Data driven decision making in saleS Robert Byssz

Forecasting complex deals has always been the greatest challenge Leads & Opportunities This has been the greatest challenge for a while. However on high level it seems easy you have a pipeline, you put in leads or opportunities on the top, as you engage with the Customer you lose/close more and more of them, and at the end you win a given % of them. In a company like ours from a supply chain perspective it is super-important to forecast when that is going to take place. Why? We are producing MRs. There is apprx 100kg magnet in an MR . To get the ideal price you need to order the magnet 12 months ahead. Ideally you want to know how many MRs we need to produce in 2019 April. Likely the yourney is long for us, average sales cycle is 18-24 months. Our FC accuracy was super-low, under 50% flipping a coin is more accurate than our sales forecst. Still we push our sales people to sit down to our CRM and put there a date, and we know from the 10 dates they put in 4 will be accurate, 6 not. When are you going to close the deal?

No data Decision makers Complexity Why is it hard? In the last 10 years since the crisis in 2008 it became even more complex! Number of decision makers grew. In 2008 average team making decision about 1 M EUR equipment was 2-4 people. Our latest research shows that avrage stakeholders now reached 7, coming from 3-4 different areas of the company. Deals became more complex, in 2008 we were selling MRs, now we are selling 15 year collaboration with hospitals, empowering them with AI, Machine Learning and selling Healthcare offerings as a service. The largest where I was involved was the 500 M USD deal Making sales fact based is hard as we are doing our best in many corporations to not to collect data. As we believe sales is an art and is done by artists. And art doesnt have a process it is based on intuaition. As global sales transformation leader I believe this is WRONG. We must start foucs on how to get data about this interaction.

Digitize F2F sales people with out of the box tools Digitally enable inside sales I have seen and imlemented two ways, which I believe are good examples Digitize F2F sales good example might be: Digitally enable inside sales Today it is possible to …. Once all of that is done data starts to flow, now you need to wait… Once all in you can analyze that data, again, my advice don’t invest into building capabilities around analytical models and custom tools. So many great solutions out there, they will be good for you. We are analyzing 8000 sales users in 108 countries, generating the total of 11 Bn EUR, 0% customization on the code

Once you have the data out of the box tools will generate beautiful decision trees like this for you, and you can push all your open opportunities through this. If you do so, you will get results as we do: As of now the forecast accuracy of our algorithm is 94% on the more mature markets. On 94 opportunities out of 100 the algorithm will tell you if you win the deal or not, more to say it tells you if you are winning it on the date indicated on the opportunity or not. Can you imagine the value of this for sales people? Two customer calls and wants a f2F meeting, both for Friday afternoon. How do you choose? You just look at this number that we made available in our CRM, helps you to prioritize tremendously. Sounds cool, right? We are fact based, data driven and easily can show the value for our sales people in using AI

It must be very easy for us to implement this, right? No, it is not! And we knew it, so when we were focusing on the implementation we spent quite some effort on enaging our users, showing the value and getting them onboard. We even had a competition for best creative work about this assistant’s implementation. And look to which work we decided to give the 1st place to. It was an animation consisting of two pictures? Let’s check this out:

2025: Account manager’s reply when the Customer says I can’t sign the contract today. I’ll be back! Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? This is how some of our sales professionals looked at this cool stuff I was just presenting to you. If you leave this presentation with one thought, then I ask you let it be this one:

Fact based decision making and AI implemetnation are the biggest cultural changes your organization needed to handle in the last 40-50 years. We speak a lot about how workplaces will change once generation Z Y arrives, but I don’t hear enough professionals speak about the fact that digital transformation is not a tool implementation it is not one cool thing you need to deploy. It is the biggest cultural and business transformation you have to drive if you want to be alive 10 years from now. The way to succseed I believe is through developing resilience. You should be better speaking with HR, IT and the business about how you can improve the resilience of your corporation and the resilience of your employees. Without that you are not going to get there!