SalesTechStar Interview with Hayden Stafford, President & Chief Revenue Officer at Seismic

Hayden Stafford, President & Chief Revenue Officer at Seismic chats about the myths and stigmas that modern GTM teams need to work around to drive better AI driven processes in this SalesTechStar interview:

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Hi Hayden, tell us about yourself and your role at Seismic.

I joined the Seismic team at the start of 2022 as President and Chief Revenue Officer. At Seismic, I oversee the global Go-to-Market (GTM) team including Sales, Customer Success, Partnerships, Professional Services and more, driving business growth and alignment with Seismic’s GTM strategy.

I’ve had a long career in this space, with almost 30 years of experience as a sales and revenue leader. Prior to Seismic, I most recently served as Pegasystems’ President of Global Client Engagement, where I also oversaw global GTM functions. Before Pegasystems, I was Corporate Vice President of Global Microsoft Business Applications (Microsoft Dynamics 365) and also had long careers with Salesforce and IBM.

Take us through the top highlights of Seismic’s new AI assisted solutions and how they enable revenue and GTM teams?

Our Winter 2025 release includes a variety of features and capabilities, all focused on giving sales and marketing teams the right tools to operate more effectively and adapt to market demands. One of those features is the expansion of Aura Copilot, Seismic’s AI revenue enablement assistant, to Slack and Microsoft Teams. This expanded access allows sales reps to work more efficiently, delivering real-time insights within their preferred collaboration tools and streamlining customer engagements. By enabling reps to work smarter, not harder, our Aura Copilot features integrate seamlessly into workflows and liberate reps to focus on the work they do best.

We’ve also enhanced additional AI-powered features, such as Seismic for Meetings and Seismic Skills. Through our Seismic for Meetings product, reps and managers are now able to quickly access summaries and key takeaways from their meetings, helping reps to easily identify next steps and drive deals forward. In addition, we’ve added more intuitive dashboards, expanded assessment options, and deeper visibility into individual rep performance to ensure more effective skills development. Through these expanded capabilities, we’re empowering teams to scale top behavior and drive strong performance.

What myths around AI, Salestech and revenue generation would you urgently like to bust in this conversation?

Despite increased investments into AI and large-scale adoption efforts, some leaders still view AI as a “dirty” or misunderstood word and often validate stigmas around the tech that can make it difficult to gain internal buy-in. Recent research from Seismic revealed almost half (45%) of leaders avoid using the term AI in official communications, even when AI solutions are used. This signals a disconnect between how organizations are approaching AI externally versus internally.

GTM leaders need to break down these stigmas and myths to embrace AI loudly and celebrate its wins. AI’s ROI cannot be fully realized until GTM leaders acknowledge its existence and benefits, helping to garner internal support for the technology. Don’t get me wrong.  While some revenue leaders are all in and quickly adopting AI solutions within their organizations, other revenue leaders may be moving slowly to embrace the tech at large.  It’s imperative to breakdown misconceptions around AI, making it easier to justify additional tech spend and accelerate adoption across the industry.

As AI and AI agents become more mainstream across sales and marketing functions: how do you feel these roles are set to evolve and what should modern B2B teams keep in mind as they deploy and implement various AI powered salestech and martech systems to drive revenue and go-to-market tactics?

Today’s B2B sales and marketing teams should regard AI agents as ways to augment and uplift their work. Roles may change as GTM teams have time to focus on the work that matters, delegating lower-level tasks to agents in order to drive greater impact on high-impact tasks. The best way for organizations to drive productivity and showcase ROI with AI agents is to treat the technology like a balancing act, with AI agents on one side and humans on the other. Marrying technology’s efficiency with human effectiveness drives revenue, and technology like enablement software also serves as the “beam” to help companies strike that balance.

When deploying AI-powered solutions like AI agents, B2B teams must keep this balance in mind. Without tech-powered solutions and their real-time insights, human reps minimize their effectiveness to deliver the right message to the customer at the right time. On the other hand, without human oversight and collaboration, AI agents will push forward on efficiency without direction on accuracy and effectiveness. To truly unlock the full benefits of AI tools, revenue teams must find a way to ensure this equation remains balanced with human oversight at the forefront of this transformation.

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What about today’s state of B2B revenue cycles needs to evolve in your view? How can revenue teams change them?

The state of today’s B2B revenue cycles are often isolated in silos. Sales, revenue, marketing, customer success, and other teams, work best when cross-functional collaboration is encouraged, but without this collaboration, everything from customer retention to GTM strategies suffers.

Enablement serves to break down these barriers, however, organizations need to recognize that enablement is not just for sales teams, but rather a tool that every team that contributes to revenue benefits from. In recent years, organizations have moved away from bucketing enablement solely with sales, as the term “sales enablement” has lost popularity to “GTM” (go-to-market) or “revenue” enablement. While revenue teams have helped shape enablement into a cross-functional tool, more awareness needs to be brought in around what enablement is and the benefits it brings to help transform revenue cycles into well-oiled machines.

As AI innovators build deeper AI driven capabilities, what should both sides of the coin keep in mind (users/makers)?

People, Product, Price. Those are the key determinations for buyers when selecting vendors. It’s well known that buyers often buy based on people and the relationships that are built on trust and in non-commodity products, human interaction and relationships often impact buying decisions.  Therefore, when further developing AI-driven capabilities, organizations must keep the human-tech relationship at the forefront of innovation. This ensures sellers are better equipped to meet buyers where they’re at with personalized interactions throughout the process.

AI can drive growth and efficiency, reduce costs, and help organizations differentiate from competitors, but without the human touch, these tools can create more challenges than they fix.  Buyers choose specialized solutions based on relationships and the quality of the products they sell, making it crucial to create impactful buyer engagements enhanced by AI.

Equally, developers must create technology with the end user in mind, focusing on how AI can solve problems over simply automating routine tasks. When built with this in mind, AI complements the work sellers do and empowers reps to focus on the human aspects of their jobs, resulting in best-in-class experiences.

Some AI innovators in salestech you’d like to shout out to before we wrap up.

I have had the opportunity to work at some amazing technology and consulting companies in my career – From E&Y and IBM, to Salesforce, Microsoft and Seismic. In each organization, I have been exposed to great sellers, management, solutions and processes. Thanks to this experience, I’ve developed a strong sense of what good leadership and solutions look like. Furthermore, working at Seismic, I have the privilege of working with over 2,000 companies, and some of the strongest partnerships include leading technology firms who we rely on to build and run our products.

The innovation and drive for excellence at Microsoft is something that really stands out to me, with some of the brightest minds in the market. Their work with cutting edge hardware and software cement them as a leader in many areas.  A close second is Salesforce. Who would have ever thought that a company that built a “boring” customer relationship management (CRM) system and did so by selling “rented” subscriptions with a tagline of “No Software” could one day become a tech powerhouse? They accomplished this by working harder and smarter than so many other companies that are now dinosaurs, making it all the more impressive.

Then there are the new disruptors.  These are the companies that are constantly challenging conventional wisdom and provoking innovative thinking.  Organizations like Shopify come to mind. At Seismic, we’re lucky to work with upstart companies like Nooks, CopyAI, Elastic, and ZoomInfo, who are either establishing or reinventing themselves with the advent of AI.

Finally, we’re seeing a resurgence in great legacy companies that are once again becoming innovators because of their impressive leadership.  Companies like Lumen or IBM are examples of legacy brands that have made a comeback, which I really admire.

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