Increases Rep Productivity with Seismic

The Challenge

Improve GTM efforts and transform revenue enablement 

HubSpot is a software company that offers a suite of tools for inbound marketing, sales, operations and customer service. They provide an all-in-one platform that helps businesses scale and empowers them to quickly adapt to their next phase of growth, no matter where they are in their journey. 

HubSpot found in early 2021 that customer-facing employees in sales and customer success weren’t as productive as they needed to be. They identified each seller was spending on average five hours per week searching for resources and content assets needed to do their job. As a result, the enablement team set out to find a solution to organise content effectively and give the team more time to partner with customers to achieve growth. HubSpot calculated that if they could cut down the time sellers spent locating resources each week from five hours to three, the company would generate an estimated $15 million in productivity gains – the equivalent of adding 100 sellers without adding headcount.

HubSpot turned to Seismic to provide a solution to manage the growing amount of sales and customer success resources. The enablement team and content-creating marketers sought to centralise, manage and govern content that had existed in various systems. And, they sought a solution that would enable sales and customer success teams to efficiently locate relevant, up-to-date content while making it easier to share with prospects and customers. 

Ryan Marini, Senior Programme Manager on HubSpot’s GTM Enablement team, oversees HubSpot’s sales and customer success content management and learning management programmes. The evaluation process with Seismic, she said, led the company to think bigger and more broadly about how an enablement platform could drive positive business results. During the evaluation, they realised the Seismic Enablement Cloud could deliver advanced capabilities to drive customer engagement beyond solving core content issues. “Our interest in revenue enablement grew at the mention of Seismic capabilities like LiveSend and the valuable analytics we could gather from it. Initially, we sought to simply track rep engagement within HubSpot and measure who was sending and who was clicking on internal content. However, with the realisation that we could also use this technology to better engage with customers, we shifted our focus towards finding a more versatile platform rather than just a straightforward CMS.”

With a broader scope on how sales enablement technology could do more beyond content storage and organisation, the enablement team found themselves at a turning point to deliver an even greater impact to the business. HubSpot’s enablement team has been focused on reducing time to ramp (TTR) for new hires and increasing productivity per rep (PPR) by leveraging Seismic’s analytics to measure programme success. The importance of supporting new hires led HubSpot to also evaluate and implement Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly) to support the ramp of new hires and overall seller readiness.

The Solution

Onboarding new team members

With the launch of Seismic, HubSpot’s enablement team developed an improved onboarding experience for new hires joining the company – starting with enablement taking on a bigger role at the outset of Customer Success and Sales onboarding. “During new-hire training, we noticed a significant issue with how documentation was stored. People would create copies and save versions to their personal folder, which meant if they continued to use that copy they would miss critical changes made to the original document,” said Ryan. Seismic provided the onboarding team with a higher level of version control than they previously had access to. 

HubSpot stored its content in Seismic to make everything easily discoverable alongside courses in Seismic Learning for training from day one. This helped new hires get accustomed to having the best resources to learn about the HubSpot product, as well as their specific role expectations, who they work with (and how), and track their course completion. HubSpot was also able to get managers involved sooner and nurture the feedback portion of the manager-rep relationship using Seismic Learning grading. 

“Since our launch, our main focus has been on improving our onboarding programme for maximum impact. In the first year, our main priority was ramp time as a key performance indicator, while productivity per representative was added as an additional objective for this year’s main priorities,” said Ryan. With Seismic, HubSpot is decreasing ramp time for new sales and customer success hires.

Finding content easily and organising content effectively

One of the main drivers for HubSpot to implement an enablement platform was to give their teams an easier way to find content. As Ryan explained, “Content governance and content discoverability builds trust between the departments that enable our sellers and our customer success organisation.” The enablement team aimed to ensure that the customer-facing teams had access to accurate and up-to-date content with clarification on who owned the content to effectively answer any questions. This resulted in a more efficient enablement team and reduced the time it takes to locate an answer for a rep, leading to improved productivity and reduced ramp-up time from the following impact: 

• Better search results using Seismic increased trust from customer-facing teams looking for the right content to share. The version control guarantees they are getting the most current content. 
• Reps save an estimated average of two hours per week by finding content, training and resources with Seismic. HubSpot is also seeing increased collaboration from having both Success and Sales organisations accessing their content in Seismic. “It makes for better collaboration and a better understanding of each other’s roles from the get-go,” said Ryan.  
• Increased collaboration between sales and customer success helps support upsell motions with existing customers and alignment across the entire customer journey. “At an enterprise-level company customer success and sales need to be heavily integrated, it’s really important,” said Ryan. 

Showing impact and ROI

Seismic provides robust analytics capabilities that offer valuable insights into the performance and impact of sales content and activities. These analytics help HubSpot understand how their sales teams engage with content, identify trends, measure effectiveness and make data-driven decisions. “The data we have in Seismic is really empowering,” said Ryan. 

HubSpot’s enablement team leverages content and data insights in Seismic to help drive priorities and business decisions for key stakeholders. “Marketing is a really important stakeholder group of enablement because both departments are invested in how sales and customer success use the content,” said Ryan. Seismic’s data analytics can help the marketing teams identify which types of content and even which specific assets are receiving the most engagement from sales representatives and customers. This information allows them to make informed decisions about how to allocate their time and resources when creating assets.