Seismic acquires Grapevine6 social sales platform
Marketing enablement platform provider Seismic is to acquire Grapevine6, a social and digital sales engagement platform.
With this acquisition, Seismic gains the ability to provide sales professionals with content sourced from 11,000 third-party publishers using Grapevine6's AI engine enabling sellers to engage more frequently with their relationships through conversations on social media platforms.
The acquisition will result in an integrated offering called Seismic LiveSocial, a social engagement solution for sales and client-facing teams that can help sellers become trusted advisors by enabling them to engage with their clients across the social media landscape.
With LiveSocial, sales teams can share timely, reputable, and compliant content in their own voice, targeting the right buyers across multiple social platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Additionally, brand leaders can amplify audience reach through employee-led social sharing, leveraging Seismic LiveSocial to measure the ROI of their social engagement strategy.
"Social media has cemented itself as a critical front line between organisations and their customers with IDC reporting that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions," says Seismic Asia Pacific and Japan vice president Richard Kulkarni.
"With the global pandemic as a catalyst, social selling skills and digital eminence have become vital competencies for workforces. Seismic LiveSocial not only empowers sales teams to engage clients more effectively on social media channels but also helps turn every employee into a brand ambassador, delivering a strong advantage in this new business reality.
The Grapevine6 acquisition and launch of LiveSocial follows solid financial performance by Seismic, including its US$92m Series F funding round and strong Year-on-Year revenue growth.
"In today's dynamic sales landscape, buyers want to hear from and connect with trusted individuals, not brands, on social media," says Seismic co-founder and CEO Doug Winter.
"Grapevine6 will be instrumental to providing additional customer value by combining Seismic's industry-leading sales enablement platform and Grapevine6's digital engagement platform, further empowering sales teams to educate and engage with buyers online — while simultaneously helping to build their personal brands in an authentic way.
Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and founded in 2013, Grapevine6 has grown into one of North America's leading engagement platforms in the digital sales space.
The company was named a leader in Forrester's Sales Social Engagement Tools report and boasts a 5-star rating on G2.
Grapevine6 enables tens of thousands of advisors and sales professionals, including four of the five largest wealth management firms in North America and the largest social selling program in the world at SAP.
"Social media has transformed the buyer's journey. Savvy buyers now use social media to not only gather information and connect with peers, but also to research the sales professionals and advisors they're partnering with. The current sea change to digital communication is an opportunity to better serve customers by enabling salespeople to humanise relationships with personal stories — the true promise of digital selling," says Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr.
"Partnering with Seismic over the past few years in creating a content ecosystem, we realised how aligned we are in our vision for digital selling and that an acquisition created a win-win for all of Grapevine6 and Seismic customers.
