Five9 develops successful and engaged sellers through enablement solutions

Develops successful and engaged sellers through enablement solutions

Esther Friend & Scott Kolman

$680,000

yearly cost savings through increased seller efficiency

Five9 is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than 2,000 customers worldwide and facilitating billions of customer engagements annually. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation, workforce optimization, and practical AI to help customers reimagine their customer experience. Designed to be reliable, secure, compliant, and scalable, the Five9 platform helps increase agent and supervisor productivity, connects the contact center to the business, and ultimately deliver tangible business results including increased revenue and enhanced customer trust and loyalty.

The Challenge

"Scaling the business and having the right tools and processes for sales is really important to us so we can be efficient and continue to grow without having a huge lift from a manual work standpoint."

Esther Friend

Vice President Sales Efficiency and Transformation

Increase seller awareness and access to the latest content

Five9 is a leading cloud-based contact center solution supporting companies with access to external customer service and sales. Five9 helps their companies accelerate their digital transformations by providing a great experience for their customers and expects the same from the vendors they work with.

In 2020, Esther Friend joined Five9 as VP of Sales Efficiency and Transformation to help scale the organization. Right from the start of onboarding, Friend tracked potential inefficiencies to add to her list of areas to tackle. “When I first joined the company, just like everybody else in sales, I went through sales boot camp,” explained Friend. Five9 has an excellent multi-week remote training program around sales excellence powered by Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly). “As I was going through the class and interacting with my fellow boot camp attendees in all different roles, from account executives to BDRs, there would be a lot of questions about, well, Where do I find this? Where do I find that? How can I send this to customers? Depending on the type of content, there were five different answers,” noted Friend.

This gap was felt by the marketing organization at Five9 as well. With content dispersed among multiple repositories, marketing had no visibility into the content that was being used by sales. This caused a potential for disconnect between marketing and sales, especially along the lines of awareness around what content was available to sellers.

“While Five9 had a rudimentary content repository, it was lacking in many ways. Search capabilities were quite limited. This made it challenging to not only locate content but to determine if it was appropriate for the sales situation. In addition, there was no ability to determine how the content was consumed and if it addressed the customers’ needs,” explained Scott Kolman, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Five9.

The sales and marketing teams at Five9 joined forces to work together to identify a tool that would help address the gaps they wanted to fill.

Five9 searched for a partner to help make content easy to find, enhance seller awareness of new content, increase the ability to track and measure content usage and give sellers the ability to customize content more efficiently while ensuring content is current.

Esther Friend

Vice President Sales Efficiency and Transformation

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The Solution

"I’ve been a Seismic Learning customer a few times now and I think that the usability of their solution is great and it’s especially geared towards folks like salespeople."

Esther Friend

Vice President Sales Efficiency and Transformation

A content solution designed with sales in mind

Five9 embarked on a partnership with Seismic to begin filling their gaps with a content solution designed with sales in mind. It was a key deciding factor that Seismic Learning, were easy to use and had a good user experience and interface.

As companies continue to onboard sellers virtually, new advantages to this virtual-first approach have made themselves apparent. “I thought it was really excellent and probably even better than doing in-person just given the length of time, the amount of content, it’s a lot easier to absorb,” said Friend. There is a clear advantage to having their content solution integrated directly with the readiness solution sellers use during onboarding.

“When Seismic went down the path of acquiring Lessonly (now Seismic Learning), that integration became even better. That was something we hadn’t anticipated as a benefit but has become a much bigger benefit,” explained Friend. This is especially true when sellers ask where they can find the content presented during their onboarding in Lessonly and get one answer, Seismic. “From an enablement standpoint for sales, the Lessonly integration makes it a lot more seamless versus having disparate places that reps need to go. That’s hugely beneficial,” said Friend.

As a previous Lessonly customer, Friend knew the tool was tailored for sellers.

This same sentiment led them to a partnership with Seismic. Their content would be easy for sellers to find, use, and track from both a sales and marketing perspective.

