Increasing Seller Efficiency to Drive more Revenue

The Challenge 

Reducing time spent on tedious, low-impact activities 

The year 2021 marked the start of Loopio’s formal enablement journey. Prior to this, there wasn’t an enablement team or integrated enablement platform. Loopio was planning for a year of continued growth and scale. A need for dedicated enablement was identified to support customer-facing teams, at scale, with the right tools in place to help them drive more revenue. Loopio began with a sales readiness foundation and quickly built an enablement programme to help achieve both efficiency and enablement effectiveness. 

This is where Stephanie White stepped into the role of Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Loopio. “When I joined, part of my overall mandate was to think about how we can be more effective and efficient in generating revenue. Part of that was clearly identifying roles, support systems and processes for the enablement of our sellers. The other piece of that was understanding what the current sales tech stack was and wasn’t doing for us.” 

Stephanie uncovered the use of Google Drive had led to version control and permission issues, and there was a lack of visibility on how communication with prospects was impacting the business. “We want to use the best sales content. We want to be efficient and effective, and we need data that tells us what the best is,” said Stephanie. 

Loopio’s revenue enablement team is focused on supporting the full customer journey, from discovering and qualifying calls, all the way through the sales cycle and into customer success, to ensure that the customer is receiving the best possible experience and driving value for them. The team aims to have happy customers for longer by enabling and supporting the sales and customer success teams. Without engagement data around customer interactions, it made understanding and painting the picture of the full customer journey difficult for the revenue enablement team. “We engaged with Seismic to get a better line of sight on how we were communicating with our prospects,” explained Stephanie.

The Solution 

Onboard new hires and coach team members 

At Loopio, the People Operations team was the first to implement Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly) which was expanded to the Enablement team to streamline onboarding and training as part of their need for dedicated enablement for the growing sales team. Seismic Learning allows the revenue enablement team to provide more support to hiring managers for onboarding, ramping and ongoing training and has reduced their workload by setting up triggers and scheduled events automatically. These triggers help enrol employees in the onboarding process along with ongoing training relevant to their roles. This relieves hiring managers from getting bogged down by manual tasks to allow them to focus on supporting and coaching their team.  

Loopio leverages the real-time feedback feature of Seismic Learning, which uses AI to give immediate feedback on training exercises. “Having the real-time feedback for their filler words, their cadences, to have that just-in-time learning and affirmation is huge,” explained Stephanie. This real-time feedback helps ramp new hires faster without having to wait for exercises to go through a review period. 

Cole Rubinoff, Key Accounts Director at Loopio, who has worked in the sales organisation over the past six years, weighed in on the impact of just-in-time learning with Seismic Learning. “Seismic Learning is a great way for us to be able to leverage the learnings that we’re going to market with, but to do so at our own time, and really having the opportunity to refer back to it.” 

Additionally, Seismic Learning provides insights into trends and training effectiveness, allowing the team to reassess and improve training content. “My human element for both error and workload has drastically decreased. Now I can have our enablement programme managers focus on the quality rather than the administrative function of training individuals,” said Stephanie.

Overall, Seismic Learning has provided the team with flexibility and a more efficient way to manage their training programmes while delighting their sales teams at the same time. Today they are ramping up new hires faster and saving hiring managers and enablement programme managers time originally spent on manual, administrative tasks.

Organise content effectively 

Prior to implementing Seismic, Stephanie identified a disconnect between the various content created by different teams. Without streamlined access to effective content Cole shared, “For a point in time, I stopped creating new decks for some of my opportunities, just because I didn’t have the bandwidth to do it.”

Seismic immediately added value as a central place for customer-facing documents. Additionally, Seismic was introduced to quantify the effectiveness of client communication to improve efficiency through real-time insights provided to sellers about buyer interactions with content. “We can talk about the internal use case and the internal benefits of visibility and data and all of those things, but what does it mean for our prospects and customers?” Stephanie emphasised. 

Today, instead of creating decks from scratch, sellers like Cole are personalising presentations in Seismic which helps close the loop for enablement and marketing to understand the effectiveness of the content being shared. “If this was 2 years ago, I was either not creating or personalising decks because it took too much time. It was taking me triple the time. When we think about delivering valuable assets to clients in a sales cycle, it has drastically increased from an efficiency perspective,” explained Cole, who only shares highly personalised presentations with clients now. 

Seismic allows management, product and marketing teams to see what’s working and what’s not, and leverage integrations across other tools to gain more insight into improving sales processes and customer experience.

Stephanie shared three best practices that have contributed to their success when implementing a new tool like Seismic: 

1. Identify power users for each role and get them to adopt the tool early, ideally, 30 days in advance, to build success stories and advocates.
2. Avoid the two extremes of waiting too long for perfection or rushing to launch without a strategy, and recommends implementing content management and review cycles early to learn from a lower volume of content.
3. Consider taxonomy and integrations with other tools, such as a CRM, and response management tools, like Loopio, to ensure that recommended content is relevant and useful for the user. Seismic and Loopio have created a complete, end-to-end solution for sales content management, proactive content delivery and RFP response management through the integration available for all joint customers. 
4. Identify sales stages and other fields to ensure the recommended content is as valid as possible for the user at that moment.

Streamline manual tasks

With continuous hiring and enablement creating new content, challenges arose around outdated content and expanding usage to other teams. The strategy shifted towards more deliberate content management and thinking strategically about integrations and taxonomy. With expansion into customer success, new integrations like Gainsight were leveraged to provide more data and insight to more users. As more teams expressed interest in using the platform, the focus became replicating successful strategies and continuously learning from the first rollout’s success. “Our initial challenges were around adoption and creating content for training… fast forward to 9 months down the road, we see tremendous value in the platform,” said Stephanie. 

Loopio leverages several integrations with Seismic, including Outreach, Salesforce, Gainsight, Gong, Seismic Learning and (of course) Loopio. Together these integrations provide efficiency, cross-functional communication and dynamic customer experiences. 

Integrating with Seismic has provided near real-time communication and passive asset delivery to customers. The integration with Seismic Learning has helped new hires track their training progress and impact on deal cycles. Stephanie shares “This is when we start to see the full picture of our sellers being effective and how we make them the best they can be,” by leveraging features like smart trackers and revenue attainment reports from Salesforce. “We can start to track the impact that doing those training sessions, whether they’re onboarding, ramping or beyond, is actually having on their quota attainment.”

Additionally, Seismic Learning allow them to do more with fewer hours in the day by providing a single place to track the effects of training and understand how something is being utilised. “Using Seismic Learning allows me to do more in less time, meaning I can deliver the same quality of support with the same or less headcount,” said Stephanie. In the theme of doing more with less, Loopio saves four full-time employees without having to add additional headcount per year through time gained by streamlining manual tasks.