Paige O’Neill, CMO at Seismic, discusses how AI is revolutionizing customer experiences and driving growth in go-to-market strategies for businesses.
Paige, kindly let our readers know how Seismic perceives the role of AI in evolving customer experiences and go-to-market (GTM) processes based on recent data.
At Seismic, we believe enablement is a mission-critical function that turns strategy into reality, and generative AI is creating an industry-defining moment for GTM and enablement teams. It is changing everything about the sales process, from prospecting to meeting preparation, content and presentation development, follow-up, training and performance tracking.
In fact, an overwhelming majority (93%) of enablement tech users acknowledge AI as the driving force behind their future investments. Based on this data, it’s evident that organizations neglecting to integrate AI into their GTM processes risk lagging behind and losing competitiveness in today’s industry, a sentiment echoed by 73% of respondents in our research.
What’s more: our customers know this to be true. In a Seismic customer survey, 65% of respondents cited AI as a primary reason for increased enablement investment. Specifically, they view Sales Content Generation & Optimization as the most valuable use cases to explore and implement for their teams. Over half (52%) are currently using or evaluating AI-powered tools within sales enablement processes, with 61% sharing that they are familiar with these tools to varying degrees.
Your report suggests a significant impact on both internal processes and customer experiences for businesses leveraging AI. How does Seismic observe this impact in terms of tangible ROI and enhanced customer engagement?
In addition to the clear revenue growth teams have witnessed, GTM leaders predict an average of 23% of that growth will be directly attributed to AI utilization over the next five years. In fact, 63% believe that AI is the primary force behind evolving customer experiences today. AI solutions are poised to touch nearly every corner of customer engagement.
For context, GTM leaders in the United States are leveraging AI-powered enablement tools for three primary functions: 53% utilize them for content analytics, 50% for content distribution, and 48% for learning and coaching. Businesses are experiencing significant benefits, with 91% of those who have implemented AI tools reporting an increase in customer satisfaction since integrating AI into their enablement processes.
With AI implementation leading to increased customer satisfaction for 91% of companies, can you share specific examples or anecdotes that highlight this positive outcome without delving into statistics?
GTM strategy is constantly evolving, but two things will always remain a priority for the customer journey and sales funnel: personalization and connection. While many think AI removes this from the traditional sales processes and interactions we have today, it actually augments them.
Enablement technology, powered by AI, elicits the most personalized and targeted sales experiences our industry has ever seen, allowing sales teams to feel confident and customers to feel special and cared for. Additionally, AI-powered enablement tech can lead to increased speed to market, cost reduction on content creation, and time savings for customer-facing teams – all creating space for businesses to reallocate resources to focus on meaningful activities and strategic business initiatives that move the needle.
For example, one of the top wealth and asset management firms reduced advisors’ time spent on administrative tasks by 70%. And a leading global investment management firm leveraged Seismic’s automation tools to save their team 23,000 hours per year in creating and distributing client content, which translates to ~$1.8M in efficiency savings from improved workflows.
There is a chance that companies not incorporating AI into GTM processes might fall behind competitors. What key trends or aspects of AI are considered most influential in this scenario?
We see a clear gap between the achievements of companies that invest in enablement and those that don’t. Poor enablement, or lack of enablement entirely, can lead to missing your number, falling short of targets, and losing customers and team members. Companies are taking a huge risk to all areas of their business when they neglect enablement. Compared to non-adopters, companies that use enablement tech were more likely to say they achieved their revenue goals (17%), client retention goals (14%), and marketing goals (14%).
This further proves that AI-powered enablement technology is the catalyst to achieve strategic business initiatives like retaining more employees, attracting new talent, growing their customer base, operating more efficiently, and exceeding revenue targets.
Despite economic challenges, there’s an anticipation of revenue growth from AI incorporation. How do GTM leaders foresee AI contributing to revenue growth, and what expectations are there for the next five years without specific percentages?
The past 18 months were wrought with market challenges. AI-powered enablement technology can be a game changer for businesses looking to quickly and efficiently drive revenue growth as they continue to navigate today’s headwinds.
AI-powered enablement has the potential to proactively predict and recommend the best next steps for any seller, marketer, enabler, or trainer in any given scenario and, in some cases, even follow through on those next steps on the user’s behalf. And teams are putting a lot of stock into these investments, with many believing the fusion of AI and GTM strategy will lead to revenue growth for their organization.
But while the potential of AI in enablement is certainly thrilling, it also brings about a sense of apprehension surrounding the payoffs. The reality is: positive ROI stemming from AI-powered enablement efforts will take time. This indicates businesses should take great care as they incorporate AI into their existing systems to ensure it’s done with intention. It also underscores how vital it is that businesses choose an enablement partner with a combination of deep experience in implementing AI-powered solutions and offering end-to-end guidance with a view to true customer success and positive business outcomes.
Seismic plans further investment in 2024. Could you provide insights into the specific areas related to AI that Seismic aims to focus on and how these investments might impact the enablement landscape?
