Hi folks, Daniel Meyers, Developer Relations here at Snowflake.
And on today's episode of "Powered by," I'm talking with Ali Sadat,
Senior Vice President of Product at Seismic.
Seismic is a cloud-based sales enablement platform powered by Snowflake.
Ali, how are you today?
Great. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. So, you know, one of the first parts of this is I want to learn more about
your background and Seismic's.
How and why does Seismic exist
and how has it been growing over the last several years?
So I've been actually at Seismic for about 5 months.
I head up platform and solutions for Seismic.
And just a little bit about my background: I came in through engineering, went into products,
did a couple of stints in technical sales and the other side of the house,
and then back in product.
Now, Seismic was founded roughly about 10 years ago, and right now
we're the number one sales enablement platform, I think bar none.
We're, I think, at least two-and-a-half times larger than our closest competitor.
We surpassed $200 million in ARR, just recently we announced that.
Over 2000 customers and 1,200 employees and growing super fast.
So Seismic actually has a very interesting story.
The founders came out of the content management and document automation kind of world,
but the on-premise world, and decided to build something in the cloud.
And one of the first capabilities or products that they
actually build was around content automation,
a product we called LiveDocs.
And the goal of that was to enable companies to be able to
generate documents off of templates really rapidly,
but be able to modify those documents based on data and parameters
that are actually being fed to it.
So imagine, like what salespeople do on a regular basis.
You have a pitch deck.
Everybody wants to personalize that pitch dark,
for example, put there customer's logo on it,
draw on a couple of use cases that pertain to that customer.
And that's something we can actually just do with a click of a button.
Once marketing kind of creates a pitch deck and all the use cases,
all sales has to do is point it to the opportunity record,
for example, in a CRM, and boom, we just generated
and saved them tons of time in doing that.
And the other aspect that marketing really likes is that
it remains consistent with all the branding.
Everything that marketing wants salespeople to do without any effort.
That's pretty powerful.
I mean, it really seems like that type of story
and that type of implementation really helps with the entire enablement lifecycle,
from the content creation to improvement later on to engagement.
Tell me a little bit about how that has evolved over time for Seismic.
Sure. So, as we kind of grew and looked beyond content automation,
we got a lot of pull from our customers,
to help them out with the entire lifecycle of enabling sales,
make sure that they acquire the skills ... you know, like when a salesperson joins a company in the beginning,
they know nothing about the company.
You need to enable them, give them all the tools, and ramp them up really fast.
One of the biggest impediments to sales and meeting your numbers is
not having your salespeople know what they're going to be selling.
So we help them with all those aspects in terms of
the content, the learning capabilities, upgrading or upleveling their skills.
And then what we also do is help customers engage their buyers.
So when you share a piece of content through Seismic with your buyers,
you actually have detailed and granular data
in terms of how they engaged with that content.
And that's really powerful for salespeople.
Now they actually know, first of all, if the buyer received their email.
But beyond that, which a lot of companies do,
did they open the document, which slides did they view,
how much time did they spend on every single slide?
And all that data, from our own salespeople using it, the users using it,
to the buyers using it, to how much time do you spend on every slide.
Every little detail is actually stored and then analyzed.
So then how do we actually improve it?
And that's gold for marketing.
They want to know how people are actually using content,
and what content actually drives the best outcomes.
Which customers end up buying, and what content was shared with them.
And then can they actually create a repeatable process,
and actually figure out how they need to improve it,
and then keep feeding that cycle again,
That is really awesome.
So it really seems like with that level of granular detail,
the possibilities of not just working with marketing,
but also gathering some of that information and bringing it back to product, for example,
to improve your customer's product based off of the information
that they're gathering from their customers looking at these decks and things like that.
Pretty awesome stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
That's key for us.
I mean, obviously, being in product, data is everything.
You want to know what your customers are doing.
And then, same thing ... the products that say marketing creates is their content, right?
So they want to see how that's being used.
So there's a multi-layer data gathering and analysis going on here.
So that's really cool. So Ali, let's see a demo of this.
So let me kind of walk you through this.
I've logged in as a salesperson, one of our primary users.
And typically, when I come into Seismic, I want to do several things.
I want to look to see, what's the latest content that marketing has created.
What's the latest news out there?
So I can actually scroll through this home page, I can see some featured content.
An app that's been created that I can actually share a sales pitch deck that I always use.
Some information about cloud computing ... looks interesting. I'm going to take a look at that.
