June 23, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

Seismic Updates Its Sales Enablement Software

Sales enablement technology provider Seismic has released an update to its central solution, which helps marketers build highly customizable content such as presentation decks, account plans and review, contracts and proposals, and pipeline reviews, and allows sales teams to easily populate that content with timely, personalized data. On the marketing side, the solution's new features now support external content integration, enable library content collaboration, and include tracking and reporting capabilities.

"Context is playing an increasingly important role in marketing content, and our solution is designed to give marketers the tools needed to build content that can be made relevant to different situations. Sales needs vary by industry, so the case studies that are helpful to a client in the retail space may not be helpful to someone in finance," Doug Winter, CEO of Seismic, says. "That's why Seismic allows marketers to create a LiveDoc—content that can be changed based on different types of data," he adds.

With the recently expanded capabilities, Seismic can now pull in not only data from a CRM solution, but third-party data as well. Though the initial release supports content from Salesforce.com, SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, YouTube, and Vimeo, the architecture and wiring make it easy support other sources if necessary.

The updated content library has new features as well, including Activity Stream, which shows recent content activity; My Tasks, a list of assignments or alerts such as content expiration; and Workflow, which organizes the process of content review and makes approval more flexible and efficient.

Tracking and reporting tools inside the library amp up its functionality as well. Content usage tracking, for example, can report on where different assets are being using and which users or groups are using them. "We're excited about this capability, because it will help marketers better understand how sales teams are using the content they create," Winter says.

"We think we've created a really powerful tool for marketers. They're using this software on the back end to build content for salespeople, but they're not developers. They need an intuitive solution that simplifies content creation, and that's what Seismic does. The interface is very customizable, there's flexible metadata, and they have full control over how they want things organized," he adds.

For end users, there are now ways to track content as well. Using the LiveSend and LiveShare tools, sales teams can track how prospects are interacting with content, including how long they're viewing it or how often it is opened. "We want the experience to be user-friendly for salespeople because they're ultimately the ones that will be using it. They need to be able to easily pull in the personalization data they need, populate the content, and track how it performs," Winter explains.

Along with the desktop updates, Seismic has also released the second version of its iPad application, which takes full advantage of the recently added features. The technology is immediately available on the Salesforce1 platform.