While Seismic’s AI/ML journey began back in 2015, the introduction of generative AI has reaffirmed our commitment and investment in AI-powered enablement in the last 18 months. Namely, we are prioritizing four key areas of innovation in our AI roadmap:
- Discover: Sellers will receive targeted content, answers and information faster than ever before. Using free form, natural language dialog, sellers can search across a variety of trusted internal and external sources while respecting all content governance controls. Seismic will also curate content across these sources based on a user’s interests, territory, and other contextual information.
- Create: Generative AI will power content creation across the Seismic Enablement Cloud. For example, rather than manually authoring learning content to test and reinforce concepts, an enablement practitioner can save time by using Seismic to create multi-modal learning paths, assessments and assignments of varying degrees of difficulty.
- Automate: GTM teams will be able to streamline and even eliminate manual tasks, such as automating steps involved in meeting preparation, summarization and follow up.
- Advise: With access to personalized guidance and “next best action” recommendations at scale, sellers can unlock new levels of effectiveness. Seismic will proactively analyze all the data across content, enablement, learning, and engagement from millions of interactions, allowing enablement teams to instantly identify skill and knowledge gaps and provide tailored training to accelerate development.
How is Seismic addressing the gap in understanding how AI is used in GTM processes, and what educational initiatives or tools are being introduced without delving into specific numbers?
At Seismic, we work to consistently update our AI product offerings and tools to ensure they are meeting the needs of our customers and empowering them to build more strategic relationships, effectively engage with buyers, and speed up the entire buying process.
In fact, just last year we introduced an AI customer community, which is dedicated to sharing best practices, knowledge and strategies to seamlessly integrate AI into revenue teams’ operations. Additionally, we offer both the Seismic Advocacy Program and Seismic Community – two spaces for our customers to hear more directly from Seismic leadership about our products, as well as share with each other what they’re learning and doing with AI-powered enablement at their company.
Implementing AI technology comes with challenges. What are the primary challenges faced by businesses, and how does Seismic view these challenges to the benefits of AI?
While the majority of businesses are placing big bets on AI, there are some concerns when it comes to implementing the technology into their GTM processes – with Seismic customers specifically citing security & privacy (50%) and a lack of time & internal resources (45%) as the most common worries.
These challenges certainly shouldn’t be overlooked, but they can be largely mitigated with executive buy-in and oversight. CMOs and CROs must meet and align with enablement leaders on key efforts and objectives to help each other meet business goals. This helps ensure revenue teams are aligned and have access to sufficient internal resources to implement AI effectively.
Could you provide insights into the key functions that GTM leaders are focusing on while utilizing AI-powered enablement tools, especially in content analytics, distribution, creation, editing, and management?
GTM teams are leveraging data to anticipate what customers expect and synthesize the information to deliver the best buying experience. Through content management and activation, teams can use AI-powered enablement to pull together the most compelling content and distribute it in the most personalized, efficient manner.
For example, the Seismic platform can track how many times a piece of content was sent to customers and collects data on the content’s open rate, how long the customer spent reading it, if they send it to someone else in their organization, and more. With analytics and intelligent recommendations, we can tell you if content needs to be refreshed or simply removed – and voila! Now the marketing team spends more time creating content that actually progresses deals.
Lastly, a considerable percentage of GTM leaders believe that AI is the primary force behind evolving customer experiences. How does Seismic envision AI continuing to shape and redefine customer experiences in the coming years?
The customer journey is longer and more disjointed than ever before, especially in the B2B space – a trend that picked up speed in 2020 and remained steady since then. As a result, customers control the buying cycle. And with more education and information at their fingertips, they are choosing digital self-service routes over working with a human sales rep – with only 5% of the buyer’s journey now spent with a salesperson, according to Gartner.
With only a small sliver of control over the process, GTM teams must deliver the best possible experience at every customer touchpoint. This requires more and more marketing and sales leaders to work directly with their enablement teams to drive greater impact, break down silos, and enable the entire revenue-generating organization for success. AI-powered enablement technology is key to success in this endeavor, as it allows teams to get content in front of sellers, train reps on messaging, and track content usage to understand what’s resonating with customers. We predict these motions to only improve and become more precise with the help of AI in the coming years.
Paige O’Neill
CMO of Seismic
Paige O’Neill is Chief Marketing Officer at Seismic where she leads all marketing functions including corporate, product, field, partner, and customer marketing. She is a data-driven marketer with a track record of propelling growth, delivering outstanding results, and spearheading thought leadership within the Customer Experience industry across her 30+ years of experience. Prior to Seismic, Paige served as CMO at public and private software companies including Sitecore, Prysm, SDL, and Aravo Solutions. She also spent nearly a decade at Oracle in product marketing and public relations roles. Paige is an established thought leader in martech and is regularly cited among the top B2B CMOs, with recent awards from LinkedIn, TopRank, B2B Magazine, Forbes, and Social Media Magazine.
