Name: Seismic + Highspot: What does it mean for the future of revenue enablement?
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T17:16:11.470Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 4 s
Description: Seismic + Highspot: What does it mean for the future of revenue enablement?

Transcript for "Seismic + Highspot: What does it mean for the future of revenue enablement?": Hey. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. We're just going to give everyone a minute or two to find their way into today's broadcast. So if you just wanna stand by, we'll probably get going at two minutes past the hour. Just wanna let everybody know we're giving the session a minute or two to get started so everyone has an opportunity to get into the session. If you want, yeah, we'll be getting going in just a minute or so. If you all wanna drop in the chat, let us know where you're tuning in from. We'd love to see who we have in this in this webinar today. Oh, nice Colorado. What's the weather like there? Is it warm? Warm and sunny. Beautiful. I think we're supposed to get some sun. I'm in I'm in New Jersey, and I hear today's supposed to go up to 70. So I'm really looking forward to that. Netherlands. Awesome. Alright. I think we're about ready to get started, Lisa. What do you think? I'm ready to go. Alright. Awesome. Well, hey. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us in this conversation about the Seismic and Highspot merger. What does it mean for revenue enablement? We're gonna be going over today what the merger means for the revenue enablement space. Obviously, two large companies like this making a decision to join forces has a lot of implications. We wanna dive into not just what those implications are, but like why is this happening and what does it tell us about the shape of the market and how is it evolving over time. Today, I am joined by Lisa from Justworks. Lisa, why don't you introduce yourself to the audience? Thanks, Ian. Hi, everyone. My name is Lisa Chukarico. I'm a manager of go to market readiness at Justworks, so really deep in the enablement space. To you know, a little bit about Justworks and who we are, what we do. Justworks is a tech board company that supports small and medium businesses with hiring and onboarding employees, paying them, giving them access to benefits, even paying employees internationally. So we really focus on that small medium business, but super complex topics. So having a strong enablement platform is critical to our success. It's awesome. Thanks, Lisa. And I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at SPECT. We're also in the revenue enablement space, which is why we have a fair amount to think about when it comes to a merger like this or any changes in the direction of the market. Now Lisa, at Jesperks, you're not just a spec of customer. You've had some experience with some of these other platforms and migrated over. We'll probably get more into this, but you wanna give us just, a little flavor for what that experience was like? Yeah. We were using Highspot for three years prior to making the switch to Specket. And, I mean, one thing I will say, was a really easy transition to Specket, but we just kind of started to reevaluate what, you know, the tool stack that we had for our employees and also the needs of our employees. Right? You know, we were looking at we the, you know, Highspot and the tool that we're using and saying, does this actually serve the purpose of what, you know, what what we're looking for? Does it meet the way we need to get information to our teams and matching the velocity that our product is expanding and kind of made us think we might wanna see what else is out there and find a solution that actually does match what we're looking for. Yeah. I I think that's that's a a theme that we're gonna see come up again and again is the actual, like, foundations of the industry are starting to shift. And so the merger that we're seeing, and not just this merger, a number of changes in the market, are really a symptom of the changing, you know, structure of of what we see out there for revenue enablement and other sort of rev ops tool stacks. And, really, what we're seeing is a pattern of legacy solutions doing consolidation. So over the last couple of years, we've seen, for example, MediaFly and Appium, the beginning acquired. We saw Clari and SalesLoft joining together to create sort of a a unified revenue AI and and and data layer. Last year also, a private equity firm brought Big Tin Can and Showpad together and merged them. And of course, that culminated with Seismic and Highspot this year announcing their intent to merger. This is announced back in February. They're going through this sort of regulatory process right now, but obviously signal the continuing trend of consolidation of major vendors in the space. Yeah. I found this one so shocking. You know, I think anybody in enablement has heard of Highspot and Seismic. Right? That's there's no question, really. But then hearing that they were merging was, like, definitely a shock to me. And if you think they're such they were such leaders in the game, like, why do they have to now merge? Right? Why can't they thrive on their own? So those are the questions I started having as I saw that. Yeah. Absolutely. And there is a question, like, why come together? Why join forces? And I think we might be able to to ascertain some idea of this. And what we see basically is when these organizations start to come together is a very similar language set that you hear about, like, things like both platforms will continue to be supported. So you see this with, you know, Clarion SalesLoft, you know, talking about how they they haven't settled on a name, but they want to create this sort of, like, unified thing. But there's a risk of bifurcation. Forrester cited this when they were talking about it. BigTeam and Can and Showpad were talking about how they were committed to supporting customers during their current journey, but it doesn't mean that necessarily they've made the hard decisions that come into how do we actually, like, rationalize this tech stack with a lot of overlap. And I think that's happening again when we look at Seismic and Highspot, where both platforms and the press release were talking about both being supported moving forward, including after the transaction is complete. But I think there's some open questions of what does that really mean when there's, like, so much overlap in the technology stacks. They both have CMS and LMS capabilities and analytics capabilities. And so I think that we are expecting some amount of rationalizing across any of these acquisitions when we have product overlap. It will be for us to determine how that really plays out in the market over time. And so next, we kind of ask what's driving the merger. And, you know, basically, I would say that there's a couple of major reasons organizations come together in the technology space. One of them is because they have some technology they want to acquire. So for example, Seismic acquired Lessonly a few years ago and brought them into their tech stack. But sometimes it's really about competitive advantage and financial modeling and so on. And both Seismic and Highspot, obviously, really great competitors in this space, really enjoy going up against them. In many ways, they help define what revenue enablement means today and have brought a tremendous amount of value throughout their history to the entire space. And when we look at, like, hey. What's been happening? Where where is their success curve been? You can see that they've been able to raise a significant amount of money because they've had the growth rate, and they've had the interesting technology. Seismic now around since since 2010 has overall raised over $440,000,000 during that that tenure. And just a few years ago, they brought, Premier in as their private equity company. They did recently take on some convertible debt, meaning, like, this isn't, real debt. It's sort of like