IBM Builds a Better Buying Experience that Grows Revenue

Builds a Better Buying Experience that Grows Revenue

With Ray Oram — Vice President of Account Based Marketing & Sharon Driscoll — CMO, Account Based Marketing Leader

20%

faster growth rate in the ABM segment

15

average content engagement time (in minutes)

2X

click-to-share ratio on social content

Challenge

Efficiently scale personalized, top-tier client experiences to boost engagement and drive business growth.

Solution

Leveraging technology to rapidly create and share personalized, interactive content, and significantly enhance client engagement.

Headquarters

Armonk, NY

Industry

Technology

Integrations

LiveSocial

IBM, founded in 1911 and headquartered in Armonk, New York, is a global leader in technology and consulting services. Renowned for pioneering innovations such as the floppy disk, hard disk drive, and relational database, IBM has expanded into cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. With a strong commitment to research and development, IBM continues to influence technological advancement and digital transformation across various industries, aiming to lead in hybrid cloud and AI domains.

The Challenge

"Seismic has revolutionized our approach to account-based marketing at IBM. Its robust suite of tools empowers our teams to craft personalized, impactful strategies for each client, turning every account into a unique market opportunity. We have significantly elevated our client interactions by creating immersive digital experiences, enabling us to deliver tailored solutions at scale."

Sharon Driscoll

CMO, Account Based Marketing Leader, IBM

Scaling a Best-In-Class Experience for Top-Tier Clients

IBM, a global technology and innovation company, strategically employs Seismic’s sales enablement platform to bolster its account-based marketing (ABM) efforts and enhance client engagement. Ray Oram, Vice President of Account Based Marketing, leads IBM’s ABM initiatives.

With an extensive network of field marketers spanning 70 professionals worldwide, IBM targets over 300 top-tier client accounts. This marketing team expands and builds new relationships, drives high client engagement rates, and promotes priority offerings to support business growth. The primary challenge is delivering brand-worthy content that can be created and distributed on time and at scale.

“One of the challenges we face is orchestrating our marketing and having it resonate with our accounts. We like to treat each account as a market of one,” says Ray.

During Seismic’s implementation at IBM, Ray led the enablement team and became instrumental during the initial rollout. Once Ray moved onto the marketing team, it was only a matter of time before he would find a Seismic solution to help his new team continue to scale.

“As Seismic started to add buyer engagement and experience capabilities, we started to consider that a unique value that we could bring to the field marketers working on our top accounts,” explains Ray.

To help the ABM team scale while creating immersive, interactive, and personalized experiences, IBM turned to Seismic to leverage Digital Sales Rooms, Interactive Content with Tiled microapps, and LiveSocial.

Sharon Driscoll

CMO, Account Based Marketing Leader, IBM

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The Solution

"Key outcomes we are focused on are growing the business, growing revenue, and doing it faster. By having this account-based marketing focus and using these incredible buyer experience tools, we’ve been growing in our newer priority offerings at a rate of 20% faster than the rest of the business."

Ray Oram

Vice President of Account Based Marketing, IBM

Creating Memorable Client Experiences with Digital Engagements

IBM aims to deliver tailored, memorable experiences to its diverse client base, facilitating agile and scalable marketing strategies. By harnessing Seismic, the ABM team focused on improving their agility and scalability to help them surpass their timelines and drive revenue for the business.

To support over 300 top-tier clients, Ray’s team manages a full suite of interactive content to promote high engagement rates with their clients. Today, the ABM team has established over 500 interactive assets and 2,500 Digital Sales Rooms, significantly enhancing engagement and relationship-building efforts.

“It’s the combination of all three things [Tiled microapps, Digital Sales Rooms, LiveSocial] and many other capabilities within Seismic that’s letting us do things that used to take weeks, if not months, in a matter of days and minutes,” shares Ray.

Through the Seismic and Tiled partnership, IBM builds microapps in Seismic to provide interactive content experiences that elevate their game through dynamic and insightful content that clients want to consume.

“First and foremost, we needed to scale and scale quickly, and we took a template approach as soon as we saw something occurring that was worth repeating,” says Ray.

Creating templates allows marketing to scale content creation and sharing faster. With the help of Seismic partners like Bridger Creative, the ABM team manages 30 repeatable brand-compliant microapp templates and 12 customizable LiveDocs, streamlining their briefing process. Using these templates, the quantity of assets produced is 7X compared to previous quarters. Engagement is at an all-time high, with over 1,700 users performing almost 14,000 activities within the microapps.

Digital Sales Rooms serve a wide range of use cases for the ABM team to share information memorably, including team introductions, event follow-ups, personalized event calendars, solution updates, and client-specific newsletters. These DSRs have over 28,000 unique views, with clients spending an average of 15 minutes with the collaborative content space.

To continue creating the best buyer experience, IBM launched a social selling program with LiveSocial. LiveSocial enabled the ABM team to engage with their audience in real time on various social media platforms, fostering interactive and immediate communication.

“LiveSocial is one of the newer capabilities we started working with this year. We’ve seen a difference in how we engage on social media, and we’re pretty proud that we’ve gotten to some world-class levels,” says Ray.

Indeed, these are world-class levels. The team has achieved an engagement rate of 2.5X click-to-share ratio, well beyond the industry median of 1.7X.

Ray Oram

Vice President of Account Based Marketing, IBM

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The Results

Faster Revenue Growth

Seismic’s dynamic suite of tools empowers IBM’s account-based marketing strategy, enabling agility, scalability, and meaningful client engagements. Through Seismic, IBM overcame operational challenges, substantially contributed to revenue growth, deepened client relationships, and accelerated business expansion.

Ray points out, “We, by use of these tools, have surpassed our full-year objective nine months into the year in terms of getting new contacts.”

IBM is welcoming new clients while continuing to spend more time with their existing accounts. The ABM team has nearly doubled the repeat engagement rate year-over-year. Their relationship-building through better experiences is working.

“Key outcomes we are focused on are growing the business, growing revenue, and doing it faster. By having this account-based marketing focus and using these incredible buyer experience tools, we’ve been growing in our newer priority offerings at a rate of 20% faster than the rest of the business,” shares Ray.

Ray and his team won’t be slowing down. AI is at the forefront of their vision as they look ahead in their partnership with Seismic. Ray believes it will be pivotal for further personalizing and enhancing client interactions, focusing on emotional connections and meaningful relationships. By continually innovating and integrating AI-driven solutions, IBM remains committed to delivering exceptional buying experiences and fostering long-term, value-driven relationships.