And you can see all kinds of different decks I've actually used in the past.
My C-level sales deck. All good stuff. All tools that I use all the time.
I can also come down here to Lessonly, a new acquisition we actually made,
and this is where I can actually see what's out there for me to learn.
So a few minutes in the morning, or a couple hours in the morning,
or whenever I have a chance-- on weekends and such.
I can come out here and see what courses I can actually take
and what I've actually completed.
And in some cases, what's been assigned to me that I actually need to complete.
And this could be a salesperson that's new to the company
that's actually trying to learn this,
but also a salesperson that is actually experienced,
but product is always putting out new products.
Marketing is actually creating all new content and messaging.
And how do you actually keep up with that?
So I can do all this from here.
So I'm going to go back to the home page.
Now, I'm going to go prep myself for a meeting with one of my prospects,
and I'm really excited to have that conversation with.
I'm going to click on the sales pitch deck.
And one of the things you actually see is
instead of seeing the pitch deck itself, I see this form that says,
what opportunity you're actually chasing right now.
So I can actually say, well, let me pick the opportunites that I actually have.
And this data, by the way, is coming directly from from your CRM system.
So it's not something that has to be stored inside or created inside.
So it comes directly from my opportunities.
As I pick the opportunity, the account information, the industry,
all this information that was in the CRM comes in directly in here.
And I have a logo that I want to upload.
You know, most of the time sales goes out there and wants to personalize
the deck to the customer, adding their logo, all their information
as if it was 100 percent created for that customer.
Go through a series of questions.
In this case, I can pick some use cases.
Because of the industry, we automatically pick our clients and some of their use cases.
If there's anything else, I want, I can go through the selection process,
and then click on Generate.
As I start doing this, it actually starts creating that pitch deck,
and it's actually pulls in all the information from the various data sources
that we actually have and prepares this for me
to send to my customer.
You can actually see, already the pitch deck has been being created.
It's cleaned some of the previews and optimizing it.
And now it's actually done
Now when it opens up, now I have a pitch deck
that in this case was prepared for Edge Communications,
which was the account I was going after.
And it actually has all my information,
plus it actually pulled in my information and the date.
So in this case, I am Joe Demo.
As my demo use case, I'm the Joe salesperson, account executive.
And actually put in today's date.
So everything looks good. Perfect.
I'm ready to go.
From here, what I can actually do is
share this content either via links or via a digital sales room with my prospects.
After this is created and sent to my prospects,
the next thing I'm interested in is, do they open it?
Are they going to actually engage with it?
So I can actually go into all my engagements and see all the content I've actually shared
and who's looked at it.
So I can actually see a few things that I have actually created
Here's a previously created content that I had shared with Edge Communications.
It got 6 views. Not too bad.
I can actually click into the analytics
and pull in slide-level or page-level of detail of how much time they spent
with the content and how much time they spent on every single slide.
I see in this case, they didn't actually spend a whole lot of time on all the other slides.
So I probably need to ping my prospect and nudge them a little bit
to see if they have actually read the content,
make sure that they actually engage with it.
So this is really critical information because half the time
you said content to customers
and you wonder, did they actually read it?
Did they spend any time with it or not?
So this is really valuable data for salespeople.
So you mentioned, right, the different personas.
Between the customer of the prospect and the marketing department.
How does something like this work as a marketing department user.
So let me actually switch and log into the system as a marketing user.
So this is gold for marketing.
All the data that we collect on every engagement, on every deck that is actually shared
or a piece of content that marketing creates, is stored in Snowflake.
And we're actually able to analyze this.
So one of the things that marketing wants to know is,
what content is actually working, what's not working,
what have their own sellers engaged with,
and then what have they actually shared,
and how much engagement was there from the buyers,
and down to what slide?
The challenge is ... and you've been in the industry for a long time, one of the challenges is
that you put content out there and is anybody using it?
When was the last time that anybody used it?
And then how do I keep it fresh?
And one of the things that sales always wants to know is that
they're always using the latest and greatest thing.
So we provide all that content and all that data back into Analytics
through different ways, back into marketing.
So I can actually optimize the platform.
So the whole process is a cycle of enabling salespeople
engage with the buyers, collect all the data to improve the content,
the process and the skills continuously.
So now I've logged in as as a marketing user.
I'm going to go into the Insights area and look at Analytics.
Now, when I pull up the dashboard over here, I'm going to look ... I can look at things based on roles.