a line of credit maybe is a better way to think about it, to give them the flexibility to take actions in the market. And a former CEO from, no, a new CEO has come in, from Oracle, Rob Tarkov, just before, the merger announcement. Highspot, likewise, has seen a lot of success. Founded around the same time, 2011, They've raised over $650,000,000 They did a little restructuring a couple of years ago, and we've heard that they've raised a little bit more money coming into 2025. So both companies driving significant value in the market, you know, growing substantially, raising a lot of capital. And the the reason we bring this up is what can happen to organizations that have such, you know, significant valuations, they can reach points where competing the way they always have and going head to head is limiting their ability to grow and are now looking at, hey. How do we bring the customer bases together as opposed to bringing the technology stacks together? And we think, you know, my recommendation, my idea here, this is, like, an analysis that I would provide to you, is that ultimately organizations that come together, whether it's Seismic or Highspot or anyone else, want to find a way to rationalize their technology stack so they're having the most efficient use of their capital as they deploy value for their customers. And so we should expect after the merger that Seismic and Highspot are going to have to do some thinking about how do they want to construct a new technology stack and a new product suite that is going to make sense for their customers after the merger. Yeah. And, you know, Ian, as you were saying, like, they founded both around the same time, and they were kind of like leaders in the game. Right? They were very innovative at the time when they when they founded and and launched this enablement platform with the ability to share resources with prospects and customers and have buyer analytics and all of that. Like, it was innovative at that time, but they kind of, like, grow, and then other people came into the game and started to think differently about how to approach enablement. And they didn't make that chain that shift, I think, as quickly as maybe they should have. Maybe got a little comfortable in where they were at and how they were growing, and it kind of now it came to a head where, like, they have to really rethink the approach of the platforms. And like you said, maybe it's easier to come together, bring that customer group together rather than spending time and money on individually updating their platforms. Mhmm. Yeah. And there's I think we're gonna talk a little bit about the challenge of, like, building these stacks over time with the rapid pace of technological change we're currently going through, not just in our industry, across every technology industry. And so as they do this rationalization, you know, this is what it might look like. You know, this is, you know, something a trend that you might see in many types of acquisitions like this over time, which is in the initial, you know, post merger phase, figuring out the organizational restructuring. You know, how do we communicate with our customers to tell them that gonna be a continuation of service and quality? How do we get the CSM and support teams reorganized to support the broader customer base? How do we get accounts owned and, like, think about territory assignments and alignment? And, you know, in theory, start going through that process of figuring out that technology platform decision making. There's a lot to integrate here, you know, from a you know, if Seismic we think about Seismic acquiring from Highspot, you know, Seismic is keeping the name, is keeping the CEO, keeping the private equity firm. You know, Highspot's got, like, a 100 customers that have to get digested. That's a big merger that has to come together, and there's a lot to go through the organizational, like, rationalization or alignment. And then we would see, like, in the middle term, you know, months six to twelve, figuring out those integration priorities, engineering bandwidth, how are we going to, like, deploy engineering in order to integrate the story, road map items. You get this competition between, like, hey. Are we building the road map? Are we building the integration? And if we have technologies that are not the go forward solution, what happens to those engineering resources? One platform, would be start seeing more investment. And pricing conversations can continue to shift. We'll talk a little bit later for a moment about what this might mean from a negotiation. perspective. I think it's safe to say finally, sorry. I'm sorry to cut you off there. But I was gonna say, oh, like, as I'm thinking about it and I'm hearing you say this, like, safe to say it's not like something is gonna happen overnight. And, like, I imagine myself as admin on one of these, you know, using one of these tools, like, as the those companies are going through the shift, then also the shift that impacts my team as well, which is, like, something that would be definitely a challenge. Yeah. For sure. It would be. And then in the year after, we probably start seeing more of those structural decisions land where we start coming clean and clear about migration, feature rationalization, trying to get back into innovation in a way for merger. And, you you know, you can using the leverage of now being this much larger organization, a much larger customer base, and not necessarily having that competitor that was always in the deals with you, you know, pushing you on price and service. So that's, like, maybe what we can expect over the next twelve to twenty four months. What do acquisitions like this normally look like, and how do they play out? And what does this mean for your team? Well, there's a few things to consider. One, you try to figure out which platform survives. As I mentioned, you know, the combined company is gonna be called Seismic. It's keeping the Seismic CEO. It's keeping the Seismic private equity firm. I think that's sending us certain signals in the market, about the the more likely play. But this is a decision that they will have to make over time as they bring the organizations and the technology stack together. If you are a customer of one of these platforms, you should be trying to seek as much clarity as you can on long term support for your platform that you're investing in and have a a question, like, openly question where the stability of implementation integrations in Roadmap is gonna land. Integration lag can be real. It can take a long time to bring these solutions together and fully integrate them. Lessonly took a while for Seismic to bring in and, like, fully integrate into their tech stack before. You should expect that just anytime there's large technology stacks coming together. There's a difficult process to bring them together, not endemic or specific to these companies. It's just the way it works. And so think about what that process of alignment is gonna do to, your other business requirements you have for that company. And one of those is road map freeze. We can expect engineering shifts from building integrations and a new innovation to slow down. We can expect, you know, the the the new capabilities being delivered to potentially be impacted. Gartner, you can go to Gartner's website and just, like, search for, you know, seismic high spot merger, and there's, like, a very little note that's publicly available that sort of, like, warns everyone about expecting slower innovation and, you know, being careful about long term commitments during this transition until you have clarity. And then pricing and leverage. Obviously, seismic in a high spot went head to head in many, many deals, and that would have pressure on, like, pricing, service levels, etcetera, that the customer could use. You can expect that to start changing the dynamic when you're working with the joint co because that head to head competitor is not necessarily going to be there. Yeah. It's a lot of things to consider. And I think what I find really interesting or what's, like, top of mind to me is, like, the integration and the roadmap freeze. Because as I've seen with these platforms, again, like I said, they were super innovative, but they are kind of really lacking some of the new ways of technology, the new ways people are learning that that just in time or like that AI, features that help to maybe update content, create content, organize content, share content, all of that good stuff, which is what would seems to be, like, lacking from the platforms currently and where they need to, like, really step up step up. And now they're gonna be coming together. And are they going to make those industry changes to the adjustment to their platform? Maybe. But, like, it's something you're gonna see in the next couple months, maybe not. Right? And that's when you wanna see those things. That's when to be stay competitive and to to really meet, you know, the company that they support. That's something I think that they really need to focus on. