Seismic, the sales enablement vendor, has announced its Spring/Summer 2024 product release. The update includes several AI-powered tools. Including the early availability of Aura Copilot its generative AI-powered assistant that will help sales teams to drive efficiency. The release also includes Siesmic for Meetings and updated integrations with Microsoft products.
Overall, the release includes several enhancements that will enable customer-facing teams to be more effective in every client interaction. Before even meeting vendors, customers have already conducted research, assessed solutions from review sites and spoken to peers. According to Gartner this shift sees only 5% of the buyer’s journey now spent in interactions with a sales team member.
Sales enablement technology is therefore critical for sales teams to deliver a better buying experience. In its “Generation Enablement Report, Seismic found that 97% of companies use enablement technology across multiple departments. Organisations are also seeing the value with 83% saying enablement technology helps them provide a better customer experience.
Furthermore, 83% said their enablement tools will help their organization maintain and grow its customer base in 2024. As Seismic continues to enhance its platform, those numbers are only likely to increase.
Krish Mantripragada, Chief Product Officer of Seismic, commented, “Sellers who are not prepared to maximize every window of opportunity in the sales cycle will fall flat. That’s why our latest product release arms them with the capabilities and resources they need to win. We’re particularly excited about the launch of Aura Copilot after a series of pilot programs, which were met with high demand and participation from our customers. Our customers are eager to utilize generative AI across their enablement efforts, and we’re thrilled with the feedback we’ve received at this stage.”
What is in the release?
Aura Copilot:
Now available for early access. The generative AI-based assistant helps GTM teams across a range of use cases, which include:
Discover: Users can ask a question in natural languages. They receive answers pulled from the data and content contained within Seismic. The answers are summarised with citations which can be linked to for further explanation.
Create: The assistant can help with generating content, whether for sales collateral, product information, emails or something else. The user can determine the length and is then able to make any corrections before the content is submitted. The content can be used in meetings, lessons or for other purposes.
Automate: The AI-powered assistant is also capable of conducting tasks within the system. Automating what used to take minutes in seconds, saving time for sales reps. Examples could be adding the metadata for content, such as the description or tags. It can manage bulk updates, for example if a product name changes or description changes. Overall, it can help to improve governance across the platform, though Seismic does not explicitly explain how it achieves this.
Advise: Not only will the AI assistant reply to questions it can also interpret data points, presenting them in visualisations that help identify trends and insights. These insights can help drive better sales enablement.
The pilot program is now complete. Customers used the Aura Copilot’s capabilities nearly 50,000 times across the Seismic platform. They have carried out a variety of tasks using the assistant. But Seismic did not present which features were the most popular.
Jennifer Sutherland, Global Leader of Culture, Learning & Development, Trustwave, commented, “Seismic’s Aura Copilot has been fantastic for us. It’s incredibly easy to use and requires minimal review due to its accuracy. We’ve used it for a variety of tasks, such as creating quizzes and course descriptions. This efficiency translates to a quicker turnaround for our salespeople, allowing us to swiftly implement new content, products, processes, and systems. The AI functionality within Seismic has been amazing, making our operations smoother and more responsive.”
Seismic for Meetings
Seismic defines meetings as critical conversations with buyers that can make or break active deals. Seismic for Meetings aims to shift the balance of probability for each meeting towards make rather than break.
It is estimated that sales reps spend 14 hours a week preparing for meetings. Not only does this seem like a lot of time, but once the meetings are held, it is hard to extract what sales enablement tools were useful during the meeting. It makes it harder for marketing and sales enablement teams to provide the optimal content for meetings.
Seismic for Meetings consists of three elements to resolve these issues: Prepare, Present and Follow up. The Prepare stage has the biggest time saving for sales reps. This offers a collaborative environment where users can create brand content and create a playlist of contacts tailored to each meeting they conduct. Elements for this could include:
- Sales Introduction
- Account Review
- Guided Overview Desk
- Account Management
- Interactive Proposal
This is not a prescribed playlist so that the sales rep can initiate the right content during the call at the right time. Furthermore, the order this content is used in is recorded for later analysis. As the meeting ends, the platform generates a summary of the call using AI. Thus creating the relevant action items and recommending future content to share with the prospect.
With control of the meetings, other teams, such as marketing, can immediately see feedback generated during the meeting. Perhaps highlighting where queries were always raised and clarifying the content. Both sales behaviours and content can be improved around the latest customer trends and what is actually driving engagements.
Seismic for Meetings now integrates with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook. thus allowing reps to leverage Seismic right in the flow of their daily work.
Microsoft integrations
Seismic has long worked with Microsoft applications. The Seismic solutions are available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Seismic integrates with several Microsoft Applications. These include Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, and Dynamics 365. This release sees an updated integration for Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
While the hype for this release is mainly around the early release of Seismic Aura, for those customers not able to get access, Seismic Meetings is a significant addition to the platform. The ability to prepare for, conduct and analyse meetings once complete is powerful. Organisations can now analyse meetings at scale, and when combined with Aura, the analysis of that meeting data could be game-changing for many organisations.