So we have the user CMO wants to see perhaps a CRO, Sales Enablement, Sales Manager, and actually also the Content Owner.
So different perspectives of the data.
So I can actually look at things like content performance.
As I click on it,
the dashboard fills up, and you can actually see
all the performance, how much activity we've had, how many views we've actually had--
usage across everything and down to every deck and every detail.
How many times it's been sent, many times it's been opened,
the percentage open rate, the number of hours that people engaged with it.
All that is available ... and this is, again, this is a goldmine for marketing people.
They want to know what's been happening with their content.
That is really powerful.
So. you mentioned that this is built on Snowflake and powered by Snowflake.
What are some of the features of Snowflake that are critical to your platform?
So one of the key features of Snowflake that we use is the Data Share, and specifically, the secure Data Share.
So a lot of times our customers want access to all this data.
Now... sure we can actually have all kinds of APIs and they can hit our APIs all day long.
But what we've actually chosen to do is give them access to their own data so they can actually log in,
and based on their users, we can actually filter down to what content
they need to see based on their tenant.
And they can extract all that data, connect their own BI tools directly to Snowflake
and create their own dashboards and analytics,
run any kind of ML, models, anything like that
that they want on top of it directly from Snowflake.
That's been huge for us.
We know our customers are actually using it.
Company comes to mind ...down in San Diego in biotech ...
... a large company called Illumina.
And they literally ... from what we can assess from the usage,
are logging in every single day to use the data.
So that to me is the key metric, to say, "OK, it's clearly valuable t hat they're using it all the time."
Yeah, that's amazing ... giving your customers the ability to directly query,
access their own data, right, is something that provides them a lot of value.
So that's pretty awesome to see.
So, as you're building and expanding the capabilities of Seismic,
what is on the roadmap over the next 6 to 12 months?
Well, I think obviously more data--tons and tons and tons of data.
One of the initiatives we have, for every area of the product,
every single thing that actually happens, that we're capturing all that data.
So that's obviously always on the roadmap.
And the other one we're actually exploring right now is
taking advantage of the Data Marketplace. Now we can bring all this data into Seismic,
but that's going to be a lot of work.
If there is a way to leverage--on the Data Marketplace, there is both free and
and paid data that we can actually leverage..
And that'll be great because we have connectors directly into that live dock content automation
that I showed you.
That can actually connect to Snowflake directly.
So you can drive and customize the data via charts and graphs you want to create on the fly,
or any other piece of information you want to pull.
You can do that directly based on data that's in Snowflake, data in the Marketplace,
or on the data that we actually offer.
So leveraging that, I think it's something interesting.
So we're really excited to see and explore what we can actually do on that side.
Yeah, that's really cool.
I know leveraging the Snowflake Data Marketplace is
something that can really expand the insights that you can bring--
with joining the data that you're ... creating yourself through your platform
and then joining that with other data that you can get on the Snowflake Data Marketplace.
That's awesome.
Exactly.
So
as you were building this application from the ground up,
what was the criteria, and how did you actually land, on using Snowflake?
I know you mentioned some of the key features of Snowflake that you use.
But how did you actually land on using Snowflake as a core part of your tech stack?
Yeah, we looked at a number of different options.
Obviously, you look at a lot of cloud vendors today,
everybody has something about database or data warehouse-type capability.
We looked at ... the capabilities across those
and how this aligns with what we want to do, and where we want to go.
So one, I think Snowflake solely being focused on the space,
not doing a million other things and then data being one piece of it.
So I think that was important.
Product functionality, performance--
the Data Share, actually, was a critical factor for us in terms of how Snowflake does that.
The other aspect was some of the key features and things like ODBC and leveraging SQL.
These are tools and capabilities that everybody has,
and it's built into almost every product.
You can go to any Microsoft product and connect to generate other ODBC data sources.
So that was huge for us.
Because ... we need to make it easy for our customers to leverage that data.
So those were some of the key features that we kind of looked at
and ultimately making a decision to run on Snowflake.
That's awesome.
And so, for our viewers here watching us now,
if they want to learn more about Seismic, where should they go?
Great.
So seismic.com, as my T-shirt kind of shows.
You can go in there and check us out.
There's ways to contact us on the website,
and I encourage you to do that.
Awesome. And for everybody else watching,
if you're looking to build your next application or business on Snowflake,
check out developers.snowflake com.
Thanks.