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, if if there's any time that the pace of innovation is high, it's like right now with AI. adoption and AI driving, you know, so much change, in the market. So, yeah, it'll be it'll be a tough time to to go through this process, but something that they will inevitably have to do because they're bringing together these two technologies. So, there's some questions that you can be asking if you are either already a customer of one of these companies. If you're thinking about being a customer of one of these companies, the questions like, hey. You know, what architecture is going to be the foundation for the combined company? Like, what's really the go forward platform here? What happens to existing road map commitments? Who is going to own them? Like, is there gonna be somebody on the hook for promises or commitments made before the acquisition? What does the combined product look like for reps and their daily workflow? Can you see what this new thing is gonna look like? Or is it just sort of like, well, what you have now, but maybe you get supported? How will your customer support relationships change? How will that adapt? Should you expect the same service levels you've had in the past? And what are the contractual protections if integrations, road maps, or other things impact your business ultimately? These are some really good questions to ask. I I will point out that everybody who's, attending today is going to get what we call a a digital sales room, a deal room that's going to have links to various things. And one of those assets is this asset here on the left, questions to ask before you decide anything, 21 questions to just consider before you make any further commitments related to this merger that, you know, will help you go through the decision making process. Yeah. And as I've seen with any type of merger or even my experience with vendors that we use that merge, right, they're going to obviously want to give you the trust and confidence in them that the service models won't change or the product experience, you know, will only improve, and it won't impact your day to day function. So I just would be encourage you all to ask any follow-up questions that are really important and relevant to your business, to make sure that you are getting the answers that you need so that you can make the best informed decision of, like, what is the right step for you and your company, whether it is still moving forward with one of these products, renewing or not, or looking into something else. You know, go in there, have this have this list of questions, other ones that are pertaining to your company, and also compare, you know, the different vendors that you speak to on these same questions to see how they respond and make sure that, like, you're finding the solution that that does really meet your needs. Yeah. Absolutely. Great point, Lisa. Thank you. So where are you in this process? And so if you're attending this webinar, you obviously have interest in this space. You may be a customer or you may be evaluating one of these vendors. And depending where you are, I'd recommend a couple of different ways to think about it. So if you're approaching a renewal, you have a lot of leverage right now. Obviously, any vendors that are merging or going through an acquisition want to minimize the risk of their customers being disrupted and then leaving them. So there's gonna be a lot of pressure, a lot of incentives to try to get you to commit to multiyear commitments. And this is just sort of like, hey. Your moment to make sure that you're protecting yourself. We recommend not just us, but in that Gartner article I mentioned earlier, hey. Prefer single year commits, single year renewals during this period so you have clarity about the go forward technology. It's a good way to defend yourself. It's also a really great time to identify alternatives that may have short migration windows that can help you manage this transition more easily. You may have thought that, hey. We were just going right ahead, and we're going to be renewing with other seismic or high spot, but there may be a way for you to migrate off if you feel like this disruption is unlikely to be sustainable for your business. Yeah. I was turning on approaching renewals really quickly because I think that was something I actually had encountered. And we only had, I think, two months to make a change and make a decision. So it is possible. You know, obviously, it requires you to move quick, but, you know, when we were in a situation and we had to say, like, is this the right decision for us to stay? I mean, this was even pre merger, but it was it the right decision for us to stay. What's the risks of us staying? What's the risks of us leaving and and transitioning off? And, like, you know, it is possible. And at at the end goal is always, like, making the right decision for you and your company and your employees that you're supporting. So just wanted to add that little little tidbit. Yeah. That's great. No. It's it's absolutely true. There are solutions today, including Specket. Obviously, we feel we can help companies get migrated off really quickly. Ourselves and others may also be able to offer BIOS to make the transition more easy. So make sure you're evaluating your options. It's a great time to see what you can get from the market today. If you're mid contract, you have a year or two to go, you know, you have time. Use it. Evaluate what your options are. What does your data look like? Can you move it out if you need to? Understand their platform migrations and what they're doing. It can be useful to start those parallel evaluations. If there's a period of uncertainty ahead of you but you're under contractual obligation, it can be a good time to start getting a feel for what's available in the market even if you made commitments years ago. And if you're evaluating right now, just be aware that market conditions have changed. We're gonna be talking in a moment about the nature of those changes in the market, and it's a good time to just evaluate what does state of the art look like when it comes to revenue enablement. It is different than what the answer would have been even five years ago. There's been a lot of transition with new technologies and new ways of servicing the rep and making them successful than were available for us just a short time ago. Alright. So that's all, like, the nitty gritty. What's going on with the merger? What's up with that? What's driving it? And what should you do doing to think about it? And now we wanna shift a little bit and talk about what's driving this market's transformation. All of these consolidations are kind of happening for a reason. Lisa, you kind of talked about it a little bit when you were saying like, hey, great innovation, new architectures driving lots of value into the market back in 2010, 2011, and actually for a very long time after that, but we're seeing a number of