Delivers content in context and meets sellers where they are working

Sellers need help identifying content

In 2019, LeanIX had a content curation challenge. Content was not easily browsable, and it was difficult for sellers to determine which content assets correlated with each stage of the customer journey. The sellers, accustomed to obtaining content from a basic content repository, needed help identifying the content that resonated most with their audience. “We needed to give sales people easy access to something that’s relevant for their prospect because, in the end, it’s about meeting the prospect in the line of sight,” said Benjamin Strathmann, LeanIX’s Revenue Enablement Manager.

Organising content in context

LeanIX turned to Seismic to address its content management needs. To begin, the Revenue Enablement team first curated its content, using the metadata in Seismic to categorise the assets. “To help sellers find relevant information, we aligned content to an industry, a specific persona, and a step in the customer journey,” said Strathmann. “We are selling a pretty complex product so it’s important to equip our sellers with the right knowledge. Seismic helps the sellers position the relevant information in front of our target audience, which in turn helps our target audience to become a champion for our solution within their organisation.”

To organise content in a prescriptive manner that most benefits its sellers, LeanIX uses Seismic’s Pages feature, known internally as Content Context pages. “Our content marketing team organises content for specific industries or use cases within this context of the industry,” said Strathmann. The content marketing team provides salient talking points to help sellers position content in the most impactful way. “We provide sellers with targeted subject lines and email body copy, highlighting what the recipient will find valuable within the collateral, and where they can find it,” said Strathmann. “Prior to having these context pages, an SDR would throw a 20-page whitepaper over the fence and the prospect wouldn’t understand what’s in it for them.”

The Content Context pages also help LeanIX reinforce MEDDICC, the sales methodology it has adopted with its sellers: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, champion and competition. “This gives sellers a framework for identifying a prospect’s pain, problem, and challenge, and understanding how they can position our solution to overcome the problem,” said Strathmann.

Meeting sellers where they are working

LeanIX integrates Seismic with Outlook, Salesloft, and Salesforce, incorporating Seismic as part of a seller’s daily workflow, thus improving efficiency and centralising data in one place. “We offer multiple entry points to Seismic wherever a sales rep would use it,” said Strathmann. By meeting sellers where they are working, LeanIX makes it easy for sellers to use Seismic, which contributes to the 100% adoption rate across its sales organisation.

One of the biggest value drivers for LeanIX is using Seismic’s LiveSend feature to share content with prospects and customers. Using any of the integrated apps or the Seismic platform itself, sellers can surface relevant content and share it with prospects and customers, all with trackable engagement insights. The global sales organisation has sent over 20,000 live sends and has an impressive 7,500 views in 2020.

To personalise and tailor content for prospects, sellers use Seismic’s freestyle feature. “Freestyle reduces errors and slides are much more accurate than they were before Seismic,” said Strathmann. “Freestyle makes it much easier to compile a customised slide deck and from what I hear from the field, this is something that the sellers greatly appreciate.”

Now in 2021, the ripple effect started to kick in as through the successful utilization of Seismic by the sales organization, LeanIX customer success and professional services teams have started to build their content repository in Seismic. For them, it allows faster identification of relevant content for their customers and projects as well as the LiveSend analytics capabilities to learn more about the meaningfulness of their sent content to their audience. This year, LeanIX plans to fully expand the Seismic utilization to the entire customer success and professional services organization.

Using LiveInsights to improve sales behaviors

To better understand sales behavior, LeanIX uses a combination of LiveInsights and customisable dashboards to monitor activity in Seismic. Strathmann uses the dashboard to look for correlations in data with respect to the number of LiveSends and the number of unique content assets. “Everything that we do has to matter,” said Strathmann. “It has to create an effect. It has to make our sales people sell faster, higher, better. And with Seismic this can be measured by, of course, the annual recurring revenue (ARR) or by conversion rates throughout the stages and opportunity.”

Strathmann uses this data to identify patterns with successful sellers, a benchmark that can be used to coach lower performing sellers on how to improve. “I am always keen on building a correlation,” said Strathmann. “Those who use Seismic in the right way generate higher view rates, but do they also generate more demos? Do they also generate higher pipeline? Do they also better move deals forward? So, this is the correlation I am always looking into as a combination of LiveInsights and our Salesforce numbers.”

The data helps Strathmann identify helpful learnings for sales leadership. “One of the key aspects of my job is to support my directors in understanding how coaching really works and that goes back to leveraging the analytics to identify coaching moments,” said Strathmann.

“The DIY dashboard has greatly improved our capability of understanding what’s going on,” said Strathmann.

Integrating its LMS with Seismic

LeanIX has replaced its Learning Management System (LMS) with MindTickle to better integrate learning with sales enablement. “We have chosen MindTickle because we were looking for more interaction of learners with our learning content. The accuracy and that learning content is up-to-date is well supported  by the seamless integration with Seismic,” said Strathmann. “At first, we plan to surface content from Seismic in MindTickle, and then the next level will be to create learning situations that incorporate the content.”