In the midst of these changes, we’ve heard from companies that missed earning goals quarter after quarter. Despite their best efforts to adapt and keep pace, their rate of growth significantly slowed over the past fiscal year. While there are a number of factors that could go into these shortcomings, many of these organizations attribute their high-profile misses to poor enablement and the need for better training.

This is important for many reasons. First, it means that C-suite executives are increasingly turning to enablement leaders to help their organizations drive more predictable and profitable growth. It also means that they need to invest in the tools and resources that will help drive greater productivity. In order for either of these initiatives to be successful, organizations need sales enablement to be strategic.

Enablement in a digital-first world

To interact with today’s increasingly savvy buyers and clients, best-in-class organizations rely on enablement to prepare sellers to put their best foot forward in every interaction. This provides sellers and customer-facing reps with the right content, training, playbooks, and skills needed to navigate any situation. To do so, organizations need tools and systems that allow them to meet buyers and sellers where they are in a highly personalized way. 

While enablement teams put in a great deal of effort to create these programs, they often fall short of the desired goal. This is due to the fact that there’s a disconnect between their enablement strategy and their GTM team’s initiatives and goals. Therefore, if enablement teams want to be as effective as possible, they need to create a strategy that brings everything together. 

Enablement is a strategic business function

Like every other aspect of business, sales enablement has drastically grown and evolved over the past few years. At one time, effective enablement included three distinct pillars: enablement, engagement, and improvement. However, modern and effective enablement now also requires intentional strategy and planning. 

By connecting your organization’s enablement efforts with your entire GTM strategy you can best determine what initiatives are most needed. This could encompass anything from creating new playbooks, refreshing existing content, or delivering crucial skills training. Because a company has multiple products, geographies, personas, and ongoing initiatives, an effective enablement strategy helps organizations prioritize actions that will drive the most meaningful results. 

This is important because enablement teams are being challenged to relate everything they do back to key business goals and initiatives. Instead of focusing on siloed departmental objectives, it shifts enablement to becoming a strategic function that better aligns revenue-driving teams. As a result, there’s greater collaboration and buy-in across the organization so that essential GTM initiatives can launch faster. This elevates the role of enablement to be more efficient and strategic than ever before.

Connecting the dots between enablement and outcomes

In order for enablement to truly be strategic, organizations also need to link all of their enablement efforts into one, seamless workflow. Many organizations rely on tactical solutions that address one area of enablement, such as sales content management or buyer engagement. But when it comes to figuring out a starting point for their enablement strategy, they need to rely on a platform and data that brings everything together. 

By investing in a solution that allows them to design an entire program from start to finish, enablers are better equipped to determine their most needed tasks, prioritize efforts, and allocate resources accordingly. Then, they can execute on their plans, measure progress, and tie their efforts to business outcomes rather than simply hoping for the best. This will make it easier to identify which content and training initiatives move the needle and where there’s an opportunity for future improvements.

When enablement teams successfully connect the dots between their enablement strategy and business outcomes, they can focus on the right things at the right time, and at scale. This is crucial for organizations that need to refine their efforts, find the right path forward, and move quickly in an ever-changing marketplace. 

The time for transformational enablement is now

Enablement software is mission-critical for any organization that needs to prioritize enablement as a strategic initiative. That’s why we’ve invested in our enterprise-grade platform. This includes all of the capabilities your GTM team needs to transform enablement, prioritize efforts, and drive smarter growth. If you’d like to learn more about the Seismic Enablement Cloud, click here to see the product in action. 

The post Why enablement has become strategic appeared first on Seismic.

There are countless ways that effective sellers make an impression and stand out from their competitors. Maybe they demonstrated a deep understanding of your unique use case or followed up with the right information at just the right time to help you make a well-informed decision. But it likely wasn’t a matter of luck – it was because they had the right skills, content, and knowledge to help you navigate your purchasing journey. 