shifts. I'd like to go through, you know, to start the conversation with, like, five key shifts. And one of them is we're just seeing massively accelerated product velocity driving continuous change. The pace at which product engineering teams are now moving is driving a huge amount of transformation in go to market teams and how they have to react. We're gonna dive into this a little bit more. The the second one is all tooling pretty much has moved into the browser. Like, the the the Chrome browser has won it. That's where everything's happening. You're gonna be in your web page. You're gonna be going to these different applications. What that means is there is now a unified interface that everything is happening on. And so if you need to drive value, you're no longer trapped in your own silo or portal or desktop application. You can be there in the browser on the web page with people that are using it. Number three, even though we've had all this innovation, we've built all these technologies out, we're seeing that 65% of sales content consistently goes unused. And what we repeatedly hear in the market is legacy enablement faces real critical utilization barriers, meaning the reps that are supposed to gain the benefit from these tools are struggling to adopt them or the enablement team are struggling to get them to adopt them. And you see behaviors like they just go into Slack and ask everybody for what they need instead of actually using the tools the way they're designed. It's so funny. It's like that we. are we always we still are moving our teams off of trying to lean into Slack. It becomes, like, the easy way. Right? And I think that's the thing. Everybody's looking for the easiest solution, like, the e the path of least resistance, and Slack feels like that. Right? But it doesn't have to be. It shouldn't be the solution. Right? The tool should be the solution. And I think that, like, how can we take the friction out of, like, our reps day to day and give them the information and the resources they need in a better way and encourage them to utilize that? Yeah. Absolutely. And that's another thing that's changed. Right? This utilization, the way that utilizes things is really transforming because AI is activating new solution modalities. We call this, like, just in time enablement. At at SpecEd, it's the ability for us to be in the moment with the rep and have the AI being proactive. This is a new modality that just wasn't possible before. And then finally, content requirements are skyrocketing. The amount of content transformation updates and edits that is required for enablement teams today is incredible. And you need tooling and infrastructure that helps you not only keep pace, but have it governed and make sure that that remains trusted, accurate, up to date content. And so these five transformations, we think, are really dramatically changing the way that every technology industry works, but especially revenue enablement. And that's causing the shift in behavior that we're seeing from companies like Seismic and Highspot, Big Team ten and Showpad, legacy architectures that are really struggling. Lisa, you had you had mentioned you had started to face some of these challenges as well, and that led to a migration away from a legacy platform. Maybe you can give a little bit more of this. So we're we're gonna talk about, like, how did these legacy platforms get built up? How do we end up in the spot? What's the challenges today? But it sounds like you are going through these challenges live at Justworks trying to service your your reps. Yeah. We definitely experienced these challenges, and and I wasn't part of the team that initially implemented it in our in our tech stack about three years ago. But I started to get involved and signed a QBR, and they were sharing about our lack of usage. And I was like, that's not great. Right? Our team we all there's all this amazing content that the teams need to be able to share externally with our our customers, and the fact they weren't using it was like a red flag. So I started digging a little bit deeper, got to know the platform better, you know, realizing, like, it's it's a destination they have to go to. Like, they have to go to HideSpot to get the content they needed. So, like, I'm like, that that that extra click, we all know one click can make all the difference. I'm like, that's a challenge. And on top of that, it was, like, all that we really primarily, what we had in there was, like, just externally facing content. So it was more like a a document, like, say, a a platform for us, like a document sharing platform for those that did use it. So I started to see what else was out there because I'm like, this is we still have reps, you know, not being able to not having a place to enterprise, not having a place to, like, even learn and and and, like, also have content that helps them to do their job better and sort of see what else was out there. And, you know, I also one thing I did look into as I, you know, was in the process of evaluating a lot of tools, you know, seeing the spec, seeing the way it was at Just In Time, how it lived on the side of the websites our reps commonly use, like, really stood out to me. And I went back to Highspot, and I said, I I see that other companies are doing this. Do you have a feature that's similar? And they had suggested, oh, well, we can, you know, we can add this tile in Salesforce. Then And I was like, okay. We don't need anything else in Salesforce. Like, this still is not gonna really resolve the problems that we have. So, you know, I did, like, really try to see, you know, could we make better use of the tool we already have? But I came to the conclusion that it just it just wasn't meeting us where we were at. And the way that, you know, Justworks is growing, you know, Ian also mentioned that, like, even internal teams at companies are moving faster. You know, our product team in the past would take them, you know, sometimes weeks to build certain product updates and launches. And we had a launch that happened in, like, three weeks, which is, like, you know, unheard of for them. Right? So they use they're also using AI to code and and do things like that. And so they're pushing products out faster. We then ship out the enablement resources to our team faster, and we needed something that was just, like, you know, reduce any possible friction in the process. Yeah. That's great. I I think this is something people have struggled with for a long time is, like, tools built to solve the problem are kind of, like, now getting in the way of solving the real problem. And, you know, one of the the reasons for that is if we think about how these legacy enablement platforms developed is that there are sort of layers that got stacked on top of each other. You know? Portal based foundations. Hey. We're gonna create a content management system. We're gonna put all your sales content in it. They're just gonna be like, well, which of that is being used? They're gonna layer some analytics on it. Then we're gonna be like, oh, okay. We wanna do something like learning and education, so we're gonna layer learning and training. And then we're gonna layer workflow integration so we can, you know, try to be supporting people who are doing things. And now most recently, we're airing on AI. How do we put AI in front of these layers to try to drive a communication gap? And but all of these are in this, like, portal based foundation. And so, you know, at least you're talking about, I think, a lot of these legacy vendors have these, like, Salesforce integrations where it's a tab in Salesforce. But it's a tab in Salesforce, and it's still just, like, taking you to the portal. And all of this stuff is happening somewhere else. The learning is happening somewhere else. The coaching is happening somewhere else. And I think that if we have one sort of insight at at SpecEd when we were founded by Melanie Filet, you know, it was this idea that learning education enablement happen best where people