Accelerating Growth in a Cautious Capital Environment - with Hayden Stafford, President and CRO Seismic

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
And welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Hayden Stafford, the President and Chief Revenue Officer of Seismic. We'll be covering three main topics with Hayden today. First, the state of B2B sales as we entered 2024
Second, accelerating growth in a efficient capital environment. And third, sales process versus a customer journey. How do they coexist? Hayden, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here on the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast?

**Hayden Stafford** (1:16)
Well, thank you, Ray. I appreciate you having me on. I think that perhaps one of your first few calls of the new year. Thank you.
My name is Hayden Stafford, and I'm the President and Chief Revenue Officer here at Seismic. We are the world's leading enablement company.
Prior to Seismic, I've had a long history and career in sales, in tech, a long career at IBM, about two years at Salesforce, another long career at Microsoft, and I was at Pegasystems as well. And I started my career long ago as a consultant at Ernst & Young.

**Ray Rike** (1:50)
Well, you definitely haven't been in very many big companies.
But that's quite an impressive pedigree. But let's talk about the last 18 months because I was a long time revenue leader myself. And I think the 18 months have been one of the most challenging and quite a ride for a B2B SaaS company selling to B2B companies. So can you tell me, have you seen a change in the fundamental approach to selling a B2B SaaS solution in the last 18 months?

**Hayden Stafford** (2:21)
I mean, you're so right. I feel like the last 18 months in dog years is like seven years. So much has happened over the last 18 months. But, you know, I would say the fundamentals have not changed. In fact, we probably have to anchor more on the fundamentals over the last 18 months than we did in the prior years. You know, I jokingly say for a lot of companies that fish were just jumping into the boat for many companies over the last two or three, for sure, five or six years.
So now it's all about the fundamentals being incredibly important. For many companies, Ray, as you know, bookings growth is down. Companies are churning customers, deal cycles are elongated, more approvals are needed, board members are getting involved, and hard business cases are required. That means companies really need to get more out of what they have and really focus on those fundamentals.
In many cases, it's doing more with less in the last 18 months. We've all read the press of what's happening and cuts that have had to have been made. So it's focusing on what you have in place and making sure they're doing what they're doing very, very well. And honestly, the timing, Ray, couldn't have been better for me.
As we just said a few moments ago, I've been at some of the leading tech companies. I'm coming up on my two-year anniversary here at Seismic in March. And you know, world leader in enablement, what is enablement? It's about making your sales teams as efficient and effective as possible and driving a great buying experience for your customers or your prospects.
And you know, enablement right now is tops of investment areas and focus for many companies. In fact, Ray, we have it on our website, but we surveyed in an enablement survey 1,400 go to market leaders in October. So just a few months ago in our, what we called our state of AI and enablement report, 89% of our respondents said they plan to increase investments in enablement and it's don't just believe me. I'm part of the CRO Council with McKinsey and they released a report back in the summer. It was May, June timeframe. And what was at the top of the list in terms of what customers expand and plan to increase their spend in software domains. What is it? Yes, it's enablement and sales data intelligence tools. Really, it falls right into that fact of you got to do more with less and do it really well.

**Ray Rike** (4:57)
We got to double click here because we do we do benchmarking for a living, right? So we looked at at median sales and marketing investments were down about 8% in FY23 versus FY22. Of course, SaaS spend management, most other B2B SaaS companies were looking at rationalizing the heterogeneous nature of all the platforms, a lot of consolidation. I do a lot of work with CFOs about trying to get more efficiency out of sales and marketing investment this year with another 3 to 5% down. So here's my question.