Kevin Chew
VP, Corporate and Business Development, Seismic

Sales Enablement is a sector that has seen rapid growth in the past few years. In this complex world of B2B sales, firms like Seismic make it easier for their clients to drive revenue with their flexible platform. We spoke to Kevin Chew, VP, Corporate and Business Development, Seismic, to understand the dynamics of their partnership with Microsoft and the challenges that a sales enablement platform must tackle to deliver ROI.

Tell us about your role at Seismic and the team you handle.

I lead partnership strategy and business development at Seismic. Seismic’s customers are large, global companies with complex, multifaceted business needs and complex technology infrastructures. They often rely on a host of technology providers and consultants to ensure that they are wielding their industry’s best-of-breed technologies and best practices. My job is to locate and target those providers and experts that are interacting with our customers and target customers, find ways that together we can increase their value through the power of Seismic, and also how Seismic’s value can be bolstered through them.

How important is the B2B sales alliance for you in 2018?

Incredibly important. Some of our major partners, like Salesforce and Microsoft, have tools that are omnipresent in enterprise sales and marketing offices today. As the most customizable and flexible sales enablement platform, we offer a wide array of integrations that increase the value of those types of technologies for customers. The ability for us work closely with them opens up a world of additional opportunities for current customers to create a sales enablement program that fits their needs and achieves real results.

What are the core tenets of your recent partnership with Microsoft?

There are three core tenants of our relationship with Microsoft. They are:

1. Product capabilities: Seismic-Microsoft integrations exist throughout the entire sales enablement experience for customers. From the moment the content is being created in the Microsoft Office Suite to when it is being distributed to clients through our Outlook or Dynamics integrations, the combination of Microsoft and Seismic is a potent one for our customers.
2. Customer education: I believe that Microsoft sees a kindred spirit in Seismic in that we both share a fanatical devotion to guaranteeing that our customers stand with us at the forefront of business innovation, and we are taking positive steps to ensure that happens through joint education initiatives. For example, Seismic is now a prime exhibitor in the Chicago Microsoft Tech Center, showing how Seismic’s integration of Microsoft technologies benefits large enterprises. We also recently sponsored a webinar with Microsoft for customers on the theme of artificial intelligence and financial services. The webinar is the part of a series of co-marketing initiatives designed to educate the market on the how new and innovative technologies are helping marketing and selling teams be more effective at their jobs.
3. Go-to-market initiatives: We are actively working with Microsoft’s sales teams to further position Seismic as a preferred technology partner for Microsoft customers looking to increase sales productivity and marketing effectiveness. In fact, Seismic is now included in the Microsoft Technical Solution Professionals demo environment in the Americas, providing direct visibility into integrations for prospective Microsoft buyers.

How do you plan to extend the benefits of the partnership to your customers and technology partners?

As I just mentioned, the partnership is already positively impacting our customers in a host of ways. And we plan on continuing to work closely with Microsoft across the product, our customer base, and our marketing and sales efforts.

Regarding other technology partners, we see Seismic as a true platform, bringing on a host of other technologies to make the overall solution uniquely suited for each unique customer to derive the most power and value out of their sales enablement investments. Microsoft’s technology offerings is a key piece of that overall technology partner puzzle.

What does it mean to you as the winner of the inaugural MSUS Partner Award in the Power Business Intelligence category?

We are honored to have received a 2018 MSUS Partner Award. Microsoft has thousands of partners, and so many of them are doing incredible things with Microsoft’s applications. To be named among the best is very exciting.

We won for our analytics suite, LiveInsights, which has been built on Microsoft PowerBI. LiveInsights tracks sales content performance in aggregate—both from the perspective of buyer and sellers engagement– and in real-time so that marketers can measure what content is working for sellers, what is being engaged with by buyers, what content is directly contributing to revenue, and which content creators are created truly impactful content. The result is a much more intelligent sales and marketing engine, making improvements based on data.

Where do you see Seismic heading to in 2019, with the kind of AI-powered intelligence you deliver?

I will echo what our CEO Doug Winter said on Sales Tech Star: The intelligence we’ve built into the platform makes our users smarter and thus more effective at their jobs. Everything we build is done to really make an impact on how sellers sell and how marketers impact the bottom line, and expect to see us continue to push the envelope on that front as we move forward here in 2018.

Thanks for chatting with us, Kevin.

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