execute. But what's happening, and I think that you have a really great perspective on this, is that the the reps are just, like, suffocating in change today. This is like the the velocity is so different. It's changing to, like, a a change in state and how things can even work. Yeah. Absolutely. And it kind of bounce off that point I mentioned before about, like, how our product teams are are building faster. So they're using AI powered tools. They're building faster because we also have to meet the velocity and growth of our competitors. Right? Our competitors are doing the exact same thing. Like, we're all in this race to show up the best for the customers and be be that, like, solution that people turn to. And because of that, you know, reps have to they have to learn more faster. They and and think about it. Right? Sometimes, you know, you might in a traditional past traditional way of enablement, my initial approach was always like, take this elearning course for knowledge, then join this workshop for that behavior change, then let's do a certification. I would take them off the floors for, you know, maybe two to three hours, you know, in in a month for enablement where we don't have the time to do that. And with so many launches, it's just nearly impossible. So as a result, like, we had to make the the switch of, like, how can people get the information that they need, like, right audience at the right time, grabbing the right message that they need to be successful and to support, you know, the prospects and customers they're speaking with because of the velocity of change under the current, like, landscape and the enablement world and and the industry in general. Yeah. And and this transformation is just gonna get worse. Right? And it's a feedback cycle because we have AI making product and engineering teams twice as fast, five times as fast, 10 times as fast. Like, who knows where that's gonna stop? Go to market teams were already not able to keep up, and now they're just, like, just ramping up faster. But that means your competition's doing the same thing. And now the competition is releasing their new products and capabilities at an incredible pace. And so what's the reaction that most organizations have? We need more stuff. Let's deploy new technology. Let's deploy more AI. Let's deploy more stuff. And then, of course, you know, enablement teams, marketing teams, everybody is like, well, we need a new message, a new play, whatever. This cycle is just, like, spinning up like a like a like a hurricane. It's just getting in faster and faster. Reps in the middle. And so we have all of this AI, all of this technology, all of these new capabilities, and yet the results are not moving. In the last three years, despite all the ability to deliver more products faster to market, win rates have only gone from 28% to 30%. Reps are only hitting quota 46% of the time, and the average annual growth rate is 16%. We're basically seeing stagnant process on the core measures that organizations really care about even though we seem to be delivering more product, more technology, more assistance into the reps. And I think that's largely because we are approaching new problems with with old solutions. Oh, And so we have this question. Oh, I did. got it, Yeah. Lisa? Go for it. this one away because I think it's really important and something that, like, I feel really strongly about and and something that we had to make the adjustment at Justworks about as well. You know, like, in one place, the legacy enablement, it's like, you file it away. They the resources just live there and reps have to go searching for it. Right? Searching for it when they a comp get a question that they have to answer versus, like, getting the information that they need wherever they need it all the time, always accessible, you know, like, right at the palm of their hands so they don't have to go searching for anything. You know, also just, like, again, path of hunting and searching, but also self servicing, looking for things versus, like, this proactive approach of them being pushed content that they need maybe at the right time, maybe at a certain process in the Salesforce during a certain stage, right, where they're getting that suggested material and information. And also, sometimes these flat files that exist, maybe there's lack of updating and governance, which is a huge problem. So a platform that has the knowledge base that has that has information and reminders on when to update resources and making sure that there's the right governance in place. And then, of course, you know, content that doesn't, like, grow with the company and the changes. Right? Static things. You know, we had elearning courses that for years, like, kind of stayed the same unless, like, there was some content adjustments. Whereas, you know, something that's a little bit more dynamic that can be updated and changed. And as the industry trainings or enablement styles and strategies change, you also are able to do that really quickly and efficiently. You know, we need to think about like I mentioned before, you know, it felt innovative when we were giving teams elearning corpus workshops and certifications until we realized that really wasn't what they needed. And also, it you can help them at one time, you know, maybe we just help them in January, but they're not even having a conversation with somebody who might benefit from that product until March. Right? They're not gonna recall all that information that we trained them on a couple months ago and took time out of them out on the floor just working and selling. So really, like, it has changed from the legacy legacy enablement strategy, and, like, these modern requirements are necessary for for teams. Now, Ian, if you want to add anything on to that. Yeah. Like, how alright. You. got me okay? Yeah. I mean, I froze up there for a second. So, yeah, I I think that the, these are exactly the things that are driving a lot of the decision making that comes to SPEC IT and how we're building. And if you go through these each of them, you can think about like, if you if you have a solution, if you're gonna build your own solution, if you're using maybe you wanna be using Glean or using, like, Microsoft Copilot and you wanna, like, build your own solution for your reps, it's totally valid. But these are the kinds of, like, challenges you need to think through about how to deploy. And I just wanna, like, take another swipe through these and talk about, like, why these are the most critical decisions you can be making about your rep performance infrastructure today. Everywhere and all the time, if you are not with the rep in the deal, the rep is going to be forced to scramble and try to recall. And being in the deal is the way that you make sure the content and material that you need is with them when they need it. Otherwise, you're relying on the rep to go find it. And that is the second item where you have to be proactive and in the flow of work. If you're not being proactive, you're relying on the rep to even know they're supposed to ask the question, to even know they're supposed to go look for the thing. So you need to make sure that when you get the signals about what their operation is, they're prepping a call, they're writing an email, they're evaluating a deal, that you're pushing the content proactively to them, the content, the enablement, the learning, whatever that is, in the moment so that it's gonna be connected to the job that needs to be done. Otherwise, again, you're relying on them to go find it themselves. They start spamming email. They start spamming Slack. You no longer are in control of the message that they're receiving. The third thing is semantic go to market knowledge. I think that one of the biggest challenges we've seen from portal based approaches is that content just consistently goes in. It becomes you said this, Lisa, just becomes another file repository, a bit of a pain of a file repository because you gotta you're supposed to get