Getting that engagement right at scale requires effective enablement. In fact, enablement is becoming a C-Level imperative within organizations as they seek to drive consistency and predictability when it comes to winning and retaining business. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the Seismic Enablement Cloud to empower GTM teams with the right content, skills, tools, and insights to effectively engage customers and drive growth, built on a unified, enterprise-grade, AI-powered platform.  

The Seismic Enablement Cloud

Just as sales and marketing clouds have brought together several complementary products and solutions to address the needs of their respective teams, we see a similar need and opportunity for the enablement cloud – a dedicated platform purpose-built to empower enablement and GTM teams to deliver exceptional end-to-end buyer experiences. 

The Seismic Enablement Cloud redefines enablement by bringing together historically siloed systems for sales content management, learning & coaching, strategy & planning, content automation, buyer engagement, and enablement intelligence into one enterprise-grade platform that supports end-to-end workflows for GTM teams. With the Seismic Enablement Cloud, companies:

• Reduce tool fatigue by powering seamless workflows for users. Go-to-market teams lose valuable time when they have to jump between disparate systems to access the tools and information they need. Combining everything from content management to personalization to training & coaching to multi-channel engagement in a single location makes sellers’ lives easier because they have access to the tools they need in one place.
• Future-proof your investment as your teams grow and company strategy evolves. What your team needs today may not be the same tomorrow or years from now. The Enablement Cloud is built to scale with your organization as it grows, all on the same platform – no need to switch or reimplement. This means your team can start with the capabilities it needs to solve its immediate needs and easily expand as your needs evolve.
• Drive a data-driven enablement strategy with a 360-degree view of the performance of your GTM teams and the impact of your enablement programs. The Enablement Cloud brings together insights from across content, training, coaching, engagement, and CRM. More than ever before, enablement teams need intelligent insights that allow them to get enablement right. It’s almost impossible to understand what does and doesn’t work when critical data is stored in separate systems. For example, if you see that your pitch deck has a dip in engagement, without training & coaching data, you might first think it’s an issue with the content. But when you can drill into how engagement compares among certified and uncertified reps, you might see your organization has training opportunities – not that your deck needs to be revamped. And with the Enablement Cloud, you can activate that plan all within Seismic.

What’s in the Seismic Enablement Cloud

The Seismic Enablement Cloud delivers powerful functionality that is greater than the sum of its parts. In total, it brings together six applications that help teams get enablement right, including 

• Sales Content Management: Build, maintain, activate, and govern  content in a scalable platform that makes it easy to organize, find and share differentiated assets.  ​
• Learning & Coaching: Lessonly by Seismic is the powerfully simple solution for learning, coaching, and skills development for customer-facing teams. Onboard new hires, continuously train, and improve the performance of your team. ​
• Strategy & Planning: Enablement Planner (Coming Soon) is the first and only hub for enablement teams to define and implement programs and content strategies. Plan, execute, measure, and iterate in one coordinated, streamlined workflow.
• Content Automation: Produce targeted content through quick assembly, reusable components, and dynamic templates or streamline mass production of materials, even those that require data integrations.​
• Buyer Engagement: Seismic’s buyer engagement capabilities allow teams to create memorable experiences and interact effectively across all touchpoints and channels to deepen relationships and move deals forward. ​
• Enablement Intelligence: Seismic’s enablement intelligence equips leaders to improve performance with insights into the behaviors, activities, and content that deliver the best outcomes. It combines human-centered and automated analytics to help increase productivity and repeat success.​

A unified platform for everything enablement 

Enablement software is mission-critical for many of the customers that use Seismic and is becoming a core part of GTM workflows and tech stacks. More than 2,000 customers and millions of users choose Seismic to help them practice smarter enablement. That’s why we’ve invested in our enterprise-grade platform. This includes a global cloud infrastructure with unmatched availability and speed, open and extensible APIs to integrate into your workflows, stringent security and controls to meet your growing compliance requirements, AI & machine learning to drive intelligent decision making, and an extensive data infrastructure to scale what works.

