Seismic and Microsoft transform sales enablement with deep content intelligence

For corporate sales reps in competitive fields, the ability to access and present the right marketing content at the right time can often be the difference between success and failure. The relationship between marketing and sales is too often fraught with tension over this pivotal issue. Sales reps complain that the content they need doesn’t exist or unwittingly request content that exists but is hard to discover, while marketing content developers wonder whether anyone uses the content assets they create. Mismatched content has a real cost: burdening content creation teams while inhibiting sellers. The Aberdeen Group estimates that a sales rep spends an average of 440 hours each year searching for content. And even that investment of time can be far from fruitful; IDC reports that 80 percent of B2B sellers don’t use sales materials available to them because those materials are irrelevant, outdated, or difficult to customize.

These numbers can be sobering, but they also represent a striking opportunity for the organizations that can serve up personalized content efficiently and consistently. Marketers estimate that their sales reps bring in 20 percent or more in additional revenue when needed sales content is always available to their sellers at the right time in the enterprise sales process. Enter Seismic, a leading sales enablement SaaS solution that empowers large brands to better manage B2B sales and marketing content. Seismic brings a customer-centric approach to sales content management, leveraging their technology and capabilities to create new opportunities and solve “million-dollar problems” for customers.

Increasing sales content adoption by 350 percent at Elekta

The potential of Seismic’s sales enablement technology resonated strongly with Elekta, a leading innovator of equipment and software used to improve and save the lives of people with cancer and brain disorders. As a growing company with 35 offices across the globe, Elekta was struggling with information management across its sales teams. Marketers could not track with full accuracy what content was being distributed to sellers or how content was being engaged with by buyers. The result was a scattered sales content program that left marketers with little ability to improve it.

Elekta chose Seismic to transform its sales enablement and realized a 350 percent rise in sales content adoption. After centralizing all sales content into Seismic, Elekta’s marketing team had a more holistic view into what content was being created and curated for sales by the entire global digital marketing team. Through Seismic’s analytics functionality that measures how sellers and buyers engage with content, Elekta also had comprehensive data into what content worked best, helping drive content improvements and further align marketing’s efforts with sale’s needs.

“Seismic is driving collaboration between marketing and sales at a level that we’ve never seen before here at Elekta,” said Kathleen Voboril, Director of Digital and Marketing Operations at Elekta. “Marketers know what content is truly valuable for sellers and sellers know that the content being provided to them by marketing has been proven to be impactful, helping create one united team across multiple departments, offices, and target customers.”

What sets Seismic apart for organizations like Elekta is their ability to empower marketing and sales work together to help put sellers in the best position to effectively engage buyers every single time.

Leveraging the Microsoft AI stack

So, how does Seismic help organizations like Elekta become future ready? First, Seismic’s solution provides a content bridge between marketing and sales and helps to resolve the tension of misaligned content development and consumption. Using machine learning–powered proactive content management capabilities, Seismic helps Marketing identify which pieces of content are being used and, of that subset, which are resonating with customers. But that’s only half the story. Seismic also analyzes and identifies disused or overlooked content that could be similarly impactful if surfaced. In this way, Seismic is helping Marketing streamline its sales content pipeline while providing an internal roadmap of the types of content assets that move the needle going forward.

Second, Seismic leverages Microsoft AI and machine learning technologies to develop a predictive search engine that analyzes video dialogue, infographics, and other assets that may escape a traditional search engine, and also anticipates the context of the sales situation they’re being used for. This “deep content intelligence” considers factors like when in the sales cycle the queried content is typically used, the success of those sales efforts, and even focused data such as the relative length of Customer Engagement with individual slides within a PowerPoint deck. The implications of this capability are profound—not just for the sales rep who can surface the exact right content at the right time, already personalized to customer needs, but also for marketers who now has unprecedented capacity to maintain message consistency and brand integrity in real-time across a centrally updated content library.

Continued innovation with Microsoft

Seismic sees their technology as an important evolution in the corporate sales motion. And Seismic continues to innovate every day. For both Seismic and Microsoft, creating value for customers requires constant innovation and ongoing investment in data science. As Seismic CEO and cofounder Doug Winter explains, “Microsoft has a storied history of increasing productivity and efficiency across the enterprise via innovative new technologies. Our relationship with Microsoft allows Seismic to further tap into those technologies and sense of innovation, building out a platform that continues to lead the way in helping sales close bigger deals and marketing have their impact felt on the bottom line.”

In addition to its partnership with Microsoft, Seismic has a large team of dedicated data scientists and is continuing to aggressively grow its data science team to ensure that they can continue to transform sales enablement with the power of AI.