Reduces Sales Cycles by 56% with Seismic

The Challenge

Building an integrated technology stack to support revenue growth

Aerogen specialises in the development and commercialisation of aerosol drug delivery systems. The company was founded in Galway, Ireland, in 1997 and has since become a global leader in the field of acute care aerosol drug delivery. Aerogen’s mission is to improve patient outcomes by transforming the way respiratory medications are delivered.

Two years ago, Aerogen’s commercial excellence team began evaluating the existing tools in their technology stack to determine if they could help the business meet its sales enablement goals. Their previous content management system had limited usage and data collection capabilities and had been piloted in very few countries. Aerogen wanted a fully integrated platform where tools and data could be connected to derive insights. “The need for a fully integrated platform and data-driven insights led to the decision to explore alternative vendors,” explained Sam Buitendag, Aerogen’s Global Head of Commercial Excellence, who led the evaluation process for a new sales enablement platform.

Seismic became the vendor of choice after a rigorous evaluation process based on the relationship built during the sales process and the support plan presented to Aerogen to get them up and running. “Since that starting point, we have experienced that the support was not just an empty promise, but the development of a true partnership – where we are building something amazing together and Seismic is eager to support our business objectives with product development and enhancements to get us to our measured point of success,” shared Buitendag.

This year, Aerogen aims to continue ten years of >20% revenue growth by capturing significant market share. This will be accomplished by establishing Aerogen as the standard of care across all departments, modalities, and stages of the respiratory patient journey. The commercial strategy will be executed in the field, focusing on driving productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. Standardised remote enablement and effective coaching by line managers with Seismic play a crucial role in achieving these goals with direct sales teams, but critically, also with channel partners. “We felt that Seismic was the team that was going to truly be invested in partnering with us,” said Buitendag.

The Solution

Driving go-to-market (GTM) efficiency by automating manual tasks

The implementation of Seismic had Aerogen focus on improving seller productivity and increased efficiency in their roles by helping them spend more time with the right customers, using the right message, at the right time in their buying journey. This included new hires, tenured sellers, and channel partners. Buitendag worked with the highly engaged global marketing team to reorganize content in Seismic and optimize search options to best support their sellers. Up until then, the marketing materials Aerogen created to support sellers were largely paper-based. “There was no measurable way of understanding which materials were being used, how often they were being used, and which parts of the material were impactful or engaging the customer,” said Buitendag.

With the addition of Seismic and key technology partners, Aerogen began to build a coordinated sales process with a new approach. Before Covid, sellers were primarily focused on face-to-face interactions but with Seismic and the Salesforce integration, Aerogen knew there was an opportunity to measure and capture more data around what the sellers were doing. “We had a group of 25 sellers, representing all geographies, that we brought in as part of our development team so that we could truly say that the enablement platform was built by sales for sales,” said Buitendag. 

An integrated experience with Salesforce was critical for Aerogen to support efficiency for their sellers. “We have gone for maximum integration,” said Buitendag. Before launch, Seismic was integrated with Salesforce to push content to the opportunity, account, and contact pages along with data readbacks which recorded seller and customer engagement with content and allowed for gamification points to be accrued by sellers. Seismic also integrates with Aerogen’s quarterly business operational reports and quarterly business review templates, along with integrating into their incentive and bonus plans.

Another additional layer of integration with Seismic’s data and content feedback began to help close the loop for the Aerogen marketing team and open the ability to automate an omnichannel approach. “Here at Aerogen, we have a great working relationship between marketing and sales, and Seismic brought us even closer,” said Buitendag. Marketing and sales meet in workshop formats to complete Aerogen 360-degree role-playing activities that require the use of Seismic with customers and to work together to create new content, such as Email Blast templates. “This approach produces an asset created by sales and edited by marketing, that is relevant to the customer. And marketing knows sales will use it because they helped to create it,” said Buitendag.

Aerogen has seen a 54% increase in seller participation (sellers reaching and exceeding target) and a 48% increase in time spent selling since the enhancements made in their overall GTM efficiency through a more integrated sales enablement technology stack with Seismic.

Delivering memorable experiences to buyers

In a coordinated effort, Buitendag rolled out Seismic, Salesforce, and their learning management system to all global teams in the same week. “My mantra is that every great achievement begins with an extremely clear expectation.” Buitendag presented global bench-marking data specific to the aerosol drug delivery industry at the outset of rolling out the enablement platform to give teams a clear path to their expectations. “The commercial leadership team workshopped this benchmarking data until we agreed on 12 Aerogen global standards that would be built into our key performance indicators (KPIs) and business processes, across all regions, no matter the business model” said Buitendag.

Part of Aerogen’s new sales process requires sellers to use digital materials in front of a customer at every interaction. To ensure they can track this activity, sellers are expected to share content directly from Seismic with LiveSend links or Digital Sales Rooms. “We up-skilled the sellers, we taught them how to interpret the data, how to look at it, and how to act on the data that Seismic was giving back to them to proactively change how they would strategise or how they would manage that particular account in their territory,” said Buitendag.

Aerogen excels in the adoption of Digital Sales Rooms and LiveSend, out-performing Seismic benchmarks for their segment and industry. This improved buyer experience is helping influence crucial goals for Aerogen’s sales enablement team. There has been a 56% reduction in sales cycle length and a 39% increase in average deal size since the launch of their integrated sales enablement platform and new coordinated sales process and approach.