Seismic, a company that helps sales and marketing departments create and manage their content, while ensuring they are always using the most current materials, landed $20M in Series B funding today.
The round was led by JMI Equity with Series A investor Sigma West also participating. The $20M was a hefty raise over their $4.5M A round from August, 2013 and brought the total raised to-date to $24.5M.
Seismic enables sales and marketing teams to build documents from existing content and data, but it doesn’t stop there. Their ‘LiveDoc’ concept ensures the content is always current because it’s actually live, so if the underlying data or any of the connected content changes, all of the related material in the document updates automatically.
In practice that means, for example, if you have a graph with performance over time, and that data changes, your graph changes too. When the company updates source pricing documents, all of the connected documents with pricing information change. If the marketing department updated the logo or product names since you created the content, the document would update to reflect those revisions.
Seismic has direct links into products like Salesforce.com CRM data and Microsoft SharePoint content so companies using those tools can link to data and content in those repositories. It could also link to an external data source like Zillow for house prices.
Seismic offers a native iPad version, Windows 8 and a browser-based web offering.
Company CEO, Doug Winter says they also have analytics and metrics built into the product. This information lets sales and marketing see just what documents people have looked at down to the page level, including how long they spent on each page. If a salesperson sees a potential customer has spent a lot of time on the document, they could use this data like a sales funnel, pointing to the folks who showed the most interest in the company sales materials and prioritizing call-backs based on time spent.
This capability also lets marketing see, which materials are most popular with sales teams and which ones they are ignoring.
Winter likens what his company does, which the analysts are calling ‘Sales Enablement’ tools, to the early days of marketing automation. There are a bunch of companies working on some different parts of the problem, but Winter says, he hopes to build out Seismic to be the one company that does it all. “Our vision is to put the puzzle together and become dominant,” he said.
That could mean he could take some of that $20M and buy some of the other players to fill in his company’s blanks, but he wasn’t willing to confirm that was the plan moving forward.
The company, which currently has 65 employees spread across two offices in San Diego and Boston, was founded 2010 and launched in 2011. Prior to the Series A round in 2013, the founders bootstrapped the company themselves. Winter reported that Seismic has grown 4x since the Series A funding and they hope to take this new cash influx and continue that growth trajectory while adding to the product and expand engineering, sales and marketing.
