On 18 August, Seismic completed its merger with Highspot. The combined company serves 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users, and it is no longer describing itself as a sales enablement company. It is now positioning around go-to-market performance, which its own announcement defines as how effectively companies turn strategy into revenue.
If you are one of those 2,500 customers, nothing in your contract changed this week. Your renewal date is the same. Your users log in the same way. Your invoice is unchanged.
Something did change, though, and it is worth about twenty minutes of your attention.
You bought a platform to do a particular job. The company that sells it has just told the market it is now in the business of a different, larger job. That is not automatically bad news. It might be exactly where you want to go. But it is a change, and the honest response to it is neither alarm nor indifference. It is a question: does the new destination still match the job we hired this vendor to do?
Most buyers never ask it. You evaluate a vendor at the point of purchase, against a specific problem, a specific comparison set and a specific budget. Then two or three years pass, the renewal arrives as an administrative event, and nobody revisits the thesis. Meanwhile the category underneath the vendor has moved.
This piece is about what to do when that happens. It applies to this merger. It will apply to the next one too, and there will be a next one.
What a category actually governs
It is tempting to treat a category change as marketing. New words, same software, no consequence.
Sometimes that is exactly what it is. But a category is not a description a company applies to itself after the fact. It is closer to a set of instructions the company then follows, because the category determines:
Who the vendor competes with: A different comparison set changes what gets built, because roadmaps are shaped as much by what rivals ship as by what customers ask for.
Who the vendor sells to: A broader category usually means a more senior buyer with a bigger budget. That changes which requests get heard.
What the vendor is measured on: Internally, a company reorganises around the outcomes its category promises. Those become the metrics that matter in planning.
What gets deprioritised: This is the one that reaches you. Every roadmap is a queue, and a category change reorders it. The capabilities closest to the new promise move up. The ones closest to the old promise wait.
That last point is the whole reason this matters to a customer. You are not renewing the product as it exists today. You are renewing your position in a queue whose ordering has just changed.
Five questions worth asking before you renew
Here is a diagnostic you can run in a single sitting. It works for any vendor changing categories, not just this one.
The three theses
Write these out. It takes ten minutes and it is the single most useful thing in this article.
The original purchase thesis: Why did we buy this? What was the problem, who felt it, and what did we expect to change? Go and find the business case if it still exists.
The current vendor thesis: What does this vendor now say it solves? Not what it said when you bought-what it says on its website today, in its announcements this quarter, to its investors.
The current business problem: What do we actually need solved in the next twelve months?
Then compare all three.
If they still overlap, renew with confidence and stop worrying about it. A category change with no consequence for you is genuinely a non-event.
If they have diverged, you do not necessarily have a switching decision. You have something more useful: a live strategic buying decision, made deliberately, at a moment when you have leverage, rather than one made by default on a renewal date.
Where this leaves enablement
Here is our read, and we will be direct that we have a position in this.
We do not think there are three competing categories to choose between. We think there is one shift, and everything else is a description of where a given vendor stands inside it.
Enablement was designed for a constraint that no longer binds. Content was scarce, production was expensive, and the sensible answer was to build a repository and train sellers to retrieve from it. That architecture worked. It is now the limiting factor, because it puts the burden of retrieval on the seller at exactly the moment they have least capacity to carry it.
What changes in the agentic era is not that enablement was wrong. It is that the unit changed. Before AI, the default instrument available for adding revenue capacity was adding sellers. That is no longer true, and once it stops being true, the interesting measure is no longer how much content was published or how many courses were completed. It is revenue capacity per rep, the revenue a single seller can carry and close once the friction around the conversation is removed.
Enablement equipped the human. Activation multiplies the human. The discipline carries forward, the practitioners carry forward, the accumulated craft carries forward. What changes is the architecture beneath them.
Against that frame, "go-to-market performance" is not a rival category. It is a position taken within the same shift, and the fair question about it is question one above: did the architecture change, or the language?
We would note only what the announcement itself says. Its stated argument is that AI without trusted content and context does not automatically produce better results. That is a content-and-context argument-a claim about holding the right material. It is a reasonable claim. Taken on its own, that remains structurally a repository proposition described in newer terms, and it is worth asking whether the thing underneath it is organised around retrieval or around action.
We would not tell you the answer. We would tell you it is the question, and that you are better placed to test it than we are, because you use the product every day and we do not.
The part that also applies to us
We should be straight about something, because this framework does not only point outward.
GTM Buddy changed categories too. Our customers bought a sales enablement platform and now sit inside a category we named - Revenue Activation. If the argument in this article is sound, then our own customers are entitled to run these five questions on us, and we would rather they did it deliberately than let it sit unexamined.
So, briefly, our own answers:
Did the architecture change?
Yes, and this is the one we would put weight on. Agents that act rather than retrieve. A skills framework so that method is executed consistently rather than re-prompted each time. An open protocol layer so that governed capability is callable from whichever AI surface a customer has standardised on, rather than only from our own interface. None of that was possible under a repository design, and none of it is packaging.
What are we still building?
The honest answer is the link from activity to revenue. We can demonstrate competency uplift, that a learning intervention changed what a seller does in live calls, measured against a rubric. Connecting that all the way through to win rate and quota attainment is on our roadmap and is not finished. Anyone telling you they have closed that loop completely is describing an ambition. It is, as it happens, the same gap the broader profession has: independent assessment suggests the large majority of enablement functions cannot connect their work to recognised revenue in any measured way.
Which points at something the whole category tends to skip.
The thing no platform sells you
Every vendor in this market, us included, will sell you a platform. Increasingly they will sell you AI that tells you what happened.
None of them sells you the diagnosis. None of them sells you the baseline you agreed with your executives before you built anything. That is not a feature, it cannot be procured, and it is the part that determines whether any of the rest produces a defensible number.
The tooling is about to get very good at telling you what happened. Working out what should have happened, and what it was worth, is still yours to do.
If a category change is going to prompt you to revisit anything, revisit that. Whether you end up renewing with your current vendor or not is a second-order question and it becomes a much easier one to answer once the baseline exists.
Run the diagnostic: A Revenue Activation Audit is a structured session that establishes where your revenue capacity is currently constrained and what a realistic baseline looks like. It is not a demo. You can run it whether or not you ever talk to us about our product, and several organisations have done exactly that.
If your renewal is inside the next two quarters, now is the useful time.
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