If you’re exploring content management options and have found that Seismic isn’t the best fit for your organization, there are three main Seismic alternatives to consider: Bigtincan, Showpad, and Highspot.
This article will walk you through how Bigtincan compares to Seismic in five key areas, including:
- Customization options
- Training and coaching
- Content management
- Collaboration and sharing
- Document automation
You’ll also get a succinct overview of the Showpad and Highspot platforms and some additional resources to help you learn more about them.
If you have further questions about how Bigtincan can benefit your organization, the easiest and best way to get them answered is by booking a demo.
Topics Covered
- Customization Options in Bigtincan vs Seismic
- Training and Coaching Features
- Content Management
- Collaboration and Sharing
- Document Automation Functionality
- Other Bigtincan Competitive Advantages
- Other Seismic Alternatives and Competitors
Build your own or buy? Customization options in Bigtincan vs Seismic
One of the first questions many companies face when seeking a content management solution is whether they should buy a sales enablement platform like Seismic or Bigtincan or just build their own. Bigtincan is a happy medium for customers in this situation due to its unique customization capabilities.
Bigtincan customization options
Customization is often the biggest reason brands consider building their own platform.
But building your own platform is a long and resource-intensive process and there are both upfront development and ongoing maintenance costs, so being able to fully customize an existing sales enablement solution can be a really attractive option for many brands in this situation. That’s why Bigtincan is customizable down to the pixel.
For example, here’s what the Bigtincan homepage looks like for a manufacturing company:
And here’s an example of a modified homepage that might work better for a tech company’s workflow:
The modified layout offers a different visual appearance and different functionality.
Do you need to help your sellers track expenses? Add an expense calculator micro-app to your homescreen for all sellers.
Need retail employees to clock in and out in a retail environment? Add a timeclock.
We have micro-apps for almost any sales or service application, and will help you custom-tailor a platform that works best for your workflows.
Leverage your brand in every customer interaction
You can also customize the colors, branding, and overall appearance of Bigtincan, so it looks like it was purpose-built for your company.
For example, let’s say you work for Cisco and are trying to close a networking deal worth tens of millions of dollars. A prospect asks a question and you want to show them a spec sheet on your computer before you email it to them.
Would you rather show the buyer a screen with third-party branding or a platform that looks like it was built by your company, for your company?
Almost every brand picks the latter, so Bigtincan is built to allow that.
Seismic customization options
Seismic gives you the option to add your logo to their platform, as you can see in this screenshot:
You can also modify the layout by tweaking things like the size and shape of some elements.
In some instances, you can also change the order of elements, such as swapping the “frequently used” section in the screenshot above with the “start browsing content” section above it.
However, the Seismic platform will always have Seismic branding and a basic layout.
Training and Coaching features
Both Bigtincan and Seismic offer training and coaching features such as content creation, video assessment, written communication assessment, Salesforce integrations, and the ability to customize training. However, the approach to each feature differs between companies and Bigtincan offers several unique features.
Bigtincan Training & Coaching features
Bigtincan Learning is one of the platforms we’re most proud of — especially after the acquisition of Brainshark, a leader in sales coaching, learning, and custom training content creation.
In our experience, training and coaching are crucial to building a quality sales team. Bigtincan’s suite of sales training products enables you to provide well-rounded onboarding and everboarding programs that include peer coaching, skill development, and knowledge assessment.
Here’s an overview of what Bigtincan has to offer:
- AI and human-assessed videos. Reps can record a video of themselves giving a sales pitch and submit the video for assessment. Reps can share these videos with their peers to get feedback before submitting the video for official review. Once it’s submitted, the person reviewing the video can leave personalized comments in addition to an overall score.
Additionally, our AI-powered assessment offers insight into how many filler words were used (and which ones), how fast or slow the rep was speaking at a given time, what level of vocabulary and speech the rep used, whether specific words were included or avoided (new product names, for example), and overall impression given by body language, tone of voice etc.