going and, like, tag everything and, like, file it away appropriately so it becomes useful. You really need is you need to be thinking, and this is where the power of AI is really transforming things. How do we use AI to construct a semantic structural understanding of the business? Like, what are your deal stages? What are your flags? What are your competition? What are your products? How do we construct that in a way that a human thinks about it so when that human, the rep, is going about their business, the information that's floating to them is gonna be current. It's gonna be accurate. It's gonna be trustworthy. And at least the next thing, which is content sometimes just goes into these repositories to tie. It just sits there, you know, taking up space, but also kind of polluting the the freshness and reality because you have old content that's out of date. And you need to be able to be generating dynamic content both for your internal audiences and your external audiences at a really elevated speed because you have to be able to move so fast. So I think thank you, Lisa, for your, like, perspective on these. This is, my perspective about, like, these are the things you need to solve if you're gonna be driving modern sales enablement. And, obviously, that's why at SPEC IT, we've built our platform around these ideas. We really get focused on rep acceleration. How do we take reps, help them ramp fast, win fast, and stay fast? And we think about it as three categories. Rep efficiency, how can they move faster if we just give them everything they need in their flow of work from tools, from assets, from automated coaching, from automated tooling? Second, we think about speed of closing. How can you help deals move faster by making sure the right content is delivered to the buyer and the entire buyer committee at the right time? Let me think about staying fast. How do you make sure your reps stay current with scalable go to market readiness throughout their life cycle with all of the change you're pushing? New products, new messages, new plays, new processes, new technologies. How do you get that to them as. seamlessly in a way, as not? overwhelming as well. Right? Because they have a lot of things that they're doing. Like, a rep is knowledge that they have to, like, stay up to date on everything, but there's also, you know, a sales process they have to follow, sales methodology they have to follow. They've gotta go through all these steps and, you know, we do help underwriting and and workers' comp and all these other really tactical things as well. So this shouldn't be we want something that takes away, like, anything that could make them feel, you know, bogged down with all of the work and all of the changes and something that really just helps them move faster, like you said, Ian, but not in a way that feels overwhelming. Yeah. Exactly that. It's there's so much. It's very easy to feel overwhelmed. We call it suffocating with change, and you've gotta make sure that you're delivering real value to them in real time. One more slide here before we we jump into a live share and then some questions. Just sort of like, hey. How do we think about the problem? Yeah. We wanna ramp fast, win fast, stay fast. We think this is really critical about unified deal context. How do you surface information about the calls, information about the deal, information about the opportunity in account to the rep? Again, everywhere anywhere they are, how do we surface that and make sure they've got the tooling they need? Go to market knowledge. This goes beyond content management. How do we make sure that you're really rooted in what the business is? Architectural coaching and actions. Take both of those things together. Deal context, go to market context, deliver the right thing to the rep. And finally, personalized buyer experiences. How do we make sure that we're communicating effectively, accurately with the right information to reps? What we wanna do now is, Lisa would love to show you how a little bit about how this comes together. And, again, this is, yes, a spec ed product demo, but, really, I think it's illuminating if you wanna understand, hey. Where are the things going? How should you be thinking about these connections of content, context, and rep acceleration if you are ever working with any vendor or you're thinking about building your own? After we do the demo, we're gonna take some questions. So if you do have questions, please start putting them into the q and a box in your interface for Goldcast here. We would love to take a look at them. Lisa is to share her screen for a few minutes, and then we'll take questions. So Lisa, Thank you, over. to you. Yeah. So I'm really thinking just to show you the platform. And I think it's important to see because one, as myself, I'm a a very visual learner. That's how I like to learn. But also, I think, you know, conceptually, you hear about this, like, information at the right time, you know, when they need it, and you're like, how does that actually work? You know, when I first even heard about SPEC IT as we were still, you know, kind of thinking about what we're gonna do with Highspot, you know, I heard about it. It has a sidekick. You can ask it questions, I just didn't really understand until I saw it. And I was like, oh, that's what we're looking for. So this is kind of like the back end. In here, I also call it, like, the brain of the platform. And you could really formulate this and and build this however you'd you want it to be. This is, like, more of a a demo environment, but with Justworks, like, real content just so you all can see it. And, again, you could you could make this whatever works best for you. But right here, have, like, these two main topics, and within the topic, there are subtopics. So it's a Justworks sales hub. It has, you know, an overview of who we are, a video. Now this is, like, internal just for reps to get that that that foundational information. We've got great sales training resources, maybe latest updates, quick links, and it's broken down a couple different ways, like what we sell, who we sell, how we sell. Within each of these subtopics, you can create subtopics. Right? So you can have a lot of different content. The great thing about Secate is that it is fully integrated for us with Confluence where we actually store all of our knowledge based resources as well as Google Drive, and you can also build and create your own content like something you're seeing here as well. And the best part too with Confluence and Google Drive, it does automatically update, which I really love. So any changes we make in Confluence goes right to, Secant. So you'll see, like, we're as an example, one of our partners is electric, so we highlight that, and we have some key, electric AI integration content. Now the web platform is awesome. It has a lot of resources. It's where you move and organize content, but the real power is in the little speck at Sidekick. Now you see it has this fun little Jeff's Works J, but it would be branding for whatever your company is. So it'll feel it won't feel like a separate resource for your teams because it'll have your own branding. So they will have access to the web app, but they don't need to go there because a lot of it lives right here in the Sidekick. So I could ask it a question as a wrap, like, is electric AI? Maybe I forgot someone's mentioned, oh, I saw this on your website. I'm like, oh, what is that integration again? Well, it's gonna pull all the information from the back end and gives you that key information I need to know. You know, it's a leading IT management platform, helps automated onboarding and offboarding, and it also gives resources. So it helps to validate for your rep that this is the correct information. This is where they got it from, and they can also go and click on that and access that information. Additionally, like, our some legacy platforms, you know, I know it's really great for resource sharing. So if I wanted to look specifically