We are very excited about bringing the Seismic Enablement Cloud to you all – the next chapter in defining the future of enablement and sales. We can’t wait to see how all of you will leverage its capabilities to transform your GTM teams and activities.

If you’d like to learn more about the Seismic Enablement Cloud, download our eBook, The Enablement Cloud: A Unified Platform for Engagement & Growth. 

The post Introducing the Seismic Enablement Cloud™ appeared first on Seismic.

The acceleration of digital transformation in sales will only continue. By 2025, Gartner projects that 80 percent of sales interactions will occur in digital channels. Gartner’s research also shows that, on average, buyers only spend 17 percent of their time meeting with sellers during the buyer journey. As more businesses adopt digital sales strategies, sellers who excel at developing strong relationships through personalization will have a competitive advantage.

The relationship between buyers and sellers is no longer simply transactional. Customers are more likely to do business with sellers and brands that build trusted relationships throughout the buyer’s journey. By using information and analytics to understand a prospect’s business challenges, sellers are better positioned to deliver resonant content experiences throughout the sales cycle.

The importance of personalized buyer experiences

The most effective digital experiences are timely, relevant, and personalized. In the 2020 LinkedIn State of Sales Report, 41 percent of buyers stated that they were more likely to consider brands that deliver personalized communication. Tailored content offers businesses a significant differentiator that allows sellers to establish trust with prospects by addressing their unique needs.

Content analytics and insights are the foundation that make meaningful content experiences possible. With fewer opportunities for in-person communication, forward-looking enterprises are leveraging data to help navigate the sales cycle with predictive content that is timely and relevant. By monitoring which content generates more engagement or leads to conversions, sellers can extract valuable insights that help optimize content experiences. Content analytics has become the new buyer feedback, opening a window into what’s resonating and–perhaps, more importantly–what isn’t. 

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology are leading toward a new era in sales, one where sales enablement solutions are using AI to deliver proactive guidance to sellers. Businesses that are prepared to take advantage of these systems will leap ahead of the competition. According to a global AI survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 63 percent of respondents report revenue increases from AI adoption in the business units where their companies use AI. 

Cultivating a data-driven culture

AI-guided selling begins with empowering a data-driven culture. Organizations that embrace data, empower their sellers to increase productivity. By eliminating the guesswork from the sales process, sellers can simplify content discovery and match content to opportunities, quickly and efficiently. Tracking content engagement metrics gives organizations baseline data that can be used to identify which content is most effective at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Sales enablement platforms like Seismic empower sellers to discover the right content at the right time. When integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, sales organizations can pull contextual information from multiple sources to create a comprehensive picture of the buyer experience. With insight into the “last mile” of the buyer’s journey, sellers can craft content experiences based on what is known to convert. 

Helping businesses prepare for the future of selling

The Seismic platform prepares users to take advantage of AI-guided selling. Seismic’s Content Analytics offers tools and resources for go-to-market (GTM) teams to access a complete view of their content ecosystem. By shedding light on the bottom of the funnel, GTM teams can turn insights into optimized buyer and seller experiences. 

As sellers begin to use analytics routinely, they can leverage intelligent insights to make data-driven decisions. Access to granular data gives GTM teams the insights needed to share the right content at the right time. When integrated with data from multiple sources, the Seismic platform offers revenue teams a comprehensive view that enables more intelligent business decisions. Organizations that have reached this stage of data maturity are best positioned to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI).

Embrace data today to prepare for the future

With limited face-to-face interactions, access to actionable insights has become an increasingly valuable resource that helps sellers discern how best to advance their conversations with customers. As businesses develop strategies for the future of sales, it will be important to foster a data-driven culture and build a roadmap to move from basic data visibility to actionable insights, and ultimately, AI-guided selling.

Read more about AI-guided selling to learn how your organization can build a competitive advantage for years to come.

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