client engagement plan:

Research the buyer 

Buyers expect reps to be informed about their needs – even on the first interaction. For reps, this means that research comes first. Learn about the company and the role your prospect holds, and then consider what might have prompted them to seek your services. This sets the stage for a productive first meeting and demonstrates genuine interest in their success.

Connect where they are 

In order to stand out, it’s important to meet prospects in the channels where they spend their time. For many, this is on a social media platform like LinkedIn or X (formerly Twitter). While digital is queen, sellers can also look into the events or conferences that prospects attend and make a valuable in-person connection.

Tailor your pitch 

As you start to engage with the buyer, practice active listening and ask questions to understand their current challenges as clearly as possible. A customised consultative pitch is proven to work as 84% of businesses are more likely to buy from reps who understand their goals.

Build a trusted partnership

Today’s sellers are expected to become industry knowledge experts, providing insight and value beyond the product. Managers need to consider how they can help their reps upskill in this area. This is when additional training and coaching programmes, as well as opportunities to attend educational events can help sellers improve their craft.

Measure success

Establish clear metrics to measure the effectiveness of your client engagement programme. This includes reporting on client interactions or views and engagement with enablement materials.

Client engagement strategies

By utilising client engagement best practices, sales teams can effectively connect with clients, drive meaningful conversations and uncover new revenue opportunities. Let’s dive into some strategies that every go-to-market organisation can put into action.

Build a strong digital presence
Buyers often do their own fact-finding before speaking to a rep, most commonly through online channels. It’s important for sales to develop a strong digital presence and be prepared to share personalised content and the right messaging at the right time.

Provide personalised experiences
71% of consumers expect personalised interactions. Tailoring the customer journey and content to individual needs can significantly impact a company’s revenue and customer retention. Organisations that excel at personalisation generate 40% more revenue than those that don’t.

Help, don’t sell,
Sales teams should adopt a consultative approach, offering valuable insights and solutions, to build credibility and foster relationships that transcend products (or even companies).

Ready to take engagement to the next level?

With the Seismic Enablement Cloud, businesses can effectively streamline and support client engagement with the necessary tools and insights to foster meaningful interactions, create personalised experiences and train and upskill their teams. Seismic’s sales Content Management enables reps to discover and deliver engaging, personalised and informative content throughout the buyer’s journey. Our learning and coaching capabilities also help sellers build client engagement skills through continuous training and 1:1 coaching. Interested in learning more? Get a demo to start honing your team’s client engagement strategy.

The post Client engagement best practices and strategies appeared first on Seismic.

Fast forward fifty years, and there are now thousands of sales operations professionals in the United States alone. The role only continues to grow, but what does the modern-day role of sales operations look like for today’s go-to-market (GTM) organisations?

What is sales operations?

Sales operations support the greater sales team so they can successfully drive revenue. The primary goal of sales operations is to streamline and improve sales processes so sellers can be as effective and efficient as possible. This involves:

1. Sales planning and strategy implementation
2. Sales analytics and reporting
3. Sales process automation
4. Sales forecasting and pipeline management
5. Sales tool management and administration

Why is sales ops important?

The world of sales is quickly evolving, and teams need to make smart investments in order to remain competitive. Many organisations are also trying to do more with less in today’s economic climate. At the same time, buyers have changed the way they interact with sellers. All of these scenarios mean that GTM teams need to make strategic business decisions that will lead to as much success as possible. Sales ops makes this possible by supporting sales leaders and sellers alike with the strategies and tools they need to be effective. In fact, a study by McKinsey found that organisations with a strong sales operations team experience higher productivity and greater revenue than those without one.

What does a sales operations team do?

Now that you have a better understanding of what exactly sales operations does and why it’s so important, let’s take a closer look at specific responsibilities and tasks.

