Revolutionises Revenue Enablement

The Challenge

Starting an Enablement Programme from Scratch

For over 15 years, OneSource Virtual — OSV for short — has worked exclusively with Workday customers to help them maximise their investment in Workday and save time on the tedious tasks that often come with HR, Finance, and Accounting.

Nicole Ward joined OSV in November of 2022 as their first-ever enablement hire. As the Senior Director of Revenue Enablement, her primary task was to pioneer a revenue enablement programme for hundreds of go-to-market professionals. This, in and of itself, was a challenge, but there were a few more specific reasons it was such a large undertaking.

Before Seismic, the OSV sales leadership team had no visibility into which sales assets or collateral reps were sending to their customers and prospects — if they were sending anything. “Sales reps didn’t know where to find content and, therefore, weren’t using it,” Nicole shared.

With no place to house content, reliably send it, or track whether customers were engaging with it, Nicole knew she needed an enablement partner with robust content management capabilities.

“Before Seismic, new sales reps had a day and a half of learning how to set up their computer, log into Workday, and do just the basics. But there was no training conducive to success in a sales role at OSV.” Nicole saw this as a massive opportunity for improvement.

With better sales onboarding, ongoing coaching, and training at every seller’s fingertips, she knew she could impact revenue and shorten ramp time.

The last challenge Nicole sought to solve was integrating OSV’s current workflows with an enablement programme. The OSV team lives in Salesforce and tracks all their deals and customer activity there. With Salesforce as a cornerstone of tech, Nicole knew that whatever revenue enablement platform she chose would need a robust integration, allowing both tools to talk to each other seamlessly.

The Solution

Centralising Content

Nicole implemented Seismic for the OSV sales team in May of 2023 and built a content library using Seismic Content. But we’d be remiss not to mention that she did six months of prep work to ensure that what she and her teammates loaded in would reduce friction for sellers and increase revenue for OSV.

If you’re considering creating your organization’s first enablement programme like Nicole, take her advice: “Building a programme from scratch means you need to get executive buy-in early and maintain it often. Also, I recommend creating a charter for what you want to accomplish and partnering cross-departmentally to make it happen.”

Since Nicole spent time content planning in advance, she could partner with product marketing and other teams internally to have them add in the first batches of content for the sales team — and they’ve continued to do so. This frees up Nicole and the rest of the enablement team to focus on things like content analytics. With Seismic’s product, LiveSend, reps, and the enablement team can see precisely when customers or prospects opened a piece of content and how long they stayed on it. In the aggregate, this data gives product marketing leadership a good idaea of which content resonates at different deal stages and which content may need to be archived.

The OSV team also takes advantage of Seismic’s Digital Sales Rooms. These are dedicated spaces where entire deal teams can handle all communication and content distribution and storage for their customers and prospects. Gone are the days of endless email threads and attachments that are too large.

Rolling Out Excellent, Fast Onboarding with Seismic Learning

Now that OSV has Seismic Learning, they have formalised sales onboarding for all new hires to get new reps to close deals faster. What was initially lots of “learning as you go” turned into simple, focused learning paths for all new reps. New hires take lessons in Seismic to get up to speed on the products and services and complete their onboarding prerequisites. This has helped decrease new hire ramp time by 47%.

And the learning doesn’t stop there. Nicole’s team uses Seismic to roll out product launch and GTM readiness information, skills refinement training, and certifications. This shortens the time it takes new product launches to turn into actual closed won deals.

Integrating Seismic with Salesforce Immediately

From day one, Nicole prioritised integrating Seismic with Salesforce; after all, you have to meet client-facing reps where they are — in Salesforce.

“It might seem daunting to roll out the Salesforce < > Seismic integration right out of the gate, but I promise you, it is worth it because your salespeople are working in the CRM more than any other system,” Nicole said.

This integration is essential because OSV can now map every piece of sales content and every element of learning — a lesson or certification — to the different stages of the sales cycle with Predictive Content. Nicole expanded on this: “The integration does its thing and helps reps find recommended content in the context of actual sales opportunities based on what’s worked well in past deals.”

Showing Impact and ROI

A final, non-negotiable aspect of choosing an enablement platform was a focus on data. For OSV, it was imperative to be able to see a tangible, quantifiable ROI from Seismic. Nicole says it best: “Seismic has fantastic analytics and dashboards. I go to them frequently when reporting to executives or stakeholders, and every decision we make as an enablement team is driven by the data.”

Speaking of those tangible, quantifiable results…