Seismic has announced its acquisition of Lessonly, the training, coaching, and enablement solution to deliver a powerful and comprehensive sales and marketing enablement platform.
Seismic also announced the close of its Series G funding round of $170 million, led by Permira with participation from JMI Equity, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jackson Square Ventures, Ameriprise, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.
This latest Series G funding round brings Seismic’s valuation to $3 billion and will be used to continue expanding Seismic’s platform, Research & Development, and a global footprint.
Significance of Seismic acquiring Lessonly
With the acquisition of Lessonly, the Seismic platform now provides a seamless seller experience where sellers can quickly and easily access sales and marketing content alongside learning programs, practice scenarios, and coaching plans in one central location.
This combined solution will play an instrumental role enabling teams to increase productivity, create close alignment between sales and marketing strategies, consistently beat quota, and build long-lasting relationships with customers.
“The capabilities of Seismic and Lessonly prepare sales teams and marketers to provide a better experience to customers, while giving employers a roadmap to upskilling their workforce amid the digital skills shortage,” said Heather Cook, VP APAC, Seismic.
“Uniting sales, marketing and services capabilities with automated and AI-powered enablement and training tools will help ANZ companies establish competitive advantage at a time when 57% of customers are happy to ditch a brand for the experience its competitor offers.”
Along with a unified seller experience, leaders can take advantage of the new combined data and analytics capabilities to track lesson usage, analyse training trends, and identify the content leveraged by top performers to close the most deals.
“We are delighted to join Seismic. During the past decade at Lessonly, we have focused on building a training, coaching, and enablement solution that brings out the very best in people and helps them deliver inspired work,” said Max Yoder, CEO, Lessonly.
“With Seismic, we look forward to transforming the enablement industry. Our teams and customers are going to see big gains as a result of this deal, as will the city of Indianapolis.”
Why has Seismic acquired Lessonly?
More than 1,200 companies rely on Lessonly for training, coaching and enablement.
Lessonly is highly regarded by analysts and customers, and was recently named a Leader in several G2 Grid Reports for Summer 2021, including Sales Training and Onboarding, Sales Coaching, Corporate Learning Management Systems, and Course Authoring Software.
Since its founding in 2012, the company has served nearly four million learners worldwide.
“Effective sales enablement through competence, confidence, and content is attained when companies leverage the full functionality of content and readiness tech within a single environment,” said Peter Ostrow, Vice-President and Research Director, SiriusDecisions.
“Enablement leaders recognise the natural tension between the desire for continuous learning, and the challenge of delivering it amid the endless noise of internal communications.”
“When they distill readiness exercises into accessible and well-timed deliverables, the chances of ‘sticky’ learning, better coaching, and insights-driven productivity gains are improved.”
“After using the Lessonly integration in Seismic, 99.5% of our sellers reported feeling more prepared to sell in a virtual environment.”
“We’ve taken hours of training content and delivered it to sellers through powerful, bite-sized lessons woven directly into our Seismic toolkit pages, readying our sellers with everything they need in one central location,” said Megan Friedrich, Director of Sales Readiness, Deluxe.
“By hosting our training content in Seismic, sales leadership also has access to an extra layer of insights to measure the effectiveness of customer engagements. We can’t wait to see how this deal will expand and enhance our seller readiness and, ultimately, our customer experience.”
