The gist

Seismic — the market leader in sales enablement software — was a Responsive core integration partner before they were a customer.

In 2023, Seismic evaluated Responsive alongside their former response management software and chose Responsive to:

• Unify proposal team collaboration with sales and subject matter experts (SMEs) from all other departments (including InfoSec, Legal, and Product Development) on one platform.
• Automate upload of final proposals to Seismic WorkSpace, a virtual collaboration platform for client-facing teams.
• Enable all authorized Seismic users (1,400+) to conduct AI-powered searches of proposal Q&A pairs housed in Responsive directly from the Seismic platform.

Open access to all content fuels Seismic’s revenue growth engine by enabling faster responses across every customer touchpoint, including formal requests and assessments (RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, DDQs, and HR, legal, and security questionnaires), as well as informal customer communications like emails, calls, and virtual meetings.

The rundown

Seismic’s response challenge

• Limited access to the company’s former response management solution resulted in inefficiency, inconsistent messaging, and restricted access to valuable sales and proposal content.
• Subject matter expert (SME) RFx content reviews occurred outside of the response management system. This highly manual process lacked transparency and was difficult to manage.
• Project management and stakeholder engagement suffered from a lack of unified collaboration capabilities; cross-functional teams resorted to whichever communication channel they were most comfortable with, resulting in zero visibility and inability to monitor proposal progress.

Impact and results

• Company-wide access to sales collateral and proposal content unifies collaboration on one platform between proposal, sales, presales, legal, InfoSec, marketing, AI compliance, and other teams for responses to RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, DDQs, and HR, legal, and security questionnaires.
• The Seismic-Responsive integration enables free-flowing access and management of all sales collateral and response content, providing end-to-end, organization-wide transparency into every response project.
• Ability to seamlessly add proposals to Seismic WorkSpace using the Seismic-Responsive integration allows teams to quickly deliver proposals to a Seismic Digital Sales Room (DSR) in a user-friendly format, track proposal engagement, and share information throughout the sales cycle in a consistent location.

The problem: Inefficient collaboration restricted growth

The Seismic Enablement CloudTM equips Go-to-Market (GTM) teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. Every Seismic employee uses the company’s AI-powered enablement hub to access content and deliver a best-in-class customer experience.

However, access to their former response management system — which also included valuable proposal content that’s crucial to the sales process — was limited to a fraction of the company. Sales cycle collaboration, consistency, and efficiency all suffered because the rest of the company lacked visibility into proposal content and processes.

In addition to responding to approximately 40-70 RFx projects per quarter, the proposal team works cross-functionally to ensure that their content is aligned with stakeholders like sales representatives, product managers, release notes writers, and solution engineers. This is a symbiotic relationship: the proposal team relies on stakeholders to maintain updated content for accurate, compliant responses, and in return, the content and data the proposal team mines from past RFx responses informs the product team on market trends. Limited access to this content created bottlenecks that had multiple impacts to the company, slowing both RFx response processes and limiting the visibility into data for product development.

Seismic needed a Strategic Response Management platform that every employee could access and would allow for:

• Collaboration on RFx responses to occur on one platform.
• Collaboration on updating Q&A pairs to occur on one platform.
• Unlimited access to RFx content so teams would not have to wait to access it through the proposal team.
• Increased efficiency thanks to streamlined review cycles in a unified platform.

The proposal team envisioned empowering stakeholders from sales, legal, and security with the ability to access the RFx content they needed, when they needed it. Not only would it help the small proposal team support more projects with a lighter touch, it would also ensure consistency, unlock the time and freedom to customize responses, and empower teams to act quickly when competition and deadlines loom.

The solution: Integrate Seismic with Responsive for free-flowing collaboration

Seismic chose Responsive to unlock team collaboration for RFx responses, especially between the proposal and sales teams. “Responsive facilitates seamless and efficient collaboration across diverse teams, ensuring smooth and effective communication,” said John Ossian, Senior Sales Engineer at Seismic.
Responsive gives everyone at Seismic access to valuable proposal content whenever they need it. Seismic optimizes the workflow even further through Responsive integrations: one with Seismic, and another with Salesforce.

