Over the past few years, enablement has gone from being a nice-to-have to a must-have. And as the industry and function mature, enablement is also becoming strategic. In order to meet the moment, enablement teams need dedicated tools to plan and streamline workflows.
This past autumn, we introduced Enablement Planner, a first-of-its-kind tool designed to help enablement teams define their strategies, plan initiatives and iterate based on real revenue and efficiency insights.
Like many other teams, the Seismic enablement team uses various tools to manage strategic initiatives and projects. Since the release of Enablement Planner, they’ve experienced firsthand how the tool can simplify some of their most demanding projects.
To get a better understanding of how our internal team uses Enablement Planner, we spoke with Seismic Director of Product Enablement, Amber Mellano. Here’s what she had to say about the experience so far.
Tony: How important is planning to the Seismic enablement team?
Amber: It’s super important. It encourages us to think strategically and be more proactive. That really helps us plan better so that our actions are less reactive and more aligned with the overall goals of the business. It also ensures that we avoid having one person run in one direction and another run in a different direction when we should be running on the same path. Planning gives us the ability to see everything that’s happening and understand where we have the opportunity to combine efforts and quickly identify gaps. As an end result, sellers get enabled on a unified message instead of being bombarded with a lot of separate, seemingly disconnected enablement programming.
Tony: How did your team manage planning prior to the launch of Enablement Planner?
Amber: We used a lot of spreadsheets and we definitely used [Monday.com] to an extent. It was tedious to try and work in Monday on content that lives in Seismic. We always had to paste links back and forth, and it wasn’t right there, front and centre. Now, having everything in the product has been game-changing. It’s so much more convenient and takes much less time since we don’t have to click back and forth, copy and paste links or send an email or Slack to keep on top of all the project contributors. It’s been a huge game-changer.
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Tony: How does the internal Seismic team currently use Enablement Planner?
Amber: We have a few different use cases that mostly revolve around different kinds of content audits. So, for example, we use it to manage just plain old stale content. We’re also using it as a bucket where we can quickly see our content. For example, we’re doing an audit around content management… content. It’s kind of meta, and there’s a lot of content. A lot of it is super old, and some assets reference “Content Manager” or “CMS,” but now we’re calling it “sales content management.” Because the wording varies, it’s hard to be sure that we’ve found all of the assets.
Every time we come across something that uses the terms content manager or CMS, we dump it in a project. Now, we have one project that has all of the assets related to sales content management in Seismic. That gives me the ability to see all of the content quickly and identify what’s super old or needs to be updated. Then, I can assign updates to the content owner directly through Seismic and ask them to update it. They can easily link to the asset and I can easily track the status of the update, all right within the Seismic web app where I already spend the bulk of my time.
The next time we update our messaging, or if there is something new to add, I now know all of the assets that are related to the topic. I can find them again super quickly, and it also means that from a cross-team collaboration perspective, it’s more efficient. So, if somebody on the product marketing team says, “Hey, we have a change to the sales content management messaging,” they can go in and change the Powerpoint directly. But then I might need to go in and change an asset that mentions sales content management, or I might need to go in and change a lesson. Having it all in the same place means that each individual can easily find the content that they need and it doesn’t have to be managed by one person.
Tony: What’s one thing Seismic customers should know about Enablement Planner that they may not know?
Amber: My favourite thing about Enablement Planner is using a content view to create the collection of content that I want to add to a project. You can use the content view to pull up all content that’s set to expire in the next 30 days and then bulk-add it to a project. The flip side is that as you’re going through the library and come across something that’s old or needs to be updated, you can directly add that asset to a task or project from the assets overview page which is kind of cool. I like the flexibility of having a project live right there and the tool gives me the opportunity to add it to a project and it queues up in my to-do list so that I don’t have to worry about it going forward. It doesn’t get forgotten or lost in the shuffle, because I added it to my project and I can come back to it later.
Tony: What can our customers do to get started with Enablement Planner?
Amber: Enablement Planner is great for content audits in any form or fashion – not just auditing freshness, but also the quality of the content. The first project we used internally to get started with Enablement Planner was to change an outdated triangular diagram with a new circular one. So, I did a little train-the-trainer course for everyone on the product marketing team. And I said, “Every time you see an asset that has a triangle in it that needs to be replaced with the new circle if you can’t do the replacement right then and there, add it to our ‘triangle becomes a circle project’ so that we can track that.”
This helps us keep track of anything. If we can’t make that update at that moment, we can come back to it in the project and be confident that nothing slipped between the cracks.
In the process of an audit, we look at content engagement and how an asset is performing. If an asset is trending up or down, the tool helps us decide if content needs to be updated or removed altogether. Again, it’s all right there in the library, magically available to my view.
It also helps with cross-team collaboration because there might be multiple people who are responsible for updating content on a particular topic. And if you can put all of that content in one project, everyone can go to the same place, see when it’s been updated and the status of it. Then it’s easy for everyone to know when they need to make their updates based on when their peers have made theirs.
Another benefit of Planner, and the fact that we’re able to perform these audits directly in the platform, is that we can publish the final updated version of the content directly from Planner. From start to finish, everything we need to manage content in Seismic can be done within Planner.
One last cool thing is the ability to look back and see how long it took to update assets with triangles to circular diagrams. It shows how many people it took to update the assets, so I can use that information to plan future projects. For example, last time it took 12 people and eight weeks to find and update content, so the next time a rebrand or a messaging update comes along, we can plan more intelligently about how long it’ll take to get it done.
See Seismic Enablement Planner for yourself!
We’ve seen for ourselves. A planning tool that’s designed by enablement professionals for enablement professionals helps teams improve speed to market, accelerate time-to-close and increase efficiency. If you’d like to see Enablement Planner for yourself, please reach out to your account manager.