The 6 Billion Life Raft

I'm rubbish at poker. Genuinely terrible. I over-bet when I'm nervous, fold when I should hold, and my face gives away everything before the cards hit the table. But even I know this: when two players at the same table, both running low on chips, decide to merge their stacks and play as one? That's not confidence. That's survival.

In February 2026, Highspot and Seismic announced they would merge into a single entity valued at over $6 billion. The combined company will operate under the Seismic brand, led by CEO Rob Tarkoff, with Permira (a private equity firm that has backed Seismic since 2020) remaining the controlling shareholder.

The press releases called it a "new era for sales enablement." LinkedIn lit up with congratulations. Analysts wrote measured takes about market consolidation.

I read the news on a Tuesday morning, put my phone down, and said to Alex: "They're scared."

The two biggest sales enablement platforms on the planet, with over $1 billion in combined venture funding between them, just admitted they can't win alone.

Think about that for a second.

A billion dollars in

Highspot had raised roughly $648 million by 2022, at a post-money valuation of $3.5 billion. Seismic had raised over $440 million. Combined: more than $1 billion in investor capital, poured into two companies building roughly the same thing for roughly the same buyers.

And what did a billion dollars produce? Content management platforms. Portals where marketing uploads decks, sales occasionally downloads them, and leadership stares at adoption dashboards wondering why nobody logged in after week three.

I ran enablement at a company that grew from 100 people to 1,500. We had the budget. We had the tools (including platforms like these). We built beautiful content libraries, gorgeous playbooks, and comprehensive training programmes. The reps loved the sessions. They praised the materials. They passed every quiz.

Then we watched the call recordings.

Nobody did anything we told them to do. Ever.

When I raised this with industry peers, they literally laughed. "Welcome to enablement," they said. That was the catchphrase. Welcome to enablement, where we all know the training doesn't stick and the content doesn't get used, but we keep building it anyway because the alternative is admitting the whole model is broken.

Sound familiar?

The architecture problem nobody wants to name

GTM Buddy published an analysis of the merger that was the most honest thing I read in the weeks following the announcement. They called it what it is: "two platforms built on the same broken architecture: storage-first, portal-dependent, preparation-focused."

That's the bit everyone dances around. Highspot and Seismic aren't bad products. They're competent at what they do. The problem is that what they do is completely disconnected from where the actual selling happens.

A rep is about to jump on a discovery call. They have 3 minutes. Are they logging into a content portal, searching through a taxonomy of folders, finding the right battle card, reading it, internalising it, and applying it to their specific prospect's situation?

Of course not. They're winging it.

I call this The Context Gap: the distance between where training and content live, and where the actual selling happens. Portals are, by definition, somewhere else. They require the rep to leave their workflow, navigate to a separate system, find what they need, and then bring it back to the moment. That journey is where 90% of enablement value evaporates.

Better search won't fix this. Better AI-powered recommendations won't fix this. Better analytics won't fix this. If the system lives outside the moment of execution, most reps will never use it when it matters most.

We've seen this film before

Here's a detail that should make every Highspot and Seismic customer sit up. In 2021, Seismic acquired Lessonly for a reported $170 million. The pitch was simple: combine Seismic's content management with Lessonly's training delivery. One platform. Unified enablement.

Two years later? Still separate logins.

GTM Buddy estimates that surface-level unification of two enterprise platforms takes 2 to 3 years. True architectural convergence, if it happens at all, is a 4 to 5 year project. And that was an acquisition where Seismic was clearly the buyer integrating a smaller, simpler product.

Now they're merging with a company of equal complexity. Highspot has its own data models, its own API architecture, its own CRM integrations, its own customer configurations. Seismic has theirs. Bolting those together whilst keeping both customer bases happy, whilst cutting costs (because that's what PE firms do), whilst simultaneously trying to pivot to "agentic AI" (because that's what the market demands)?

Good luck.

The PE playbook is not your friend

I want to be direct about what a Permira-controlled merger means in practice. Private equity firms don't buy companies to innovate. They buy companies to optimise margins and exit at a multiple.

The playbook is well-documented:

1. Consolidate overlapping functions (sales teams, customer success, engineering, marketing)
2. Raise prices because there's less competition and customers are locked into multi-year contracts
3. Reduce R&D spend relative to revenue, because innovation takes years to pay off and PE holds are typically 4 to 7 years
4. Package for exit (IPO or sale to a larger acquirer)

Gartner published a First Take on the merger titled: "Seismic-Highspot Pending Merger Limits Options, Raises Risks." That's Gartner. Not exactly known for dramatic language. And even they're telling enablement buyers: you now have fewer choices and more risk.

And this isn't a one-off. Vector Capital merged Showpad and Bigtincan in October 2025. Two PE-backed enablement consolidations in four months. The content portal model of enablement isn't growing fast enough to justify its valuations, so the money is consolidating to survive.

Meanwhile, the ground shifted

Whilst the old guard merges to protect market share, the actual problem has moved on.

Gartner predicts that AI-driven enablement will deliver 40% faster sales stage velocity than traditional enablement methods by 2029. Not 40% more content consumed. Not 40% better quiz scores. 40% faster movement through the actual pipeline.

Read that again. The traditional enablement stack measures success by inputs: content views, course completions, adoption rates. The next generation measures success by outputs: did the rep actually execute the methodology on the call? Did the deal move forward? Did behaviour change?

This is what I call Performance Drift: the growing gap between what reps learn in training and what they execute in real selling. Every enablement leader I've spoken to in the past year acknowledges this gap exists. Most of them have no way to measure it. The merged Highspot-Seismic entity, for all its $6 billion in combined valuation, still doesn't have a way to measure it either.

Because you cannot measure execution from a content portal. You can measure whether someone opened a document. You cannot measure whether they used what was in it.

What actually works (and why it looks nothing like a portal)

The future of enablement isn't a bigger portal. It's not a more comprehensive content library. It's not even a better LMS.

It's coaching and guidance that lives inside the workflow, at the moment of execution, personalised to the rep's specific deal and the buyer's specific situation.

When a rep is writing a follow-up email after a discovery call, the system should already know what was discussed, what gaps were identified, and what the next step should be. When a manager has 50 pipeline deals to review this week and time for maybe 8, the system should surface the ones where execution is drifting from the methodology. Not just the ones with the biggest number attached.

This is the shift from "preparation-focused" to "execution-focused" enablement. It requires a completely different architecture: one that's embedded in the rep's workflow, not sitting in a separate tab they never open.

Two life rafts, still sinking

I don't take pleasure in saying this. Thousands of good people work at Highspot and Seismic. They've built real products that real companies use. But merging two content portals, no matter how well-funded, does not solve the execution problem.

It's like combining two libraries and calling it a gym. You've got more books. You've got a bigger building. You've even got some very nice AI-powered book recommendations. But nobody in that building is actually lifting any weights.

The enablement industry spent the last decade building the world's most sophisticated content delivery infrastructure. And it worked, for the content. The content gets delivered. The decks are polished. The playbooks are comprehensive.

The reps just don't do any of it on real calls.

$6 billion for a bigger library. Still no gym.