The Challenge
Controlling Content Chaos and Standing Out from the Competition
Cognism provides a suite of sales and marketing acceleration tools. Their platform offers solutions for lead generation, prospecting, and sales intelligence. One of their main goals is to increase the chances of a seller having a conversation with a buyer by using their product.
Cognism’s primary business goal is to drive revenue and business growth, particularly from larger enterprises. They aim to enhance the customer and prospect experience by utilizing accurate data and enabling global selling strategies to help them stand out from their competition.
When Verche (Vera) Karafiloska, Head of Product Marketing, joined Cognism she identified a lack of a scalable process for sharing product messaging. “As time went by our sales team started to grow and we were a very small product marketing team, customer marketing team, and sales enablement team. We needed to be able to support this growing sales team in a better and more efficient way,” said Vera. Cognism required a solution that would enable efficient content management, improve content discoverability, and ensure that sales reps had access to the most up-to-date and relevant assets.
As Cognism expanded its market reach, the importance of an elevated selling experience became evident, leading to a decision to explore a solution like Seismic. “This was a table stake tool for us,” shared Vera. “As we went upmarket, an elevated selling experience became more and more important. Enablement and sales leadership understood that, and it didn’t take long to persuade them that we needed a tool like Seismic.”
With an enablement platform, the ultimate goal was to improve sales efficiency, boost morale, and demonstrate strong support for the sales team.
“When we started evaluating, we started with our pain points in mind that we had in both sales enablement and product marketing – we needed a place to share content at scale. When we went into the demos and saw the different things that can be done with Digital Sales Room we realized we can use Seismic for much more and that made it easier to sell it to sales as well,” said Vera.
Adoption was a crucial factor, and Cognism worked closely with the operations team to gain approval and budget. They focused on measuring success by influencing win rate, revenue, and adoption rates.
Alice de Courcy
Chief Marketing Officer
The Solution
Deliver Memorable Experiences to Support an Elevated Sales Experience
To ensure successful adoption, Cognism opted for a phased release of Seismic instead of training all 200+ users at once. They selected champions from each team, recommended by team managers, who were typically high-performing representatives. These champions collaborated with Cognism to customize Seismic according to their needs and preferences.
From that point on Cognism began to leverage Seismic to drive awareness of content available to sellers, curate the content available to them, and help sellers elevate their conversations through enhanced content delivery.
- Seismic supports reps targeting larger businesses and those focused on smaller businesses by providing the right content at the right time. “Once we built out Seismic how we wanted it, we started tagging everything and because of the integration with SharePoint, bringing in the content was easy,” said Vera.
- Playbooks in Seismic serve as a centralized hub for monthly product releases to support sellers with the information they need to continue to expand their selling opportunities with customers. “Seismic enables us to collaborate with sales enablement and product teams to make the most out of launches and drive revenue growth,” said Vera.
- The rollout of Digital Sales Rooms saved marketing time by swapping out customized decks for an easily curated digital experience. DSRs allow sellers to pull in relevant content for what buyers care about most, cutting down on marking requests for custom presentations. DSRs give sellers deeper insights into the content their customer is viewing, to further tailor their conversations and improve their efficiency. “We want to ensure an elevated customer experience, which is why Digital Sales Rooms and workspaces are crucial,” explained Vera.
“Using Seismic has been incredibly beneficial for me as a seller at Cognism. It simplifies the process of accessing branded materials and personalizing presentations, saving me time and effort. With Seismic, I can easily find and deliver the right content to my prospects, enhancing my conversations and increasing my chances of closing deals. It also keeps me updated on the latest product updates, enabling me to stay informed and effectively sell our offerings,” said Charlie Beale, Senior Enterprise Account Executive at Cognism.
The product marketing team reached 99.5% utilization by sales of all product marketing-created content. Cognism doubled its Seismic adoption in just 6-months and has consistent month-over-month adoption growth – 100% quarterly user adoption of Seismic with 90% average monthly users and 77% of sellers visiting Seismic and creating a Digital Sales Room or LiveSend link more than once per month.
Verche (Vera) Karafiloska
Head of Product Marketing
The Result
Increasing Win Rates and Driving Revenue Growth
Cognism recognized the need for a scalable solution to manage and share product messaging as their sales team grew. They chose Seismic as their enablement platform to improve content management, enhance content discoverability, and provide sales reps with up-to-date assets Seismic has become an intranet for Cognism, serving as the platform for all internal knowledge sharing at the company. Cognism’s sales enablement team also leverages sales readiness with Seismic to centralize tracking for training, and learning pathways, and support new hire onboarding.
“I needed an easy way to give the right messaging and content to sales to use in their conversations and Seismic makes it all possible,” said Vera.
Seismic enhances collaboration between marketing, sales enablement, and product teams, optimizes product launches, and empowers sales with tested marketing content for effective conversations.
“At the end of the month, I always pull the win-loss report, which shows us our win rate. I want to see it growing and also if I decide to change an asset or test a new approach, I look at this data to see if it has made any significant change,” said Vera. Since implementing Seismic, the product marketing and enablement team at Cognism has been able to save their sellers over 21,000 hours per year. This, in turn, has led to a potential efficiency savings of $1.6 million by assisting sellers in delivering personalized content and enhancing customer experiences, ultimately boosting revenue.
