The Challenge
Implementing the Inaugural Enablement Function
Advantive was founded in 2022 from a partnership between TA Associates, a global private equity firm, and ST6, a tenured team of software operating executives. Advantive’s mission was clear: modernize and optimize the manufacturing distribution lifecycle.
Advantive experienced rapid growth in its first year. That is why the leadership team needed a team member who could work cross-functionally and help standardize messaging across the organization. Enter Matt Schalsey. Matt is Advantive’s Director of Revenue Enablement and Business Development. In his role, Matt works directly with the entire revenue team as a strategic enablement partner.
Advantive was in a unique position as a highly acquisitive portfolio company. In 2023, Advantive acquired six companies. This made enablement a challenge because Advantive continuously added new brands and products with unique content that needed to be distributed to the sales team. Matt told us that the sales team was “constantly trying to find somebody from an acquired company just to get a one-sheeter or a deck.” The team lacked consistent pitch materials due to the different legacy practices.
Multiple acquisitions also meant a constant influx of new employees who needed learning content and easy access to marketing materials. Before implementing Seismic, content and training lived in separate platforms, creating a disjointed employee experience.
“When Advantive brings on new additional Sales members, they already have their own processes and methodologies,” Matt shared. “We’re now trying to incorporate them into our company culture at Advantive from the get-go.”
The final issue Advantive wanted to tackle was reducing the time the sales team spent searching for resources to share with prospects and customers. In addition to enablement, Matt oversees Advantive’s business development team. He had a firsthand look into the lack of accessibility of content in the sales process. Advantive’s product line was vast and constantly changing with all the acquisitions. The question Matt grappled with was this: “How do I enable my BDRs to understand the products, and what are the key problems our future customers need help with?”
Phil Burroughs
Chief Revenue Officer
The Solution
Consolidating Content to a Central Location
One of the first steps in Advantive’s implementation was migrating existing marketing content into Seismic Content.
Instead of content in various folders scattered across the organization, all sales content lives in a single platform. Matt explained the impact of this consolidation, saying, “Seismic Content has created easy searchability and reduced the amount of lag for all of our end users.”
Centralizing Advantive’s content has also taken lots of pressure off of Matt. Initially, as the sole enablement role at Advantive, Matt was constantly inundated with sales reps looking for a specific asset. He shared how “sales reps only had one person to go to. If I was out on PTO or in a meeting, they couldn’t get an answer until later in the day.” Seismic Content removed this bottleneck, allowing for greater efficiency in the sales process.
Matt and his teammates enjoy using Seismic’s LiveSend — which is a way to see when prospects engage with the content. “Utilizing Seismic’s LiveSend feature has given us a whole other way for prospects to communicate with us. And it helps us engage better by multi-threading deals. It’s a whole new level of sales excellence for our reps.”
Matt Schalsey
Director of Revenue Enablement and Business Development
Building Time-Stamped Learning Paths
Bringing on new employees is always a large undertaking. It’s even more challenging to train Sales reps who are used to their prior company’s workflows, terminology, and guidelines into a new methodology for the same product.
Seismic Learning has been instrumental in reducing the human energy required to align employees to Advantive’s processes. The Advantive team has already built three unique Seismic Learning paths.
“Anytime a newly acquired employee or any of our new hires start on the Sales team, they can log in to Seismic and find all the necessary materials. They have all the resources at their fingertips,” Matt told us.
Matt also highlighted the functionality that allows him to break training content up and release it to new employees based on timing. He said, “With Seismic Learning, we can add intentional pauses and gaps within the learning paths. When a newly acquired employee comes on, they are set up with the resources they need at the appropriate time in their acquisition timeline.”
The Results
Reducing the Sales Cycle by 50%
One of Advantive’s goals in implementing Seismic was to increase the sales team’s efficiency. The hope was that by increasing content efficiency, sales reps would have more time to spend on the phones and closing the business. Since implementing Seismic, Advantive’s sales cycle has shrunk from 90 to 45 days.
This 50% reduction in the sales cycle has closed more deals in less time. Matt was animated when he shared this exciting stat: “Since bringing on Seismic, within just the first half of the year, we had 80% of our sellers exceed or hit their annual quota.”
The impact of Seismic is undeniable in Matt’s eyes. “This is my first time using Seismic,” Matt said. “It’s going to be one of those tools that moving forward, no matter where I’m at in my career, it’s going to be non-negotiable.”