Drive sales strategy

Sales operations teams work closely with sales leadership to develop sales plans, set goals and create strategies that enable sellers to hit targets. This includes:

• Cross-functional collaboration: Sales ops acts as an advocate and partner for sales teams. They work with product, marketing and leadership teams to create alignment across the GTM organisation.
• Analysing sales metrics: Sales data is not only important for compensation and forecasting. It’s also critical for deciding how to adjust the sales organisation and GTM model. Sales operations can help spot trends and provide recommendations on how to adjust the sales strategy.
• Forecasting: Using data and predictive models, sales operations take an active role in this strategic function by making accurate predictions of what will close, where there’s pipeline opportunity and which deals are at risk of losing.

Organise sales teams

Sales operations also play a key role in recommending the organisation and responsibilities of the greater sales team. This includes:

• Hiring: Who makes it through the doors and onto your team will dramatically affect the performance of your organisation. It can demotivate your top-performers or it can lead to an all-star team. Sales operations help establish hiring practices and criteria to ensure the right sellers join the team.
• Territories: The allocation of territories – by geo, zip code, vertical and more – can have a major impact on success. Sales operations can balance territories for fairness and maximum ‘exploitation’ of opportunities.
• Compensation: This one is actually mislabelled. A more complete approach is to look at ‘incentivisation’. That is, how monetary rewards, gifts, training, career progression, recognition and other tools can encourage positive actions that drive revenue. Sales operations often manages these programmes and is generally involved in balancing pure compensation versus industry benchmarks.

Drive team efficiency and execution

Sellers only have so much time in their day, and Gartner found that they only spend 18% of it selling. Therefore, any amount of time that you can give back to them to focus on core selling activities is going to pay large dividends. Sales operations can have a major impact here by implementing tools and processes that automate manual processes, remove barriers and streamline processes. This includes:

• Transaction processing: Friction in the sales process can dramatically slow any deal. Sales operations measures where bottlenecks occur in the selling process and make necessary improvements.
• CRM administration: Sales ops often oversees the administration and management of the team’s CRM. They ensure accurate data entry, set up tool integrations, create reports and dashboards and report on activity.
• Managing the tech stack: There are a number of tools that make sales teams more effective. From data quality and appending to email management tools, sales operations should pioneer the discovery and adoption of the best sales productivity tools possible.

Sales operations rightly deserves a strategic seat in every GTM organisation. While not all of these responsibilities will apply to your team, it’s important to evaluate them and identify the best areas for your team to focus on.

Boost sales success with Seismic

Best-in-class companies are eager to jump in and use the best tools and resources to help their organisation create a winning sales enablement strategy. Hungry for more knowledge about sales enablement and how it can help your organisation operate efficiently? Get a demo and we’ll show you how!

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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 organisation generates $3 million in revenue and spends $1.5 million, the sales efficiency calculation is 2 or 200%. It is also easy to calculate this 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. Organisations 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.

Since sales efficiency and effectiveness aren’t the same thing, organisations shouldn’t 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 organisation’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 organisation’s revenue. Efficient sellers have the resources they need to interact with buyers, answer questions and close deals more quickly. As a result, organisations can expect to reach quotas and revenue goals. However, organisations 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

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The evolution of sales playbooks

Sales playbooks have been integral to sales success for decades. But, as buyer journeys have shifted, sales playbooks have also evolved. Let’s take a brief look at how far they’ve come in recent years. 

Why are sales playbooks important?

We’ve already mentioned how helpful sales playbooks are when it comes to navigating rapidly changing sales processes and evolving buyer preferences. Sales playbooks also positively impact your entire GTM team and promote ongoing company growth. In fact, one study found that companies with well-defined sales playbooks and processes are 33% more likely to be high performers. The win rates also exceed 50% for two-thirds of companies that have these in place. If that isn’t encouraging enough, here are some of our other favourite benefits.

Decrease ramp time

New reps have access to a step-by-step guide that they can follow to engage with customers and learn important information.

Improve productivity

Because reps know where to find important information, they spend less time looking for what they need and more time interacting with buyers.

Drive consistency

Playbooks create and clear, concise and easy to follow processes for every function of the GTM organisation.

Increase effectiveness

By equipping sellers to navigate various scenarios, they can quickly and efficiently interact with buyers and close deals faster.