- User-friendly content creation: Bigtincan offers the ability to transform PowerPoints, Google Slides, PDFs, screen recordings, webpages, and more into interactive training material. You can add voice-over to any material for a more engaging experience. Bigtincan also offers templates for various types of training material for fast content creation. This enables busy, successful sales reps to create content for their peers to share their knowledge to less experienced or less successful sales reps.
- Performance scorecards: Many training and coaching platforms let you track certification scores across teams or for individuals. Bigtincan takes this a step further by tying training and coaching performance to real world performance. If a sales rep is consistently losing sales at a specific point in the sales process, you can look at their performance scorecard to see how they scored on training material related to that part of the sales process.
- Gamification features: This involves assigning point prizes to salespeople that take trainings, offering competitions between teams, and using leaderboards to keep employees engaged. These types of features create a psychological feedback loop that increases user engagement.
Seismic Training and Coaching features
Seismic training and coaching features are focused on:
- Playbooks: These playbooks are free downloads that combine knowledge of standing experts to help you improve your sales training and coaching program.
- Customized training: You can build training programs from existing material specifically for any group or individual. Material can be created by copy-and-pasting any document or video into a training deck.
- Hands-on coaching: Like Bigtincan, reps can record a video of themselves giving a sales pitch and submit them for assessment. These videos can be assessed by peers or managers.
- Self assessment: Reps can answer simple questions to help identify areas where they don’t feel confident and need more training.
- Skills focused assessment: The training and coaching features are heavily focused on building skills. By comparing reports of successful and less successful reps, you can identify which skills your top reps have in common.
Bigtincan vs Seismic Content Management
Seismic and Bigtincan both offer robust content management functionality, though Seismic’s approach relies more on metadata and tagging compared to Bigtincan.
Bigtincan Content Management
Bigtincan’s content management consists of a three-layered file folder structure that includes:
- Tabs
- Channels
- Stories
If you compare this system to a physical file management system, the tabs are like a drawer, a channel is a folder, and a story is the document or bundle of documents within the folder. Except in Bigtincan, each file can live as part of multiple stories, channels, or tabs.
You can also add tags and other meta-data to each file, though this isn’t required. Instead, Bigtincan’s AI-powered search tool performs a full-text search of every document and image and can infer what kinds of files you’re looking for.
For example, if you search for “elevator spec sheet,” Bigtincan will automatically:
- Match “spec sheet” with “technical data,” “specifications,” and other synonyms.
- Look for PDFs and other file types that are commonly associated with “spec sheets”.
- Prioritize results for elevator models that you’ve viewed recently or that are associated with successful sales.
Then, it will combine that information with dozens of other factors based on our complex artificial intelligence, and serve you a list of results.
Of course, if you happen to have tags on each file, the AI engine will take these into account, but tags are just the cherry on top — they’re not strictly necessary.
Because of this AI-driven system, Bigtincan clients can cut down on hours of manual tagging and data maintenance. There have been clients who are on the verge of making a full-time hire specifically for data-maintenance, but decide to forgo the extra hire when they implement Bigtincan.
Seismic Content Management
Compared to Bigtincan, Seismic also has a powerful search engine, but a different folder structure and overall approach to managing content.
Specifically, Seismic’s approach is much more metadata-focused. Their search engine relies on tags as an integral part of their AI search feature, and when you get a list of results back, they offer extensive filtering tools based on metadata.
They also offer an endless folder-within-a-folder content structure, which is great if your organization tends to stay organized. In our experience, this can lead to a messy content structure at an enterprise scale.
Overall, Seismic’s features are very powerful in the right hands. If you know how to use all of their filters, and stay up to date with your tagging and content governance, their platform can help you find content easily and will be a great asset for your sales and marketing teams.
Collaboration and Sharing
Seismic and Bigtincan both share a few similar collaboration and sharing features, including:
- A news center to distribute recent and important news and information.
- The ability to share files or folders internally or tag someone on a specific file (a.k.a. “Story” in Bigtincan) for review or update.
