Sales Enablement and Account Orchestration vendor Seismic announced General Availability of its Q3 release with enhanced analytics, alerting, customization, and dashboards.  The release emphasizes improved recommendations and metrics for the bottom half of the funnel.  The fall release aims to improve reporting, alerting, content recommendations, attribution, and context-specific messaging.  

“Sales content performance data has become a critical source of buyer feedback,” said Seismic CEO Doug Winter. “Businesses are looking for ways to engage buyers through personalized, resonant messaging, but haven’t had the visibility into what content performs well and what doesn’t. Our improved analytics capabilities unite revenue teams, changing how deals are closed, how content is produced, and ultimately, how business is done.”

In an interview with GZ Consulting, VP of Product Marketing Jam Khan emphasized that sales and marketing professionals are becoming “increasingly data-driven,” but doing so across the full funnel.  The historical pattern of marketing identifying and nurturing leads before handing them off to sales no longer holds.  Instead, sales and marketing work in tandem, with sales taking broader ownership over email messaging and marketing looking to maintain conversations post-sale.

Top of the funnel marketing has a series of well-defined metrics, but lower down the funnel, analytics are murkier.  Sales and marketing struggle to determine which content is working, what the best-sellers are doing that differentiates them from their peers, which messages are most effective, and the coachable moments.  Reps also want assurances that they are using the most current and compelling content.

Sales Enablement platforms typically report on views and time spent with content but lack attribution that ties content to close.  Thus, content efficacy remains cloudy.  A 2019 Forrester study commissioned by Seismic found that 85% of “buyers will dismiss a seller in the first interaction if they don’t receive tailored information” but that 54% of organizations aren’t able to “effectively generate actionable insights from sales asset data.”  Thus, revenue teams need to understand better what buyers want and replicate best practices across the revenue organization.

Part II discusses Seismic Fall Release reporting enhancements.