A Seismic Opportunity

If you work for a company that sells products to customers, you’ve probably considered a countless number of tools to increase the productivity of your sales reps. Whether it’s sourcing more leads, to having more effective sales calls, to visualizing productivity and discovering opportunities to coach your sales team, there are a number of potential process improvements to allow your sales team to reach its full potential. As investors in scaling enterprise businesses such as Mulesoft, AppDynamics, Zscaler and Nutanix, Lightspeedpartners are constantly thinking about best practices amongst top performing sales teams.

A trend we noticed is the increasing need for Sales Enablement to facilitate the collaboration between the sales, marketing, and finance teams. Ever accidentally used an old version of a marketing presentation? Or a document with last quarter’s numbers? What if your sales reps knew how to optimize all the collateral at their disposal to wow a prospect during the demo? Top sales reps may have their own personal folder of secret weapons while your ramping reps are scratching their heads about perfect slides to show a new lead. Or worse, your seasoned sales reps are spending countless hours updating materials and asking for the most up-to-date, compliant presentation instead of closing their next deal.

Enter Seismic.

The recognized leader in Sales Enablement, Seismic equips global sales teams with the knowledge, messaging, and automatically personalized content to deliver relevant and impactful information from internal and external sources. From pitch builder, proposal automation, ROI calculators, to training materials, Seismic combines content management capabilities with discovery and search, data analytics, and deep customization. Seismic’s platform sits across sales, marketing, finance, customer success, training, and growing sales enablement teams. Seismic has saved sales reps thousands of hours searching for and managing content, improving win rates, upsell, and retention.

At the heart of Seismic, CEO Doug Winter has led a world class team that has successfully built, scaled, and exited multiple enterprise software companies. Most recently, Doug and co-founder Ed Calnan were VPs at EMC Corporation, where they scaled the Document Science division. Prior to EMC, Doug was COO and Ed was SVP of Sales of Document Sciences before the eventual acquisition by EMC. After flying down to sunny San Diego, we were thoroughly impressed by the Seismic team. Having been in the trenches together since meeting on a submarine ship in the Navy, Doug and Ed gave us confidence they would build an enduring enterprise company.

A few reasons why we’re excited about Seismic:

1. Seismic is the demonstrated leader in the emerging sales enablement space and meaningfully larger than frequently mentioned competitors.
2. The company has the opportunity to achieve significant scale within current customer segments, which represent very large global markets.
3. Seismic’s CRM and API integrations allow for orchestrated workflows across large teams, which create unique data insights that will extend its product deeper into enterprises.
4. Many metrics of the company impressed us, but we’ll highlight a few here. Seismic has continued to show heathy top line growth by displaying 100% year-over-year organic growth in ARR. Strong gross retention and increasing net revenue retention show expansion across large customers and a stable, growing base for long-term scale. The team has repeatedly shown an ability to land and expand into seven- and eight-figure deals, reaffirming the trend around sales enablement and content management within enterprises.

Did we mention that Lightspeed Venture Partner John W. Thompson will also be joining the Seismic Board? As Chairman at Microsoft and former CEO of Symantec, where he served for ten years and oversaw 10x revenue growth from $600 million to $6 billion, John is the perfect compliment to the Seismic team.

This scratches the surface of why we are so excited to be chosen to lead the $100M Series E investment for Seismic, and partner with Doug, Ed, and the rest of the Seismic team. As seasoned enterprise software executives, Doug and Ed truly understand their own customer and Lightspeed is thrilled to back a team that is both product-driven and has a history of successful execution.

If you are a global enterprise with a sales force, join more than 500 global enterprises and check out Seismic.

— Will Kohler & Natalie Luu