The Sales Playbook Blueprint

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Sales onboarding encapsulates the entire process of welcoming and connecting new hires on a sales team. This starts as soon as a seller walks into the office or logs on for the first time.

The sales onboarding process, however, is more complex than a simple “hello” and introducing new hires to their teammates. Sales onboarding is multifaceted and includes a number of tasks and items that get new sellers up-to-speed and hitting performance goals as soon as reasonably possible. An effective sales onboarding programme includes:

• Industry knowledge: Popular acronyms, selling tactics and trends may be old news to you, but they’re brand new information to a new sales rep.
• Company and product training: Your sales reps have selling skills, but they aren’t yet familiar with the products and services your organisation sells. Training new hires on these aspects of your business is especially important if your company belongs to a unique or niche market.
• Sales enablement content strategy: Knowing what content assets like pitch decks, sales sheets and case studies are at their disposal is critical to a new seller’s success. This also ensures they understand the best time to deliver different assets throughout the buyer journey.
• Sales processes and best practices: A comprehensive understanding of what has or hasn’t worked in the past can save a new seller time and energy.
• Skills training: Every seller has unique strengths and weaknesses. Great onboarding gauges each seller’s current skill set and delivers personalised sales training that helps strengthen their weaknesses.

Why is sales onboarding an important part of enablement?

Selling is more challenging than ever before. Deal cycles are increasingly complex and often driven by highly-informed buyers through digital channels. As a result, sellers now have to develop new skills and enable them to engage buyers in a new sales landscape. In order to quickly ramp up new sales reps, your organisation needs to ensure they have the right skills, knowledge and tools to engage buyers on their terms. In order to do these things effectively, companies need to create an onboarding programme that acts as a roadmap for new hires.

A successful sales onboarding plan educates sellers on their sales quotas, performance milestones and expectations, and the tools that will get them there. The sales onboarding process is an essential step in this plan. If you don’t take time to train, educate and guide sellers from the get-go, they’ll fail to properly understand what the organisation intends for them to achieve and what resources they have to help get the job done.

The benefits of sales onboarding

Sales onboarding goes far beyond providing a few playbooks and training sessions to new sellers. A strong sales enablement onboarding programme paired with collaborative company culture pays off tenfold when your seller starts connecting with prospects. In fact, effective sales onboarding has been shown to:

Increase Productivity	Drive Satisfaction	Decrease Turnover
New sellers who have access to an effective onboarding programme ramp up seven weeks faster than the industry average (6-9 months).	Employees who say they experienced exceptional onboarding are 2.6 times more likely to be extremely satisfied with their workplace.	Nearly 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for an average of three years if they experience great onboarding.

Let’s take a close look at how these benefits come to be.

• Improve productivity: When a seller spends less time asking questions or digging for important resources, they can reach their full potential with ease.
• Drive satisfaction: An onboarding programme is a new hire’s first experience with your organisation’s learning and development culture, which is an important factor in employee satisfaction. Therefore, a hassle-free onboarding experience is often reflective of a larger, positive company culture.
• Decrease turnover: Lower turnover rates are all about confidence in your brand and your company. An organisation with a solid onboarding process may make new hires feel more secure in their position and the company as a whole.

Challenges to delivering effective onboarding

Although an effective onboarding programme is critical to seller experience, some organisations still struggle to hit the mark. In fact, 88% of leaders believe that their organisation struggles with onboarding. Some of the most common obstacles to delivering a solid onboarding programme include:

1. Access to the right sales enablement materials: Sellers need easy and ongoing access to their training and sales enablement materials. Make sure new hires know where the most pertinent information is stored, as well as additional resources that may come in handy.
2. Lack of milestones to gauge progress: Despite the well-known benefits of goal-making, 60% of companies don’t set short-term goals for new hires. Giving performance reviews – even small ones – can reassure sellers that they are on the right track
3. Compressed time frame: The first few months in a new role can be stressful for a new hire. Sales training plans should allow adequate time for your seller to learn the ropes instead of cramming onboarding into a few weeks. The fact is, employees who experience longer onboarding programmes gain full proficiency 34% faster than those with shorter programmes, so create a roadmap that extends beyond a seller’s first 30 or 60 days on the job.
4. Inconsistent experience from rep to rep: Sometimes, even the best sales onboarding plans can have flaws. These can boil down to simple things like different methods of delivery by trainers and enablement leaders, or the time of year when a hire is brought on board.
5. Inadequate coaching and feedback: As a sales enablement manager or leader, it’s up to you to ensure that each of your sellers receives the support they need wherever they are in their skills journey. What applies to one seller may not apply to the rest. Utilise the resources at your disposal to give feedback where it will be most effective.

Accelerating Seller Success

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Sales onboarding best practices

While companies can face a number of challenges with onboarding new sales reps, there are many great tips to help the process run smoothly.

1. Streamline the process: Keep your training materials sorted, indexed and easy to find. The faster a new hire can get a question answered, the better.
2. Assess and measure sales readiness over time: As discussed, goal-setting is one of the strongest facets of a great training plan. Give your new hires small goals to achieve, so the bigger ones don’t seem quite so daunting.
3. Deliver engaging training: Binders full of reading material don’t make for a great new hire sales training experience. Instead, encourage employees to interact with content, apply newly learned knowledge and problem solve in practice exercises.
4. Encourage relationship building: Mentoring and shadowing are some of the oldest tricks in the book, and for good reason! Letting your new employees learn from more experienced sales reps grants access to hard-earned wisdom and builds the foundation of a strong professional connection.
5. Provide coaching: Your sellers are only as good as the support they receive. Offering coaching and ongoing training can push your sales numbers higher than ever.

Why you should consider using a sales enablement platform for onboarding

Despite the benefits, many organisations still don’t have a formal onboarding programme. The most common reason is a lack of time. With an economy moving at a pace unheard of just a decade ago, it’s hard to carve out time to bring every new hire up to speed.

What are sales enablement tools?

In order to overcome this obstacle, more companies are implementing an onboarding tool or sales enablement platform. These tools make it easier to turn important knowledge into lessons, assignments and assessments that new hires can complete over time. It also streamlines the onboarding process by automating tasks so that leaders don’t have to manually push out training content when a new seller is ready. This type of system has actually been shown to boost retention rate by as much as 16%.

If you’ve started a new job in the last few years, you might recall that a lot of the information you were given was irrelevant to your role or simply too much to remember. You’re not alone in this feeling. In fact, almost 80% of sales training is forgotten by most reps within the first few months on the job. So, how can an organisation make training stick?

This is one of the many perks of investing in sales onboarding software. A one-stop digital location for your company’s policies, procedures and materials makes for easy onboarding and happier employees. A dedicated sales onboarding tool also tracks the progress your new sellers make during their onboarding journey with assessments and feedback assessments.

Ramp up new hires faster with Seismic

When you’re ready to upgrade your sales onboarding process, turn to Seismic. Customers like Lower ramp up new sales reps 5x faster by creating onboarding at scale with Seismic’s learning and coaching software. Interested in learning more? Get a demo to find out how your organisation can improve speed to competency and reach goals more quickly with Seismic.

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The term sales enablement has come to mean different things to different people, depending on their industry or company. At Seismic, we consider sales enablement the process of equipping sellers with the resources, content and technology to sell effectively. In essence, the tools your sellers use to engage buyers fall under the umbrella of sales enablement.

Benefits of sales enablement

The way your organisation approaches sales enablement will vary based on the needs of your business, its sellers and customers. Depending on your goals and objectives, there are several ways your organisation might define success. We’ve identified a handful of ways sales enablement can positively impact your organisation: 

• Cross-functional alignment: When sales operations, marketing and sales enablement teams work together great things can happen. Having your go-to-market engine work together to create resources and share ideas can make life easier for everyone, including your sellers.
• Streamlined workflows: When sellers have access to the right tools and information, they can work more efficiently, without jumping across multiple disparate systems.
• Improved buyer engagement: Sales enablement software includes capabilities that allow sellers to personalise content at scale, which is critical because most buyers won’t buy from sellers who fail to personalise their outreach.  

