It might seem like an odd statement, making the most significant player in the CRM marketplace even more powerful. However, the new machine learning-powered integration we have developed here at sales-i does just that.
For several years, sales-i has had an integration with Salesforce. It works well and delivers instant reporting, customer and sales overviews, and forms part of a Salesforce users' dashboard.
However, up until now, there has been a gap in what Salesforce can deliver to salespeople. While it is the market leader for managing an organization's relationship with its customers, a gap exists around identifying future sales opportunities that exist within its users' current customers. This gap means that Salesforce users have no way of determining what these opportunities are or, vitally, how much they are worth.
Powerful future sales opportunities
One of the main benefits of sales-i is its power to identify future sales opportunities through customer sales data analytics. It answers three simple questions:
- What are your customers buying?
- What should they be buying?
- What have they stopped buying?
Using sales-i's Campaigns function to discover the answers to these questions has been why many manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution businesses have chosen sales-i to support their sales function.
But what if, by harnessing the ever-growing power of machine learning (ML), the information could be delivered to users proactively every day, for every single customer and every single product? The time-saving benefit of removing the need to create Campaigns manually is one advantage. However, the significant benefit is that an ML solution would have the capacity to do this on a massive scale. If you have hundreds of customers and thousands of product lines, the potential sales opportunities and potential returns are vast.
The development
So that was the challenge we set for our development team. A simple brief to build the power of machine learning into sales-i. The development process began in 2019 and through a series of sprints, we got closer and closer to the solution. David Hayes leads our Data Science team and he outlines the process.
We learnt that the best way to provide ML insights to the customer was to integrate these with their current sales process workflow, assisting them in making better decisions. This really highlighted the fact that ML shouldn't be treated as a bolt on or a replacement to salesperson - true positive business outcome is achieved by combining human intelligence with machine intelligence.
The result of that hard work and effort is now ready and has been christened sales-ai, with SFDC users being the first to benefit. This first step along our development roadmap identifies purchasing associations between two products and notifies the user of these opportunities, building on the learnings of the Date Science team
The new functionality assigns each opportunity a confidence score, as a measurement of the accuracy of the opportunity. These results are then delivered daily, directly into a Salesforce user's dashboard as opportunities, enabling them to follow up to secure the additional revenue.
As we progress further along our roadmap, sales-ai will continue to develop and identify associations between whole groups of products, providing even more value and potential return.
While only results with high confidence scores will be served to users, the whole scoring process will drive sales-ai’s learning algorithm to hone results over time. Users are asked to record the opportunities' outcome as won or lost, so sales-ai can continually improve the accuracy of future opportunities.
Initially, SFDC users will be the first of our partners to benefit from the launch iteration of sales-ai, but we will begin to migrate the capability into the current product over the coming months. This will give all sales-i customers the added functionality, which will positively impact their business.
Innovation with a purpose
For a long-time, AI and ML have been almost abstract ideas, with little relevance to many businesses' day-to-day operations. That changes from today with sales-ai's insight and potential return, empowering salespeople to sell smart every day. If even the most significant players such as SFDC can benefit from our integration, then there will be opportunities for every business to take advantage of sales-ai. Find out more here.
