Community is at the heart of why Seismic decided to open a new office in Austin earlier this summer. In today’s hybrid work era, the office space functions differently than it traditionally has. At Seismic, we’re thinking deeply about how these spaces can build community for our employees based on role and region and ignite growth for our company.

Our new flexible workplace philosophy views each office as a hub for fostering community, connection, and creativity – and our new office in Austin is purpose-built to do exactly that.

Over the last few months, it’s been great to meet and work closely with team members based in Austin. Our new space provides opportunities to learn from one another, build community, and collaborate with fellow employees, particularly for our early-career team members. We’re excited to meet all the amazing talent this city has to offer and continue hiring in the greater Austin area. Of course, we haven’t forgotten our Southern hospitality – we look forward to hosting Austin-based Seismic customers and partners in this new office. Tacos and beer, anyone?

I’m thrilled that Seismic has an official footprint in this city on the rise, one that has seen a boom in people and businesses alike over the last two years. We’re excited to deepen our relationships with the Austin community and have already completed the first of many group volunteer outings at the Central Texas Food Bank.

So whether you’ve got a great BBQ joint to recommend or just want to say hi to your new Austin neighbors, drop me a message on LinkedIn. If you’re looking to ignite growth in your career and join the Seismic team – in Austin or elsewhere – check out our open roles.

The post Howdy! Seismic opens new office in Austin, Texas appeared first on Seismic.

The truth is that nobody knows for certain. Deloitte recently published an article that claimed as much. In it, they outlined four potential forecasts for the future, ranging from blue skies to stormy weather. With everything up in the air, we decided to speak to members of Seismic’s leadership team to get their perspectives. 

We first spoke with Seismic Executive Vice President of Global Operations Toby Carrington. He summed up his mindset on work ethic and weathering uncertain times in a recent LinkedIn post. In our conversation with Toby, we discussed everything from hiring to driving new efficiencies in times of uncertainty. Check out our conversation below!

Tony: What do you think of when you hear economic uncertainty?

Toby: The last time we talked about economic uncertainty was when COVID-19 started. There was a momentary freeze when nobody knew what was going on. Today, leaders are stopping to assess what’s going on. This period is also different in that just a few months ago we were talking about the Great Resignation and hiring like crazy. Now companies are facing layoffs.  is a period when organizations will begin to slow down on their investments.

During COVID, there was a general expectation that the pandemic would pass and that it would happen quickly, but the slowdown didn’t last too long. Other periods of recession can take 2-3 years for the economy to recover. Businesses today will need to ensure that they have 2-3 years of runway.

Tony: Many organizations are limiting hiring right now. How can teams do more with less?

Toby: Good talent will find a role regardless of the times, and I do think that good talent will find a job anywhere – companies are still hiring, just not at the same speed. You have to focus on the people who are still in your organization. If you’ve cut 10% of your staff, you still need to make the remaining 90% productive, engaged, and ready to do their job. When the economy recovers, if people feel like they were treated poorly because they stayed, they’ll eventually leave. In the end, your targets for the year are still the same – you just have to do it in a more efficient way.

Tony: You recently posted on LinkedIn about the importance of “getting s**t done” in times of uncertainty. Will you explain what you mean by that?

Toby: I mean that it’s important to ruthlessly prioritize the things that will make the organization more efficient. Operational excellence is always a good business practice, but it becomes more critical in times of economic uncertainty. When times are good, you can throw more people at the problem and carry on. Things become incrementally harder in times of uncertainty, because organizations may not have the tools and processes to make fewer employees more productive in short periods of time. So organizations need to figure out the processes that are taking up unnecessary time and get the s**t done in order to save time and increase output for as many people as possible. 

Tony: Where does enablement fit in during times of uncertainty?

Toby: People might slow down the onboarding and new hire use case of enablement. There will also be a focus to continue the personal development of individuals who stay with the company. Budgets for travel will be the first to get reduced, while productivity tools like enablement will come back into prominence as they did in a post-COVID world. When you say you need to tighten the belt and purse strings, you need to invest in tools that make people as productive as possible.

Tony: Your role is responsible for making our go-to-market (GTM) teams efficient as the company scales. How does that change for you as our economic climate evolves?

Toby: We’re still growing, and we’re still going to scale. Not all markets are created equal. Scaling has a lot of different dimensions, and we’re still growing a lot. We’re still adding people and customers every day. It gives an opportunity for people to look at process excellence and it forces an introspection that doesn’t occur when times are good. When times are good, people overlook the little things.

Tony: Can organizations come out of this better on the other side?

Toby: Organizations should look at what they can actually do. We can’t exactly control inflation. What we can control is that we execute getting our own house in as good of shape as possible. For example, amazing companies have come out of the 2008 downturn – many companies were born out of that. Companies were able to go to the next level by being able to pivot and meet unmet needs. They were resilient and many have been through several different crises. If you plan long-term, you can weather the storm.

Tony: Deloitte’s outlook says the current economy can go in four different directions over the next year or so. How do you prepare to pivot based on where things go?

Toby: You have to set yourself up to be flexible and have the ability to pivot. Where’s the playbook for dealing with the situation we have now – post-pandemic, etc? There is no playbook for that. It’s about organizations being nimble, lean, and flexible about what they’re doing externally so that they’re ready. Communication matters more than ever, and everyone in the organization needs to know what’s happening and why. It’s always a best practice, but there’s a right and wrong way to communicate. Focus on effective communication and tone from the top to the staff is important.

If you’d like to learn more about how your organization can navigate times of economic uncertainty, please visit our page, Adapting to Change. 

The post Navigating Uncertainty: Driving efficiency in a downturn appeared first on Seismic.