What is sales content automation?

Closing a deal takes precision, attention to detail, and the ability to nurture relationships with buyers over time. Longer sales cycles coupled with ever-changing buyer preferences mean that your reps need to find and share the perfect content in order to move a deal forward. But, because reps have such a large quantity of sales collateral to choose from, this process can take up precious time.

If this sounds familiar, it may be time to consider sales content automation. Sales content automation streamlines the content workflow and gives sellers access to all of the content they need. By deploying sales content automation software, sellers are enabled to personalise content at scale so they can spend more time on selling, which is something that should be a top priority for every organisation. This software uses artificial intelligence to automate repetitive tasks and include data from other sources so sellers can craft content in a matter of minutes.

Why sales content needs to be personalised

Adding content automation software to your sales toolkit can help you meet a fundamental benchmark of successful sales: personalised content. Making your sales content unique to each buyer can make all the difference between closing or stalling a deal. Over 90% of consumers indicate that they feel more inclined to engage with brands that personalise content as compared to brands that only send generic content. These numbers mean that you simply can’t afford to skimp on your personalised content.

However, creating and delivering personalised content can be overwhelming. Who has the time to produce unique content for every prospect? To reach content personalisation at scale, your organisation needs some level of automation that’s powered by content AI tools.

How to automate your content workflow

Automating the sales content process sounds good, but how can a company actually go about integrating content management tools and artificial intelligence into their sales enablement efforts? Let’s break down a few of the tasks that sales content automation can take off of your plate.

• Creating: The real name of the game for content automation is templates. Whether it’s a proposal or pitch deck, your reps can swap out and replace content as needed to tell the right story to the right customer. All this can be done without the hassle of manually compiling content and reorganising it for each buyer.
• Integrating: Data can be tricky to pull together in a way that helps your reps and makes sense to your customers. Automating data organisation and collection can help your sellers pull highly relevant information with the press of a button.
• Approving: Getting approval for new content can take more time than actually sending it to buyers. With content automation, marketing and enablement teams can limit the areas of personalisation to ensure that reps are staying on brand. Automating the approval process according to your brand’s standards and governance gives everyone the peace of mind that content is consistent and correct.
• Sharing: Long gone are the days of manual email and hours dedicated to rehearsed sales calls. Sales content automation allows your sellers to share personalised content widely and efficiently.
• Reporting: The analytic and reporting features of many content AI tools lets you see which buyers are engaging with your sales content and which may need an extra nudge. It also tracks what content sellers are using the most so teams can make informed decisions on what content marketing and sales collateral is most beneficial to move deals forward.

Benefits of sales content automation

Stress isn’t the only thing that gets better with sales content automation. Other benefits of automating your sales content workflow include:

• Improving efficiency: Save yourself and your sellers immeasurable time scouring unorganised drives and folders for helpful content or sweating over entirely organic content creation. Content management tools and automation removes all of the muddling and allows sellers to focus on what they do best – building relationships with prospects and customers.
• Shortening the buying cycle: Now that your sellers are free from the slog of content generation, they can dedicate more time to buyers. They can dedicate their attention to the essential conversations and interactions that get buyers to move from the leads list to active customers.
• Increasing buyer engagement: We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – customers love personalised content. In fact, 76% of consumers feel upset when they don’t experience any sort of personalisation during the buying experience. Automating your sales content means that each of your prospects gets the content they want, when they need it.
• Creating a scalable workflow: With the power of sales content automation, your sellers can mass-produce content, as well as locate relevant information with ease. Bringing your organisation to the next level has never been easier.

How Seismic enables sales content automation

When you decide that sales content automation is the next step for you and your business, reach out to Seismic. Seismic’s Enablement Cloud features content automation tools that allow your sellers to repurpose and personalise content, integrate other sources of data and generate highly engaging content at the push of a button. Click here to see it in action!

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