for an electric resource, I could type it in here. I'm this is, when I'm searching for something specific. I'm looking for a file. I know we have you know, I might be thinking, I know I have a couple one sheeters I can share, so then I get to see them. So we have electric solutions, pricing tier. You know, maybe my customer I'm speaking to is curious about the cost. Well, I might wanna share it with them externally. Now don't know how your reps or how your team currently shares shares content. Maybe you do have a legacy platform. Maybe you don't have any platform at all. And right now, they're, like, downloading things and saving it to their desktops, which could, of course, lead to content that might be out of date. But I know it's in here. It's up to date because it was put here two weeks ago. Right? So there's some confidence in that. But also, instead of just sharing a link externally, a downloaded resource to an email where it could get lost for an admin, it's really easy to create a deal room. So if I wanted to add it to a deal room, I could either, you know, search for a deal room I previously have, or I can create a brand new deal room. And it's connected to your CRM, so the deal room buyer analytics, whether they bring pipeline value or help to close ARR, you're able to see that based on the connection to Salesforce. Not gonna go through fully here, but you'll be able to, like, search and add the company here. It will give a company logo, and you do a nice color and everything, and you could choose how to be notified. And easily, you could just add that link to the deal room, and it could be something that you could continue to add as you continue to, you know, to speak with that prospect or customer and determine, you know, what they need and what could help them maybe close the deal. On top of that, I mean, I could go on and on, but there's now learning paths as well that can be created. You can do knowledge checks. So another great thing is that you're able to test your team's knowledge, use it as an enablement platform. And then we also, of course, have the awesome analytics as well. I do also wanna preface now. Obviously, this is a little bit demo so that we don't have any information in here. But my team has had access to SpeckIt for about three months now, and I think we have over, like, three or 4,000 Sidekick chats, over 7,000 views of content, which has been really awesome to see. But you're able to look at all the analytics and also see, you know, what questions are people asking. So it also helps to kinda figure out, like, what are those gaps that they have in content or things that they need to know. And, also, the last thing I will say, and, Ian, you can also cover anything else I might have missed, but you can personalize the content for Teams. So at Justworks, we have over 20 customer facing personas. We don't have all 20 in the packet just yet. We're we're getting there. But the information I have shared with my account executive team is a bit different from the account development team, from our customer success manager team, from our sales specialist team. Right? There's foundational content they all need, but our CSM team does not need the Salesforce selling stages. Our AEs need that. Right? So I'm able to move content around and give the people the right content that they need at the right time. Yeah. That's great, Lisa. And, obviously, this this scratched the surface of an entire platform that's meant to support sales reps, also sales leadership, customer success teams, marketing, product marketing, and so on. And so it's and, of course, our core audience enablement professionals who are trying to drive success with those those reps. And, obviously, we'd love to, you know, share more to anybody who's interested to learn about it. Also gonna share, in a minute, link to, the book that our founder wrote about just in time enablement in the future that, in part, actually predicted consolidation in our market. So it's a it's a great book that came out last year that that I think really talks a lot about how things are transforming. With that, I think we can move over to some questions. I've got two oh, no. Like, four, maybe six here kicking us off. So the first one is how do you see the evolving MCP server client trend impacting the future? Well, I think it's a really great question. So I think whether it's, like, MCP specifically as a technology, I think there's a lot of conversation in technical circles now. Is it MCP or APIs or a combination of both? But, basically, there's this idea that as we move increasingly to an agentic world and AI tooling being able to talk to other systems, that these systems have to be able to talk to each other. And we need to be able to share that. So, certainly, an important element for us is the ingress and egress of data. Like, how do we share our insights that we built up in our go to market knowledge base with other, platforms that need it, and how do we consume that information? So, for example, late last year, we released a fairly deep integration with Gong where we are able to pull call intelligence records directly into our interface and make sure that sellers always know what happened in the latest calls with the deal that they're working on. And that is, today, driven by API, but we certainly see a future where both sides have MCP capabilities that are able to more dynamically get the right information that they need. And where we think this ultimately goes is organizations that build out sort of, like, vertically integrated AI tooling that then have, like, structural understanding of the content. It's not just content. It's that you know, from from our perspective, for example, we work on is, like, do we understand what a competitor is? Do we understand who those competitors are? Do we understand how we compete against those competitors? So if you're a company that's using like, for example, you can have another solution that asks and interrogates that data for any use case you have. So I think what it ultimately means is better layers of interaction and more tools that are able to drive more value across the organization, but it can't be just sort of, like, a vacuum that just, like, sucks up all the data and you hope that it comes out. Yeah. It needs to have, really, looking structural insight. to that too. Was gonna say just because, you know, I think any other enablement leader on here can agree with me and and and align on the sentiment that it's almost challenging sometimes to measure enablement effectiveness because data is living in so many different places. You know, you've got the Salesforce data. We've got whatever enablement tool data that you're using. I don't know if you're using Zendesk data, Gong, all of it. It's like living in separate worlds. You're trying to take it and bring how do I bring this all together and be able to tell one cohesive story? Like, this enablement program was effective because it was spoken about this many times. It brought this much ARR in. You know, our our teams were supportive because they all did x y z enablement resource or learning tool, strategy, pathway, whatever it may be. So try like, the building this MCPs and getting these tools to speak even better together is something I really look forward to. But the Gong integration that is with Specket right now is is awesome. Like, it gives call details and and call details and action items, and I know there's a lot on the road map you all have with the Gong integration that I, for one, am, like, super excited about. So, you know, I I'm excited about how these tools continue to, like, speak to one another and and work together. It's. exciting world. AI is changing everything. And in this case, just AI is talking to each other is is gonna open up a a lot of value. This one's probably more for you, Lisa. What changed for your team operationally when enablement moves, like, out of a portal and into the the, workflow? it was definitely a behavior change, which I was a little surprised about because