Seismic’s five founders, from left, Fred Xie, Nasser Barghouti, Marc Romano, Ed Calnan, and Doug Winter.
“We saw a massive need for sales and marketing teams to move faster, be nimble, and deliver personalization and customization for their customers,” says Doug Winter, CEO and Co-Founder of Seismic. “And with the current model at the time, that wasn’t happening.”
Doug and the team saw these challenges firsthand from the client perspective. “I’d have meetings with financial advisors, and when I’d sit down with them, I noticed that they’d scrap their pitchbooks together in a three-ring binder filled with various copied pages, outdated charts, and most interestingly, a section of someone else’s personal data. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘what would their CMO think if they knew this pitchbook was being presented to me?’”
Their vision for delivering stronger customer experiences coincided perfectly with the cloud revolution. “The cloud was a huge driver of innovation and change in the marketplace. It freed us up to create a much better solution to solve the specific challenge we saw in content management, especially for sales and marketing, and make it easy to deploy on the cloud.”
The vision kept growing, and the team set out to revolutionize the content automation and personalization process. “We worked hard to build a product to automate the production of pitchbooks and make it easier for client-facing teams to present their products and services while staying compliant, and avoid wasting time and resources having to build and rebuild content.”
Out of a basement office in Encinitas, California, the founders kept pushing, building an engine for sales and marketing with a heavy emphasis on personalization for customers.
Fred and Mark worked on the product, writing code for the first versions. Ed and the team approached go-to-market leaders to collect feedback and build momentum.
They made headway, but they also faced headwinds. Doug recalls Leap Day in 2012 as a particularly difficult time.
“That day, we had one of our biggest meetings to date with a large firm in Boston, and forming a partnership with them could take our company to the next level. But because of a bug in the cloud related to Leap Day, everything about our demo started breaking. We’d push a button, and nothing would happen. Some things worked, others didn’t. It was unpredictable. We left the meeting thinking that things couldn’t get any worse, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Shortly after, another big potential client called to inform us that they’d decided to pass.
“We’d definitely lost one big deal and probably lost the one we just demoed, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this might be it for our company.’”
But despite the setbacks, Doug and the team stayed resolute. They kept moving forward with an even stronger belief in their product and vision. They started winning more deals and began to expand.
“You realize there’s always a new day, another demo, another deal, and you’ve just got to pick yourself up and keep running.”
The growing Seismic team continued finding success and advancing its technology, built on the clear vision to evolve the way sales and marketing teams communicate and work. It’s a vision that still resonates with enablement, sales, and marketing leaders everywhere, across all industries.
Today, Seismic is the global leader in enablement and empowers thousands of teams to grow and win. The product that started it all has evolved to become the Seismic Enablement Cloud™, the world’s most comprehensive and powerful enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to engage customers and grow revenue.
Seismic serves approximately 2,000 organizations worldwide, with more than a million users and spanning across 100+ countries. And while we’ll always be proud of our own success story, nothing makes us happier than seeing the success of our customers.
