Seismic empowers sales teams to find the right information faster with Elasticsearch

The role of sales is changing dramatically. Customers increasingly prefer researching products and services for themselves online. What they need from sales is someone who can understand their unique needs and act as a trusted advisor to find solutions for their business problems. With so many expectations on sales representatives, companies often turn to reliable sales enablement tools that can improve team productivity and help them deliver better customer experiences.

Seismic is a leading global sales enablement platform that empowers entire customer-facing organizations with the skills, content, tools, and insights needed to grow their business. More than 2,200 customers in over 100 countries rely on Seismic Enablement Cloud to enable sales, marketing, and customer service teams to deliver the experiences that customers want, when they want it.

With the marketing technology space shifting quickly, Seismic maintains its leading edge by focusing on developing solutions that solve real customer pain points. “We don’t spend our time creating new tools just for the sake of doing something new,” explains Tom Strader, lead machine learning engineer at Seismic. “It’s very important that we focus on technologies that will bring our customers as much value as possible.”

Seismic Enablement Cloud brings together all the information sales and enablement teams need in one location. And whether users are seeking training content, customer insights, or sales strategies, fast and reliable search is critical. Seismic deployed Elasticsearch with the ELSER semantic search retrieval model to help users find the information they need faster.

Seismic previously used an open source version of Elasticsearch in its products but wanted to enhance its customers’ ability to find exactly what they need. A sales representative working with a retail client, for instance, might want to look at case studies and strategies only for retailers of a similar size or those operating in the same region.

With Elasticsearch running on Elastic Cloud on Azure and IBM Cloud, Seismic gains an all-in-one solution with everything it needs to provide more performant and accurate search results.

Knowing that everyone was moving toward AI-powered search, Strader needed to act quickly. Rather than spending resources to build and train its own AI search models, Seismic again turned to Elastic's ELSER model, which allows users to perform semantic searches based on contextual meaning and user intent.

"We evaluated many different providers, and we found that ELSER not only outperforms the competition, but it's also significantly easier to maintain for large enterprise customers," says Strader. Compared to previous search options, Elasticsearch with ELSER delivered a tenfold improvement on search speed and relevancy at Seismic. Now, its customers are seeing tremendous impact from the improved search, with search usage increasing by 20%.

Elasticsearch with ELSER also forms the core of the new Aura Copilot feature at Seismic. This AI-powered assistant helps sales teams get the content and answers they need using natural language, just as if they were talking to a human assistant. Now, if a sales representative wants to create a sales deck for a client, they can simply ask Aura to analyze client data, collect assets, and even write a first draft of the pitch.

Seismic already uses Aura internally and introduced the feature to customers through a pilot program. The initial response from customers has been very positive, with some signing up to purchase Aura once it's launched as a paid feature.

According to Strader, one of the biggest benefits of working with Elastic is the ease of both development and maintenance.

Seismic teams spend much less time on maintenance and administration by working in the cloud, repurposing a team of 20 people dedicated to maintenance down to a handful of engineers. This migration reduces operational overhead costs and allows team members to focus on bringing more value to Seismic, such as improving system efficiencies or supporting the development of new features.

Strader also mentions the Elastic team as a benefit. "If we have a question, the Elastic team is always happy to jump on the phone and help find an answer. They’re really there for you."

Building upon the success of Elasticsearch and ELSER, the next step for Seismic will involve expanding vector search to internal video, audio, and images. This will allow Seismic sales and enablement teams to search through a greater variety of content, even looking for specific sections of videos and images within sales decks.