Adding value without disrupting workflows

While the proposal team centralizes its work in Responsive (which stores Q&A pairs), the Seismic sales and marketing teams spend more time working in Seismic (which stores sales collateral). The two-way Seismic-Responsive integration ensures that searches from either platform include results from both.

Even though the vast majority of users work on the Seismic side of the integration, adoption of Responsive has not been an issue. The seamless integration simply presents a new source of highly complementary content. “Training for the integration isn’t necessary. It just happens organically on their screen,” Solnitzky said. “They might not even realize that the content they’re seeing is from Responsive. They just care about getting the right answer from our content library.”

Responsive optimizes the Seismic sales team’s workflow even further through the Responsive-Salesforce integration. Seismic sellers use the integration to seamlessly initiate projects that require the proposal team’s support. After the proposal team accepts the intake and creates a project in Responsive, the sales team can still monitor the project’s progress from Salesforce. “They love to see progress on their Salesforce opportunity under the Responsive section — without leaving the tool they’re always working in,” Solnitzky said.

The Salesforce integration also automatically allows the proposal team to access valuable details about the opportunity from Salesforce, eliminating the extra step of forcing account executives to provide that information separately. The integration also allows the proposal team to cleanly map their efforts to revenue generated and elevate their standing as strategic business partners.

Giving time back to SMEs and proposal managers

When a Seismic proposal manager assigns questions to an SME, Responsive triggers an email notification to alert the SME with the details of their assignment (a notification can also be sent to Slack and Microsoft Teams through an integration). From there, the SME simply opens Responsive to see their questions in context with the larger proposal requirements. “As an RFI/RFP support user, the seamlessness of getting into the appropriate location and going through question by question with minimal clicks has been a game-changer for me spending my time effectively,” said Mike Wendahl, Senior Growth Initiatives Director at Seismic.

No longer working on assigned questions in a vacuum also helps motivate participation and maintain accountability. Solnitzky said, “SMEs find it really easy to use the tool so they can take the time out of their day, hop in there, mark it as answered, and know that their part is done. I think a lot of them look at some other questions as well, just out of curiosity, and get some more familiarity with our proposals.”

Responsive AI has also accelerated the process of creating a response through:

1. Enhanced Search Precision: Content can be filtered by any metadata points tracked, including system-defined fields (e.g., tags, collections, star rating, content score, usage information, created/updated/review dates, review status, ownership, project name, section name) and Seismic-defined fields, like product area. This allows users to quickly narrow down search results to the most relevant content.
2. Customizable and Flexible Filtering: Users can apply multiple filters simultaneously and customize the filters to include or exclude specific criteria. This flexibility ensures that Seismic can tailor searches to meet specific needs, making it easier to find high-quality content quickly.
3. Improved Content Organization and Management: The ability to filter and sort content by various metadata points helps maintain an organized content library. This ensures that content is easily searchable, discoverable, and sorted for immediate usage, enhancing overall content management efficiency. “Responsive’s AI tagging recommendations are usually spot on,” Solnitzky said. “Many times the tags we need are already suggested, which eliminates our content manager from having to search for them.”

When the Seismic proposal team has to respond through online portals, they rely on Responsive LookUp to access all response content without leaving the portal. LookUp makes all Seismic-Responsive content and Responsive AI-recommended results available directly from the applications the team is using, saving time and keeping proposal managers in their workflow.

Amplifying Strategic Response Management with the Seismic-Responsive integration

Seismic selected the Responsive Platform to increase collaboration and because of the established seamless Seismic-Responsive integration.

The Seismic-Responsive integration amplifies AI-powered Strategic Response Management. It makes composing a comprehensive proposal with all supporting documentation seamless, from project initiation in Salesforce to adding the final response to a Seismic WorkSpace, where it can then be delivered to the customer’s personalized Seismic Digital Sales Room.

With extra time to focus on proposal quality and the pursuit of more opportunities, Seismic’s sales and proposal teams can accelerate revenue growth.