Seismic-specific Collaboration features
Besides document-specific collaboration features and a news center, Seismic also offers workflow automation features and a content management integration for all major CRMs.
The workflow feature helps you keep track of compliance and brand approval for content assets.
And the CRM workspace helps your sales team collaborate on content without leaving the CRM (though in our opinion, this just adds another place where you have to keep track of content, which is why we keep it all in the Bigtincan platform).
Bigtincan-specific Collaboration features
Bigtincan offers a built-in chat feature, similar to Microsoft Teams or Slack, where your team can collaborate and communicate.
Collaboration and sharing is another area where Bigtincan’s customizability comes in handy. In addition to the default features listed above, our onboarding team will help you add any number of micro-apps to help with communication or sharing.
Does your brand team need a dynamic list of the most recently updated assets that need approval from marketing? The Bigtincan team can build that for you.
Want visibility into whenever sales reps have a physical visit with a customer? We’ll pull data in from the CRM and create a dynamic “check-in feed” for sales leaders.
We can build practically any collaboration or sharing feature you need.
Document Automation functionality
Document automation is a strength for both Bigtincan and Seismic.
Both systems allow users to build document templates, connect them to live data feeds, and build custom documents for thousands of prospects in a matter of minutes.
For example, if you need to create financial reports for clients every quarter, you can create one compliance-approved template, hook it up to financial platforms, and create reports for every client on your roster in a matter of minutes. Learn more in our blog post about financial document automation.
The difference between Bigtincan and Seismic lies in the approachability of the platforms.
Seismic offers very robust capabilities, but they have a steep learning curve. However, they do offer help using these features, so you can essentially offload your document automation tasks to their support team for an additional ongoing cost.
Bigtincan offers much of the same functionality, but it is designed to be user-friendly enough that your internal team can use it without much ongoing support. Most customers just need a series of onboarding sessions, and they’re able to use the tool independently.
For this reason, while Bigtincan does have a dedicated document automation implementation team, many customers choose to automate documents themselves with minimal support.
Other Bigtincan competitive advantages
Bigtincan offers a few other features that Seismic does not, which might be helpful depending on your organization’s needs.
Sales Engagement
With the acquisition of ClearSlide, Bigtincan has expanded our sales engagement functionality to offer robust sales analytics and engagement data for sellers and sales leaders alike.
Mobile Functionality
Every tool on this list (including Highspot and Showpad, mentioned below) offers some sort of mobile app. However, Bigtincan was designed from the ground up for every operating system to include unique features such as:
- The ability to integrate with your device’s hardware, so we can fit all of the most important files on your devices without taking up all of your devices’ hard drive space.
- 100% offline functionality, including AI-powered search.
- Augmented reality features so you can show prospects what a product would look like in a specific space.
- And more.
Overall, your sales reps will have a very similar experience on Bigtincan mobile without internet access that they would have on a desktop with internet.
Other Seismic Alternatives & Competitors
Besides Bigtincan, there are two other main competitors in the space that offer robust sales enablement and content management features.
Highspot
Highspot offers:
- Content management using “spots” rather than standard folders or the three-tier Bigtincan system
- Some sales analytics
- AI-powered search
- Coaching and training
- Real-time coaching features through “Coach in Context”
- A mobile app
Learn more on the Highspot website.
Showpad
Showpad offers:
- Folder-based content management
- Solid sales analytics
- Training and coaching features, including MeetingIQ, which “acts as a ‘game film’ for sales calls”
- AI-powered search
- A mobile app
Learn more on the Showpad website.
Bigtincan: The most complete & Intelligent Sales Enablement platform
We designed Bigtincan to be the most complete, customizable, and intelligent sales enablement platform available. If you:
- Have a strong brand that you’d like to reflect in your sales platform.
- Want to spend less time managing content manually.
- Want a mobile sales enablement experience that rivals most desktop platforms.
- Want to eliminate sales tool overload and house all of your go-to-market workflows on one platform.
Simply book a demo, and we’ll walk you through the platform in more detail and show you how it could work for your organization.