As Seismic’s Executive Vice President of Global Operations, part of my responsibility is for the operations and enablement of our go-to-market (GTM) teams and report to our CEO. In our meetings together, I often need answers to a handful of questions: What’s the average ramp time for new sellers? What’s the average time to first deal? What’s our average deal cycle time? And, what’s our win rate?

I also meet frequently with our customers, and when I do I’m asked different questions. Our customers and prospects want to know how they can move from a responsive enablement model to a structure that proactively drives change. They often ask: Where should our enablement leadership report? How do I attract and retain the best talent? And, how do I measure enablement success?

There are a few different ways GTM teams can exercise enablement to great effect. I’ll discuss them in this post, as well as how your organization can attract and retain the best sales and enablement talent. 

Enablement should be considered a strategic priority

Traditionally, enablement teams have reported to sales or marketing leadership. By placing enablement within the wider GTM operations structure, enablement leadership has visibility into sales, marketing, and customer success’ business goals. 

When your enablement team knows the quota for bookings or the amount of pipeline marketing needs to generate, it can help fashion a strategy. Enablement leadership can work with sales and marketing leaders to benchmark how many calls need to be made or how many meetings need to be booked in order to reach key revenue targets. 

Enablement leadership should report to your c-suite

Connecting revenue operations to the c-suite elevates enablement as a strategic priority. When enablement is tied to broader GTM activities, it can provide key performance indicators directly to the c-suite.

Having enablement leadership with a broader remit and c-suite visibility also helps attract the best talent.

Strong enablement candidates are hard to come by. At companies that view enablement as a strategic initiative, the head of enablement often serves as a vice president. By elevating the head of enablement to a senior position, they can gain more visibility and have a greater impact on company-wide initiatives. 

Assemble tools for the best talent 

Hiring the best enablement leadership is only one piece of the puzzle. In order to execute an enablement strategy, organizations need to hire effective individual contributors within sales, marketing, and customer success. 

In most cases, the top candidates will gravitate to organizations where they feel they can be most successful. The companies that value, train, and give their employees the skills they need to do their best work will stand out to top talent. 

More often than not, candidates want to know how an organization enables success. In interviews with candidates, I’ve been asked how we train, what tools we provide our reps, and how those tools help our reps become more effective at their job. Good enablement helps retain talent because when reps feel like they can become an expert faster, they close deals faster and renew business faster. 

Measure enablement’s impact on business KPIs

Measuring success for enablement should be tied together with business objectives. Start with metrics that contribute to GTM productivity, such as ramp time, days to first deal, deal cycle times, and win rates. Each of these metrics is a deal-related KPI. 

For instance, following our acquisition of Lessonly, we needed metrics to understand that our sellers were effectively readied to sell the new solution. We developed metrics to assess whether our reps were effectively using new messaging. We used these metrics to understand what our field sellers were doing, as well as how to measure its impact on win rates and renewals. 

Enablement has evolved significantly in my time at Seismic. It went from being primarily sales-driven to a strategic business enabler. Growth is unlocked when enablement plays an instrumental role in GTM success and revenue operations. That starts with attracting the right talent and equipping them with the tools they need to achieve business goals. 

If you’d like to learn how you can achieve better outcomes with smarter enablement, check out our interactive Benchmark web page or download our 2021 Annual Sales Enablement Global Benchmark Report. 

The post How to rethink your enablement strategy for 2022 appeared first on Seismic.

Today the enablement landscape looks very different. A predominantly digital customer lifecycle means that sellers need to be more than just productive—they need easy access to the right content for the right buyer, at the right time in the buyer’s journey. This also means that enablement isn’t a principle that’s owned exclusively by sales. Enablement is a practice that can be leveraged to optimize the go-to-market (GTM) engine across all customer-facing functions. 

When I first joined Seismic, most businesses had a three-to-four-year horizon for digital transformation. 2020 accelerated that timeline and, at many organizations, virtual selling was adopted three years sooner than anticipated. An October report published by McKinsey found that “companies are three times likelier than they were before the crisis to conduct at least 80 percent of their customer interactions digitally.” We have seen a similar acceleration with many of our customers, and are proud to say that we’ve partnered with many of them in speeding their transformation journey. During this time, I’ve noticed three changes in enablement that will continue to define virtual sales for years to come. 

Data is the voice of truth

Virtual sales allow businesses to capture analytics about content effectiveness. When marketing organizations relied more heavily on print materials, sellers were often left with collateral that went unused. With digital content experiences, content strategy isn’t opinion-based, but instead, driven by buyer behavior. Content analytics provide a direct feedback loop to marketers about which content is most effective with customers. Sellers can leverage the same insights to determine which content resonates with specific personas and at specific points in the buyer’s journey. Data-driven companies build competitive advantages through a deep understanding of customer behavior and use insights to improve buyer experiences. 

Data fosters GTM alignment 

In order to best serve customers, enablement has to be a shared responsibility across all customer-facing roles. From sales and marketing to operations and customer success, each team has a unique role to play throughout the customer lifecycle. Companies that rely on data to guide customer experiences, are able to personalize each interaction with the customer from pre-sales all the way to contract renewals. When GTM teams operate without silos, they have greater clarity of customer experience at each touchpoint throughout their lifecycle and can move forward the relationship.

Data helps optimize internal processes

Successful companies continuously incorporate new insights to fine-tune strategy. Once the GTM team has established shared goals and processes, establishing an internal feedback or communication cadence helps teams share findings, and use data to optimize their strategy and processes based on what does and doesn’t work. Internally at Seismic, we’ve made it a practice to have regular standup meetings across our GTM teams to ensure that we are taking an agile approach to execute our strategy. 

Want to learn more about the future of enablement? Watch binge-worthy on-demand content from Seismic Digital Shift.

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