OpFocus Helps Sales Enablement Leader Seismic Break Down Silos and Facilitate Growth with Salesforce & CPQ

challenges

aligning sales and marketing and improving efficiencies

Seismic Software has been growing by leaps and bounds, and for good reason. Their sales enablement platform provides what businesses desperately need – a way to better engage prospects and close deals faster. By aligning sales and marketing, improving efficiencies, and fostering cross-functional visibility for key insights, Seismic’s SaaS product helps teams drive revenue.

The challenge with growing so quickly, however, was that Seismic’s own sales operations didn’t fully mirror the same high levels of efficiency, alignment, and visibility.

The company’s Salesforce CRM implementation had been expanding organically in response to requests for enhancements and new fields. At the same time, team members had limited time and resources to strategically evaluate the best way to organize Salesforce and maximize its integration with Seismic. 

Although this didn’t impact Seismic’s business growth, it caused inefficiencies and posed potential future risk, according to the company’s Executive Vice President of Revenue Operations Toby Carrington. He said, “Salesforce performance problems frustrated users and made us concerned the system could fall over. The master data for customer records was getting a bit out of control and things like lead routing weren’t optimized. There were too many steps in the process. Plus, there were so many custom fields with similar information that people weren’t sure they were looking at the correct data when running reports. They spent a lot of time trying to find the right answers so they didn’t draw the wrong conclusions.” 

When it came to pricing and quoting, sales did everything manually with Excel and Word. This led to a lack of visibility for managers and the customer success team. Resulting challenges included limited insights into customer activity, an inability to trust deal accuracy and health in Salesforce, and noncompliant pricing at times. 

“We needed to put the foundational elements in place so we could drive the efficiencies, alignment, and results that a company at our stage needed. Like a lot of organizations that experience very rapid growth, we needed to mature our core systems,” Carrington said.

customer experience

CPQ enables Seismic to break down silos and strengthen alignment between sales and customer success. Now that all contract information is in one place and readily accessible, sales and customer success teams can work hand-in-hand to enhance the customer experience. “We’re much better positioned to care for our customers holistically and optimize sales opportunities,” Carrington noted.

Seismic has already seen success in improving combined services and software deals, compliance with pricing policies, and transparency between departments on deals.

“Our customer success team is a big fan of CPQ because it gives them direct visibility into what’s happening with customers. This makes it much easier for them to prepare and provides an organized hand-off from sales, which is very important for our customers,” said Carrington.

business funding and acquisitions

Seismic has acquired several companies since its OpFocus engagement began. By merging Salesforce instances and consolidating tech stacks, OpFocus has helped Seismic be operationally successful with acquisitions and has reinforced investor confidence in Seismic’s ability to scale. 

“Our most recent round of funding placed a lot of emphasis on our ability to scale internationally and take on new lines of business. Investors wanted to look at all the different KPIs and the robustness of our go-to-market engine. A lot of this fundamental work was supported by OpFocus,” Carrington said.

bottom-line growth

With CPQ, new sales staff can onboard faster and hundreds of people can accurately quote deals. Seismic also benefits from more rigorous controls around discount rates. “Fewer people are baking in big discounts because they don’t want to go through all the approvals that are now mandated,” Carrington explained. “From a growth perspective, we also have to focus on margins. Having visibility into those deals enables us to determine what levers we can pull to get the kind of deals we want.”

continuous Salesforce improvement

Carrington noted, “I’m very happy with the way our Salesforce system has matured. “We’ve been able to up-level it to something that’s robust and suitable for our size, scale, and growth plan.“

Even still, there is always room for improvement. As Seismic employees experience the value that Salesforce and CPQ enable, they request more ways to use the system. OpFocus’ managed services frees Seismic’s sales operations team to think more strategically about Salesforce and focus on ways to optimize it further, helping sales and customer success teams do their jobs even better.