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(And Why Nobody Can Name the Baby)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...
Charles Dickens wrote that in 1859. He was describing London and Paris during the French Revolution.
He could have been describing the sales enablement market in 2026.
Two mergers in four months. Showpad and Bigtincan. Highspot and Seismic.
Four of the biggest names in enablement, quietly admitting they couldn’t get where they needed to go alone.
If you’re a customer of any of these four platforms, you already know which Dickens line applies to you. If you’re still on a contract and just found out your vendor’s roadmap is now someone else’s problem - you’re living in the worst of times. If you’re watching from the outside and asking bigger questions about where enablement goes from here - you might be living in the best.
Either way, the story is the same.
The Naming Problem
Our sales team raised a question last week that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
What do you actually call these merged entities?
This sounds like a joke. It is, a little. But stay with me.
Highspot + Seismic. What do we call it?
Highsmic? Sounds like a medical condition. Seisspot? Sounds like a rash. High-Seismic Activity? That’s an earthquake warning, which — actually, fair.
Showpad + Bigtincan. Let’s try.
Bigpad? Let’s... not. Showcan? Sounds like a toilet brand. BigShow? That’s a wrestling move. Two heavyweights, zero agility.
Someone on the team suggested the celebrity couple angle. Highspot + Seismic is Brad and Angelina - the glamorous power couple everyone assumed would work. Showpad + Bigtincan is the zebra and the donkey - technically related species, but the offspring is... confused.
None of the names work. If you want to experience the full naming chaos for yourself, we turned it into something interactive. Go ahead and vote. We promise it’s more fun than most roadmap briefings. See the naming experiment here.
And this is where the joke stops being a joke.
The names don’t work because the mergers don’t produce anything coherent.
You can’t name it because it doesn’t have an identity. It has two identities stitched together. Two content management systems. Two learning platforms. Two sets of integrations. Two roadmaps that now need to become one. Two customer bases that were promised different things.
The naming problem is the architecture problem.
The Pattern Nobody’s Naming
Let’s zoom out for a second.
Two of the largest enablement companies in the world each decided, within months of each other, that they couldn’t continue alone. The market read this as consolidation - a natural maturing of the category. Bigger is better. Economies of scale. The usual narrative.
I think the market read it wrong.
These companies didn’t merge because they were thriving. They merged because they hit the same ceiling. And the ceiling has a name. The shift beyond that ceiling is emerging as Signal Architecture - the foundation of Revenue Activation.
Storage.
Every legacy enablement platform was built on the same foundational assumption: that the core job is to store things. Store content. Store training. Store coaching records. Store analytics. The platform is a repository, and the value proposition is organization.
That architecture produced real value for a decade. Content chaos was a real problem. These platforms solved it. I’m not dismissing what they built.
But storage has a ceiling.
You can make the library bigger. You can make search better. You can add AI to help reps find things faster inside the portal. But the fundamental motion doesn’t change: the rep has to stop selling, go somewhere, find something, and come back.
Stop. Search. Resume.
That’s the architecture. And merging two platforms that share it doesn’t change it. It just makes the library bigger.
A bigger library is still a library.
What Dickens Actually Understood
Here’s the thing about A Tale of Two Cities that most people miss.
The story isn’t resolved by merging London and Paris. The two cities don’t become one. The contradiction between them - privilege and poverty, order and chaos, old regime and revolution - isn’t resolved by combination.
It’s resolved by transformation.
Sydney Carton doesn’t merge two identities. He transcends them. The resolution isn’t additive. It’s architectural.
Same physics in enablement.
The enablement category isn’t going to be fixed by merging Highspot with Seismic. Or Showpad with Bigtincan. Or any combination of storage platforms with other storage platforms. The ceiling doesn’t move because you put two companies under it.
The ceiling moves when you change the architecture.
Storage vs. Signal
There’s a different architecture. One that doesn’t start with “store things and hope reps visit.” It starts with “map the signal and deliver it where the rep already is.”
What is storage architecture?
In a storage architecture, content lives in a portal. Reps visit the portal. The platform measures visits.
What is signal architecture?
In a signal architecture, context appears in the workflow. Reps don’t go anywhere. The platform measures revenue impact.
In a storage architecture, training happens in a classroom. Completion is tracked. Knowledge decays.
In signal architecture, learning is reinforced in the deal. The moment of friction becomes the moment of coaching. Knowledge compounds.
In a storage architecture, the AI helps you search the portal faster.
In a signal architecture, the AI injects the right context before you even think to search.
Stop-search-resume vs. context-appears-execute-close.
These aren’t two points on a spectrum. They’re two different architectures. And you can’t get from one to the other by merging two instances of the first.
Signal architecture is not a feature bundle. It activates five execution levers in concert:
- Ramp Acceleration
- In-Flow Activation
- Content Velocity
- Coaching Precision
- Revenue Proof
When these levers operate inside the deal, execution stabilizes. When they don’t, performance varies rep by rep.
What This Means If You’re a Customer
If you’re currently on Highspot, Seismic, Showpad, or Bigtincan, the next 12 months are going to feel like this:
Your roadmap will slow down. It has to. Two engineering teams need to be integrated. Two product visions need to be reconciled. Features you were promised will be deprioritized. Migration timelines will be longer than anyone is currently admitting.
Your vendor’s attention will shift. Account teams will be reorganized. Your champion at the vendor might leave. The sales motion will be about retaining you, not delighting you.
And at the end of it - after the reorg, the migration, the re-training - you’ll have a bigger portal.
The ceiling will be in exactly the same place.
This isn’t anger. It’s architecture. No one at Highspot or Seismic or Showpad or Bigtincan is doing anything wrong. They’re doing the logical thing given the system they’re in. But the system is the constraint.
The question isn’t whether the merger will succeed. The question is whether a successful merger solves the actual problem.
The Better Question
We started this piece trying to name the baby. Highsmic. Seisspot. BigShow. None of them worked.
But maybe the question was wrong all along.
Maybe the question isn’t what you call the merged entity. Maybe the question is what comes after the ceiling.
What does enablement look like when you replace storage with signal? When content finds the rep instead of the other way around? When coaching happens in the deal, not after it? When the platform doesn’t measure views but measures revenue impact?
There’s a name for that.
And unlike the mergers, it doesn’t need a portmanteau.
It needs a new architecture.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” - Sydney Carton, on leaving a legacy enablement platform
