In December 2016, Forrester published The Forrester Wave™: Sales Enablement Automation Systems, Q4 2016. At the time, our company had around 200 enterprise customers and about as many employees. If a prospective customer of ours even had anyone with the words “sales enablement” in their title, more often than not it was one person trying to make sense of their role and how they can make an impact. Selling a sales enablement solution also meant selling an idea, that it was an organization’s responsibility to invest in resources devoted specifically to helping their sales people be the best they can be in any interaction with a buyer.
Today, 21 months later, Seismic stands at 500 enterprise customers and as many employees. We now service entire sales enablement teams–people specifically focused on sales content, or sales readiness, or sales communications, or on specific sales teams or products, in addition to thousands of marketers and salespeople. The sales enablement technology landscape has gone through an incredible period of rapid growth and transition, with new competitors popping up seemingly every other day, an incredible streak of consolidation and venture capital infusion, and product innovation at a level unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Equipping sales people with what they need to win has become a top priority for CMOs, CROs, and heads of sales across industries and across global regions.
And also today, 21 months later, Seismic has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Enablement Automation Platforms, Q3 2018.
Earlier this year, we were named a Cool Vendor by Gartner. At the time I wrote that the credit goes to our customers. I believe that applies perhaps even more so to this recognition today. The growth in sales enablement over the past few years didn’t happen magically by itself, and it didn’t happen just because of a new technology. It happened through the hard work of many individuals at many different companies who first saw the potential of aligning marketing and sales to really make a difference, then promoted the idea internally, then pushed for larger budgets and teams, and then had the incredible ambition, focus, and talent to produce real results. Those sales enablement experts and practitioners—our customers—are the ones that also push us at Seismic to maintain a breakneck pace of innovation by bringing in the best people on our product and engineering team, to rollout a near constant cadence of new services from our customer success team that is unmatched in the industry in terms of size and capability, and to work to spread the message of sales enablement success to other companies, industries, and areas around the globe.
In short, our customers have become leaders at their companies, and they expect their technology vendors to be leaders too.
In today’s Forrester Wave, Seismic received the top score in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories, and was among the vendors with the highest score in the Market Presence category. If you read the report, you will see that those categories are broken down into more specific criteria. As I read through it, I was struck by the fact that in every single criterion, I could think of multiple examples where our customers inspired us to be better.
So as we sit here today, more excited than ever as to where the practice of sales enablement will take all of us next, I am filled with gratitude towards having the best group of customers a CEO could ask for.
Thank you.
