Enable easy collaboration and sharing

Sales organizations need to collaborate effectively with their teams, their vendors and suppliers, and of course with their customers. A dynamic, AI-driven approach enables collaboration, integration, and project and data sharing. The solution does the heavy lifting and provides an integrated offering with built-in collaboration across the sales lifecycle.

The end result is delivery of more sales proposals, better offerings that comply with company best practices, and more efficient workflows that are based on consistent data.

Keep tabs on the business

How can managers understand exactly how they, the business, and their teams are doing and where they need to improve? AI and big data can provide easy access to business intelligence and actionable insights.

Business management typically relies on multiple internal and external tools and reports. Any analysis or validation is typically performed manually and as needed, rather than as part of normal workflow processes.

Staying abreast of technology supplier incentives and promotions is daunting: minutiae on up-front discounts and back-end rebate programs as well as programs based on employee certifications and specializations can be overwhelming. For most solution providers, these programs have a significant impact on margin and profitability. For large companies, the impact can be in the millions of dollars. Managers use time-consuming manual processes to piece together ever-changing qualification and compliance criteria from complicated data sources and vendor systems.  

AI can increase profitability through deal registration management, greater program participation, and tighter relationships with suppliers and distributors. All deal data can be consolidated in one place, including direct, indirect, and distributor data, with comprehensive data mining and drill-down capabilities.

At a glance, managers can understand margins, increase revenues, drive best practices, and improve processes.

Alerts can be provided to potential situations that either invalidate or increase the rebate, with relevant information provided to dispute transactions with the vendor to ensure payment for all earned transactions.

Reviewing proposals for increased profitability

Final reviews of Bills of Materials (BOMs) for profitability enhancements are often desirable. To manually analyze BOMs, solution providers gather information from multiple vendor systems and then match to the BOM’s SKUs. For example, solution providers may inadvertently sell stock that will be end-of-sale soon, thereafter impacting customer satisfaction.

AI can dramatically simplify the process of analyzing BOMs so optimization can become part of the sales workflow on every deal. AI algorithms automatically analyze relevant promotion, and other information gathered from multiple vendor systems. Insights are summarized in a dashboard with deep drill-down capabilities. Opportunities to increase margin can be identified, as well as the actions to take to capture rebates, align SKUs, and identify products that should be upgraded.

Elevating Sales Business Using Big Data and AI

The application of AI techniques to sales’ big data can have a significant impact on business outcomes. It can dynamically impact selling motion and workflow efficiencies. AI can drive sales behavior toward business goals throughout the sales cycle, while eliminating manual analysis and the need to query multiple complex vendor systems.

Insights can be provided automatically on risks and opportunities so sales organizations can spend the time taking action, not plowing through data. Increased deal profitability and team productivity result in competitive advantage.

SDN and SD-WAN are making networks more agile, freeing enterprise customers from vendor lock-in, and ensuring network optimization. These technologies enable data centers to coordinate and manage a variety of service types dynamically, which is key to many business transformations. This combined with the new generation of AI capabilities is already bringing business benefits to solution providers.