To support this vision Five9 uses the Sharepoint real-time integration with Seismic, the Salesforce CRM integration, and the Domo integration for enhanced data visualization.

"I’ve been a Seismic Learning customer a few times now and I think that the usability of their solution is great and it’s especially geared towards folks like salespeople."

Esther Friend

Vice President Sales Efficiency and Transformation

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"Marketing was concerned with ensuring the accuracy of the content including company messaging and key data points, so having the ability to address both needs through LiveDocs was a huge win. We have already noticed a substantial increase in the use of this content in opportunities."

Scott Kolman

Senior Vice President Marketing

A new layer of personalization with customer communication

This same sentiment led them to a partnership with Seismic. Their content would be easy for sellers to find, use, and track from both a sales and marketing perspective.

To support this vision Five9 uses the Sharepoint real-time integration with Seismic, the Salesforce CRM integration, and the Domo integration for enhanced data visualization.

A new layer of personalization with customer communication
As Five9 released Seismic to their sellers, Friend began to identify clear advantages of the new tool. “The biggest beneficiaries are definitely the sales users because this is really helping them communicate better with customers,” said Friend.

Five9 rolled out one of Seismic’s newest features, Digital Sales Rooms, to their sellers. The solution resonated well with sales users and soon sellers were sharing examples of the Digital Sales Rooms they were creating for customers. Friend walked through one of those success stories. “We recently closed a pretty large enterprise deal. The rep had shared with us the Digital Sales Room that she created and it was really professional. It had their logo at the top, it was easy for them to find the content, and she shared a video with her face in the middle. It had a very personal feeling to it and created a really great relationship with them.”

Along with Digital Sales Rooms, sellers at Five9 can create custom content for prospects through Seismic’s content automation tool, LiveDocs. “The field teams wanted the ability to create custom content for their clients. Marketing was concerned with ensuring the accuracy of the content including company messaging and key data points, so having the ability to address both needs through LiveDocs was a huge win. We have already noticed a substantial increase in the use of this content in opportunities,” said Kolman.

Sellers are having more personalized and tailored conversations with their prospects, creating an enhanced end-to-end experience for customers. “Seismic really helps our sellers differentiate themselves versus other competitors that may not make it as easy for their prospects to find this content and easily navigate,” explained Friend.

Scott Kolman

Senior Vice President Marketing

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"You can definitely see a correlation between the reps who are most successful and the ones that are the top users of Seismic."

Esther Friend

Vice President Sales Efficiency and Transformation

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Driving engagement with content

Sales and marketing leadership know customers are receiving the same messaging from the top of the funnel all the way through the close. Seismic helps Five9 sellers stay engaged and understand the messaging that is resonating with prospects through Seismic’s content insights and analytics. Five9 sellers save time finding, personalizing, and sending content right from Seismic.

Content has become a focus area for Five9 to drive more engagement in deals. “We saw content as a primary way that we can increase engagement. I have seen a pretty significant shift when looking at our opportunities for the quarter and if they are low, medium, or high engagement,” said Friend. She’s seeing a larger percentage of opportunities in high engagement from both enhanced awareness of sellers following through on engaging with prospects, and also through the content being shared. “I think content is also a key part of how you drive that engagement.”

"You can definitely see a correlation between the reps who are most successful and the ones that are the top users of Seismic."

Esther Friend

Vice President Sales Efficiency and Transformation

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The Result

Arming sellers with the enablement solutions

Five9 partnered with Seismic Learning to fill gaps in access to lessons, content, and performance analytics. They looked for a solution that would bring sales and marketing together and create efficiencies to help scale their business.

The Seismic partnership has helped Five9 sellers perform consistently, stay focused on their engaged opportunities and understand what content and messaging is resonating. “You can definitely see a correlation between the reps who are most successful and the ones that are the top users of Seismic,” shared Friend.

Five9 will continue to grow and scale with Seismic by their side. “One of our criteria was having a great partner that we knew would help us grow and share the best practices. And that has definitely been the case in our experience,” said Friend.