Seismic acquires Lessonly to build new sales and marketing platform - closes $170 million funding
Seismic has announced the acquirement of Lessonly, a training, coaching, and enablement solution, with the aim of delivering a new sales and marketing platform.
The company has 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.
The latest funding brings Seismic's valuation to $3 billion and will be used to continue expanding its platform, R-D, and global footprint.
With the Lessonly acquisition, the Seismic platform aims to provide a seamless experience where sellers can quickly and easily access sales and marketing content alongside learning programs, practice scenarios, and coaching plans.
Seismic says the combined solution will play an instrumental role in enabling teams to increase productivity, create close alignment between sales and marketing strategies, consistently beat quota, and build long-lasting relationships with customers.
"The combined capabilities of Seismic and Lessonly prepare sales teams and marketers to provide a better experience for increasingly demanding customers," says Seismic vice president of Asia-Pacific, Heather Cook.
"Uniting sales, marketing and services capabilities with automated and AI-powered enablement and training tools will help Australian and New Zealand companies establish a competitive advantage. This comes 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.
"We are delighted to join Seismic," says Lessonly CEO and author of Do Better Work, Max Yoder.
"During the past decade at Lessonly, we've focused on building a training, coaching, and enablement solution that brings out the very best in people and helps them deliver inspired work. In partnership with Seismic, we look forward to transforming the entire enablement industry. Our respective teams and customers are going to see big gains as a result of this deal, as will the city of Indianapolis."
More than 1,200 companies use Lessonly to deliver training, coaching and enablement. Lessonly 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.
"After using the Lessonly integration in Seismic, 99.5% of our sellers reported feeling more prepared to sell in a virtual environment," says Deluxe director of sales readiness, Megan Friedrich.
"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.
"By hosting our training content in Seismic, sales leadership can also access 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," she says.
