Seismic Releases Workspace to Build Collaboration on Sales Presentations

Seismic, a provider of sales enablement technologies, today bolstered its core platform with the release of Workspace, a virtual hub in which reps can collaborate to improve their presentation materials. The addition enables users to gather and store materials from within (or outside of) Seismic, work together to sharpen their slide decks and videos, and share content across devices regardless of whether they’re working online or offline.

According to Doug Winter, Seismic’s CEO, the enhancement addresses a stage of sales enablement that has been neglected by software vendors: the final preparations before a meeting. As a salesperson gets ready to engage with a prospect, Winter explains, there is usually a point at which she will seek colleague input. Typically, those colleagues are asked to provide suggestions or comments, but because most solutions aren’t built to accommodate and record these processes, they’re are often forced to leave the system and communicate via email, a sharing platform, or another separate tool. “Workspace solves those problems by allowing a larger team to access content from anywhere and work on it, while keeping it in the platform so it ties back into a single source of truth,” Winter says.

Seismic’s cloud-enabled platform leverages automation and data intelligence capabilities so marketers can create, organize, and distribute content to make it more accessible to sales professionals. Rather than requiring reps to find content, Winter says, the platform is configured in such a way that content can find them. For instance, marketing collateral is recommended to users according to their behavior on email or within a CRM system.

Workspace adds to these capabilities by giving sales professionals the opportunity to review customized content while providing feedback to users in the same platform. For instance, if a salesperson wants to get a second opinion about his presentation, he can share it in the platform and allow a more senior salesperson to chime in with annotations and suggestions.

The product also includes a video annotation feature that allows experienced salespeople to coach less experienced presenters. In a tech company, for instance, “the sales engineer may record a dry run of the demo and allow different members of the team to watch and provide feedback,” Winter says. Users have the freedom to inject in-frame commentary and record audio feedback. “People might be all around the globe and providing feedback on that recorded demo,” Winter points out. Viewers can suggest that the presenters tweak their messaging, or stress specific points, without having to schedule another meeting.

Workplace also benefits marketers because it allows them to better monitor how salespeople use the materials they provide and track any changes that have been made, Winter says. They can make sure that sales isn’t leveraging content that hasn’t been approved, thus keeping everyone on message.

Winter says that Workspace has been in a “limited but expanding beta” with customers since December, and is available today at no additional charge to customers.

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