Ed Calnan grew up on the North Shore. He began his career learning sales in the trenches at John Hancock Life Insurance Company and ADP after graduating from St. Michael’s College. He leveraged this sales know-how to launch what has now been a long-running career in the Boston technology scene.
Back in the dot-com era of the late 90s, he joined a company called ONEWORLD, which helped venture backed companies build and launch products. ONEWORLD was also venture funded and experienced the same roller coaster as many of its clients. The company grew from 6 employees to over 500 and back down to 6 again, in the span of 24 months.
All was not lost however, as it was at this organization where he met his future business partner, Doug Winter.
Calnan went on to join Capital IQ, where he helped grow the revenue from $5M to over $100M and an eventual acquisition by Standard & Poor’s, when he got a phone call from Winter. He had joined a software company called Document Sciences in San Diego as its COO. The company was going through a restart and he wanted Calnan to head up sales. Calnan accepted the opportunity.
Document Sciences’ software was used by large financial services companies who issued documents online like checking account statements and insurance policies. Over a 36 month period, the company launched a new product and tripled its revenue. This growth led to an acquisition by EMC, where they fell under the company’s Content Management and Archiving Division.
While working underneath the EMC umbrella, it turned out to be valuable experience for Calnan as he was able to witness firsthand how a company at the scale of EMC operated in terms of sales and marketing.
It was also an interesting time in the market, as the world of marketing was rapidly evolving with companies like Eloqua and HubSpot bringing a fresh approach to the top of the sales funnel with content marketing. Then, everything changed with the launch of the iPad in 2010.
“We had a belief that this evolution was now going to heavily affect the last mile of sales,” said Calnan. “It was a great opportunity for B2B sellers to use data and content more efficiently.”
Winter, Calnan, along with three other founders, left EMC to start Seismic and address this problem. There was a vision of how mobile devices such as iPad would be a difference maker for salespeople and how a software platform could help marketing distribute content to people in the field real-time, ensuring that marketing could have their impact felt on the company’s bottom line.
They knew there was a problem to solve, yet the market didn’t know it yet. Plus, the software industry didn’t coin a term yet, like they had with “marketing automation” for the top of the funnel issue.
For the first 2.5 years, Seismic was bootstrapped and the company grew based on its own merits by landing customers. It was during this stretch of time when “Sales Enablement” became a term in the industry and by this time, Seismic already had a massive head-start over its competitors.
Today, Seismic has over 200 enterprise customers, which includes many Fortune 1000 companies and half of the top 20 asset management firms. The company has also seen triple revenue growth over the last five consecutive years.
Its products are used by companies who have a large sales force and need an effective and efficient way for marketing to work with sales. The company has over 200 employees with its two largest offices being in San Diego and Boston. Product, engineering, and UX are mainly based in San Diego, while sales and marketing is based out of Boston. Seismic’s customer success team has locations around the country.
Last May, the company raised $40M in a Series C round of funding to bring the total amount of funding raised by Seismic to $64.5M. General Atlantic led the round and Gary Reiner, former CIO at GE, joined Seismic’s board. You might recognize Reiner’s name, as he recently joined Turbonomic’s Board of Directors.
Seismic has a plan to hire 150 employees in 2017, approximately 40% of that growth will take place in Boston. The company has come a long way in growing its local presence since its early beginnings with a small office above The Fours near North Station. Today, the company is located at 239 Causeway Street along with Uber’s local office.
As a company, they don’t just hire experienced software sales people or recent college graduates. They have a diverse team with an eclectic mix ranging from teachers to firefighters, who were looking to change professions.
“It’s a different mentality here than a lot of software companies,” said Calnan. “We are selling an enterprise level solution to a VP of Sales or the VP of Sales Enablement. It’s not just a smile and dial bullpen structure like one might have selling to SMBs. We have to be thoughtful in our approach.”
Seismic has a history of promoting from within and grooming their talent in-house. Calnan went on to share that the company’s attrition is basically zero. To his recollection, they’ve only had one person leave voluntarily. The company also prides itself at encouraging everyone to start interviewing prospective candidates early.
“Everyone has a vote in our process and it’s up to the team to help vet out who is going to succeed here,” said Calnan.
Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.
