Seismic used its customer event this week to announce a plan to acquire Percolate, which provides software to orchestrate marketing campaigns and manage content for B2B brands.
Based in San Diego, Calif., Siesmic is known as a developer of sales enablement tools to manage various assets associated with closing a deal. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Seismic said the combined entity would employ more than 800 people across 12 offices.
Responding to questions via e-mail, Seismic co-founder and CEO Doug Winter told B2B News Network the acquisition will now empower go-to-market teams to be ready for selling situations by providing them with the right news, training and content for any marketing and selling situation imaginable.
“Marketing and sales teams have to deal all the time with content that is either irrelevant or hard to find, which wastes marketing budgets, and can slow down the sales cycle, he said.
There are a number of companies actively using both tools from both firms, Winter said. Percolate’s customer base has included VMware, DocuSign and DHL, among others. He said Percolate is traditionally bought by marketing organizations, whereas Seismic, a sales enablement solution, is purchased by either marketing, sales, or sales enablement, depending on the organization.
Percolate will operate as its own business unit that will continue to grow and develop their own product roadmap and integrations, Winter said, and its CEO Randy Wootton will join the Seismic team. That said, the acquisition will allow Seismic to bring forward both capabilities as one.
“(It) creates a unified platform that creates and coordinates purposeful content, and scales and automates content management,” Winter said. “We help engage field teams and buyers through personalization, and leverage analytics to improve quality, behavior and strategy for sellers in any selling situation.”
Unifying content across all customer touchpoints means that marketers can offer compelling, personalized content much more efficiently and effectively than ever before, Winter added. “This will be a boon for marketing teams pursuing other strategies that require highly tailored campaigns and content, like ABM,” he said.
In a thread of comments on Twitter, NewsCred CEOÂ Shafqat Islam provided his own reaction, suggesting that for Percolate, at least, it was “not the outcome they wanted” in terms of growth.
“The traditional CMP category has changed. We are the Gartner leader, but Percolate and Kapost were both competitors we respected,” he wrote. “Both are now gone. Building a new category is hard. Lots of lessons around managing cash, being operationally efficient, not raising too much etc.”
Earlier this year, Percolate announced it had secured $32 million in financing and brought on a new CFO in a bid to accelerate its growth.