I'm like, it's right there. It lives on the side of your platform. But I think people are just so used to just, like they're, like, in this, like like, just focused in whatever that they're doing, and they didn't really realize at first the value it could bring. There were some you know, there's definitely the champions and those that are, like, ready to dive in. But, like, our more tenured reps who just are, like, no. I know how to do this. I don't need this. It definitely took additional, like, you know, enablement and refreshes. And it's a behavior change across the org. Right? Because typically, you know, we would say, oh, here's the update and go to confluence to find it. Whereas now, you know, all of us are saying in in department meetings when we're sharing updates, like, go go look for it in Beckett or ask Beckett's sidekick if you have any questions. Right? So it's also getting everybody else on board, not that nobody wants to and not that it's challenging at all to do so. It's just you just have to remind people. What I will say, it wasn't really I wouldn't say it was hard to get them out of a separate, like, web app platform like Highspot because they weren't really using it that much. So it wasn't like that that was a change. Honestly, I think they're like it was just like a new thing that they just didn't really, like, fully understand what value it could bring immediately. And also we did I will say we rolled it out December 15 originally, which was right before the holidays. So it was a crazy time. But, like, once January came, we went back somewhere like, okay. This is how you use it. This is the benefits it's gonna bring. And on top of that, we also, like, have been also, like, checking our metrics. Like I mentioned before, our team leaned heavily into the sales Slack channel to ask each other questions. Now they we've seen a trend that they're less sales Slack questions, more questions in Spacket, so we're seeing growth and change there. I've seen people ask questions in sales Slack and someone else saying you can find that in Spacket. Or if they ask in in sales Slack and I know it's in SpeckIt, I will screenshot the sidekick and be like, here, you could ask it. Just teaching people how to use it, you know, a little bit. But otherwise, I think, you know, people are, like, really seeing the value and and really excited about it, which is great. And, like, getting managers on board was really important. So, you know, like, with anything, there's there's a behavior change, behavior curve. Right? But I think it was definitely easier than if we were trying to adopt a platform. Definitely. Because I wasn't even gonna retry to readopt Highspot. Yeah. I'll look at we're not we're go we're just changing we're changing routes here. Yeah. Over a portal. Yeah. Absolutely. And I I think that the, you know, I I could say from a marketing side, before I I joined SPEC Ed, I've frequently faced this kind of challenge. The problem is that, you know, you create content assets information, and you try to get it to the sales reps. And you you broadcast it. You're like, I will send it to you in Slack. Send it to you in email. We'll do it at office hours. The challenge is for the rep, they are already. at capacity doing their job and managing whatever regular change, like new sales process or in a different methodology or new talk track or new deck. Like, all that's going on all the time. And so it feels like we we get up there in our bullhorn, and they're like, there's a new whatever, and. they can't hear it. It's like a brick wall. And that brick wall is just their jaw. Right? And it's such an operational gift to have. Like, we know if a subject comes up, that this thing is gonna like, here's the what you need to know, and it's like, it's gonna be there. And the chance that they are going to be able to, like, not only see it, use it, internalize it is so much higher because they're actually gonna be, like, in the moment doing the thing. And for us, it's it's been a big lift in our ability to to reach reps. Alright. I got what do we got? I think we got, like, a five minute warning here. We're, like, four and a half minutes maybe three and a half minutes left. So let's do a couple quick ones maybe. When when you're evaluating platforms, what separates tools that reps want to use, and maybe this is just within your last question, versus tools that they try to work around? Like, was that part of, like is that kind of what you saw? I think this person is saying, like, hey. Our how do you how do you even know if this is gonna be a tool that reps wanna use? My think maybe that's what they're, trying to ask. like, why would they not want to use it? Right? Like, they that was it. I was like, this is this is an perfect solution for all the problems they're having. This is the this this is the solution. Like, this is the only solution in my mind because because of the rate of change, because of, like, even, Ian, you mentioning, I'm just doing like, them having to adjust the transition of just, like, doing their job on a day to day. Like, my thing, and I keep saying, like, it takes out the guesswork for them. It gives them the tool that gives them the answers that they need when and where they need it. So I wasn't concerned that they were like, there's there's tool fatigue. Right? And and I will say, Justin, because we love tools. We love we love lots of tools. We're looking to consolidate. This is one of the tool that helps us to do that. So we we're not shy against using tools, but this one felt like something that they was gonna get a lot of benefit and value from. So I wasn't really, you know, I was never really concerned on whether or not they were gonna use it. I think, yeah, I just think with anything, it's a lot of just, like, refreshers, reminders, giving them support, giving them tools and tips and tricks. Like, I had a lot more time to learn how to use a Sidekick. And granted, I don't think it takes very long at all, but some people, you know, they need to see it and be walked through it to learn. Right? Some people can just get hands on themselves and just learn how to use something. So I never really had that concern. My biggest concern was we I, you know, I mentioned we had, like, two weeks to actually transition. It was less than that. It was, like, it was, like, six weeks, a month and a half. You know, we signed with expected October 31 on Halloween. I was on my way to a Sabrina Carpenter concert, and the and, you know, we closed the deal, and we had to get it to our reps for December 15 because of the transition. So that to me you know, we were able to do it. Like, we got we were able to build the platform and get it in a a place that was we were confident that they were gonna have what they needed, like, of the one the marketing one sheeters, all of the back end content. And, you we're still continuing to build and iterate on it and continuing to improve our reps' confidence in the platform as well. And I think that's a a real big thing. Confident that when they go there, they're gonna ask a question and they're gonna get an answer. And if they don't get answer an answer, they're confident that my team will make sure that answer is in there the next time they go to look for it. Alright. I have been informed by our team that in thirty seven seconds, this thing just turns off. So I went ahead. A couple of quick things. You're gonna get a deal room. It's gonna have this recording. It's gonna have assets. Number two, if you wanna read the book, specit.com/book. Request your free copy. We'd love to get it to you. Third, Gonna read a question verbatim because it's great. I'm not new to spec it. Love it. And the more people who use Sidekick, the faster they adopt using it. Great shout out. Thank you, Denny. The question here is, how realistic is that merging sales reps will be transparent? I think you just have to ask them and see what they'll say. They're and and and. judge it for yourself. Thank you very much. Thank you all. all your time for joining us.