Overview
You sell Seismic's sales enablement platform to enterprise companies with 500+ employees. These are long, complex deals involving sales operations leaders, enablement directors, RevOps teams, and often IT for security reviews. You're navigating org charts, building consensus across departments, and competing against 2-3 other vendors in most opportunities.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Full-cycle Enterprise AE |
| Sales Motion | Balanced - mix of inbound MQLs and outbound prospecting |
| Deal Complexity | Enterprise - multiple stakeholders, procurement, security reviews |
| Sales Cycle | 6-9 months on average |
| Deal Size | $100K-500K+ ACV depending on seats and modules |
| Quota (est.) | $800K-1.2M annually |
Company Context
Stage: Late-stage private (Series G, $3B valuation, $446M raised)
Size: ~1,300 employees
Growth: They've been around since 2010, matured significantly. Not hyper-growth startup mode - more about execution and competing for market share.
Market Position: Top 3 player in sales enablement alongside Highspot and Showpad. Established category with real buying intent, but also real competition.
GTM Reality
Pipeline Sources:
- 40% Inbound - Marketing-generated leads from content, webinars, analyst reports (Gartner/Forrester). Quality varies - some are tire-kickers researching the category, others are active evaluations.
- 40% Outbound - You prospect into target accounts. Cold calling VPs of Sales, enablement leaders, RevOps directors. LinkedIn outreach to decision-makers.
- 20% Partner referrals and existing customer expansions
SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDR team for top accounts, but you'll do plenty of your own prospecting for strategic targets.
SE Support: Shared Solutions Engineer pool. You get SE support for demos and POCs, but you're scheduling around their calendar.
Competitive Landscape
Main Competitors: Highspot (biggest competitor), Showpad, Mindtickle, Allego. Also fight "we'll build this internally" or "we use Google Drive and it's fine."
How They Differentiate: Seismic positions on breadth - content management, learning/coaching, buyer engagement all in one platform. Deep Salesforce integration. AI capabilities (Aura Copilot).
Common Objections: "We already have [competitor]," "Too expensive for our size," "Our sales team won't adopt another tool," "IT says implementation will take 6 months."
Win Themes: When you win, it's usually because you demonstrated ROI on seller productivity, proved integration capabilities, or the champion really bought into the unified platform story vs point solutions.
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Prospecting & Outbound (25%) | Active Deal Management (45%) | Internal Meetings & Admin (30%)
Key Activities
- Discovery calls with enablement leaders: You're diagnosing their current state - what tools they use, how content is scattered, how they onboard reps, what metrics they can't track. Calls run 45-60 minutes and you need to uncover the economic buyer early.
- Multi-stakeholder demos: You coordinate 3-4 demo calls per deal. First demo is high-level for a broad audience, then you do deeper dives on content management, analytics, integrations. Your SE handles the technical demo while you manage the room and tie features to their pain points.
- Navigating procurement and legal: Once you get verbal commitment, deals sit in legal/procurement for 4-8 weeks. You're chasing contracts, answering security questionnaires, getting on calls with their IT team to discuss SSO and data privacy.
- Building business cases: You work with your champion to build an ROI deck for their executive team. Calculating time savings, ramp time reduction, content usage metrics. Deals die if you can't quantify value for the CFO.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Deals slip constantly. You think you're closing this quarter, then they want to evaluate one more vendor, or the budget gets frozen, or your champion leaves. Your forecast accuracy will be tested.
- You're selling change management as much as software. Even when they like the product, sales leaders worry their reps won't use it. Adoption concerns kill deals.
- Competitive shootouts are draining. You'll spend weeks in a bake-off against Highspot, doing multiple demos, custom POCs, reference calls - and still lose because they had a relationship with the other vendor's rep.
- Internal dependencies: you need SE time, customer success for references, legal to review contracts, finance to approve discounting. Deals move at the pace of the slowest internal stakeholder.
What Success Looks Like
- Closing 8-12 deals per year at $100-150K ACV average
- Building a pipeline of 3-4x your quota (because deals slip and die)
- Getting second meetings - if you can't get past the first call to a broader stakeholder group, the deal is dead
Who You're Selling To
Primary Buyers:
- VP/Director of Sales Enablement (primary champion - they own the problem)
- VP of Sales Operations (often holds the budget)
- Chief Revenue Officer (signs off on 6-figure deals)
- IT/Security (blocker if you can't pass security review)
What They Care About:
- Enablement leaders: "Will this actually get used by reps? Can I track content effectiveness? Can I reduce ramp time?"
- Sales Ops: "Does this integrate with Salesforce? Can I get analytics on what's working? Will this create more admin work for my team?"
- CRO: "What's the ROI? How long until we see productivity gains? Why not Highspot?"
Requirements
- 5+ years selling enterprise software, ideally selling to sales/revenue teams
- Experience managing 6+ month sales cycles with multiple stakeholders
- Familiarity with sales tech stack (Salesforce, Outreach/Salesloft, LinkedIn Sales Nav)
- Located in or willing to travel to Boston/New England/Tri-state area for key meetings (they say remote possible but regional preference is clear)
- Track record of consistently hitting quota in a competitive market
- Ability to build business cases and speak to ROI - you're not just demoing features, you're selling business outcomes