Improves Seller Efficiency with Seismic

The Challenge 

Transitioning to a sales-focused enablement approach to support growth 

Harbor Capital is a 40-year-old asset management firm specializing in active management and offering institutional-grade investments to its clients. They follow a sub-advised business model, curating intentional and selective suites of active and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from various managers worldwide. 

“Advisors looking for distinct and differentiated investment options for their clients often connect with us at Harbor because we’re passionate about finding what we believe to be the best bold solutions that have the potential to produce compelling risk-adjusted returns,” explained Distribution Enablement Consultant Allyson Green.  

Harbor Capital aims to increase brand presence, drive market interest, and boost cash flows through sales. Distribution Enablement supports these goals by acting as the voice of sales within the organization and providing resources to enhance sales performance. “We view ourselves as the voice of sales across the organization. Our goal as a team is to provide sales with whatever resources they need to perform their job better and hit our department goals,” said Green.  

Harbor Capital initially adopted Seismic Content as a marketing automation tool, primarily a centralized hub for storing marketing content. However, as the company expanded and developed its sales team, it needed a more sales-focused approach to their solution. “That’s where enablement has come into play because as we grow our sales team, they need more support. We are bringing in these tools to help us grow,” said Green. 

To help build out more support for their sales team and continue to expand their enablement tech stack, Harbor Capital brought on Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly). Harbor Capital recognized the versatility and value of Seismic Learning beyond just sales-focused activities. While the platform provides excellent resources for the sales team, Harbor Capital utilizes it for various purposes across the company.

The Solution 

Increasing employee retention by coaching team members with Seismic Learning 

Seismic Content and Seismic Learning play a significant role in seller training across Harbor Capital. This includes how enablement distributes content to all sellers, provides consistent coaching to improve client interactions, and builds a learning culture. 

• Playbooks in Seismic are valuable resources for new hires, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the product and messaging quickly. The enablement team has created playbooks for each investment, containing all relevant materials, including quarterly content, internal messaging, external assets, and competitive intelligence. Playbooks also allow them to integrate learning videos and sample pitches to help new salespeople convey the company’s approved messaging effectively.
  
• Seismic Learning’s automated analysis tool helps Harbor Capital enhance its training process by providing real-time coaching to trainees, pointing out areas where they can improve, such as reducing filler words or adjusting their speaking pace.
  
• Harbor Capital is also developing a learning path within Seismic Learning for new hires, aligning paths with the established sales process used by the entire team, making the onboarding process more accessible and consistent, even for those who may have missed in-person training sessions.

“With Seismic, we aim to enhance the onboarding experience and ensure consistent, effective messaging across the sales team,” said Green. 

This enhanced onboarding experience has led to a decrease in new hire onboarding time. Additionally, Harbor Capital uses Seismic company-wide to build the “One Harbor” story and allow all employees to practice delivering key messages. It fosters a sense of community and encourages employees to refine their pitches. 

Improving sales efficiency through an optimized seller workflow 

The Seismic Enablement Cloud is a centralized repository for marketing-generated content, and the sales team’s content usage is crucial in establishing a brand presence and generating market interest. By working closely with the marketing department, Harbor Capital’s enablement team ensures that the content available in Seismic enables sales representatives to easily access and share relevant information with their clients, improving their relationship-building.

Enablement has created a homepage that hosts essential playbooks and tiles of commonly used content. This approach ensures that the most frequently accessed resources are readily available to the sales team, saving them valuable time.

Efficiency is a top priority for Harbor Capital, as Green shared the importance of easy access to materials. Green emphasizes that an efficient system is crucial because busy sales professionals may opt for alternative routes to access information if it’s not readily available. The efforts to tailor content and tagging to the sales team’s needs have significantly improved the ease of use for Harbor Capital’s sales team. “Efficiency of the system has increased, I’d say, 10-fold” since implementing content governance changes to Seismic, said Green. 

Overall, Harbor Capital is committed to optimizing its sales team’s workflow and ensuring they have quick access to the necessary resources to excel in the field.

Streamlining manual tasks with the Red Oak integration 

Harbor Capital built a custom integration between Seismic and Red Oak Compliance to help mitigate compliance risks. 

The integration streamlines compliance workflows, eliminating the need for multiple manual steps. Before this workflow was in place, marketing would email content to compliance, which would then review and send it back to marketing for upload into Seismic. With the Red Oak integration, marketing uploads content once into Red Oak, creating a streamlined workflow for compliance to review and approve. Content then automatically flows into Seismic, reducing manual effort and the risk of losing content.

“This new workflow with Red Oak helps reduce manual steps and increase overall efficiency,” said Green. 

Overall, the integration between Seismic and Red Oak Compliance plays a critical role in simplifying compliance processes for Harbor Capital, ensuring efficient content review and mitigating compliance risks.