FRI NOV 15 2019

Product Update: Opportunities Acceleration

by Amit Pande

The Problem With CRM Forecasting: If you work in sales, you know that an ideal sales-cycle starts with a massive amount of pipeline, from which you and your team need to whittle down into opportunities you’ll actually pursue. How do you know which deals to focus on from that giant hay-field of current pipe? If you use a CRM system, it’s typically intuition on which opportunities look the most promising, or “feel good” health scores. But what if you could know exactly which deals will close? And even better, what if you could know exactly which deals in future quarters can be pulled-in to the current quarter to close your number gap? Since we created AI-powered Deal Maps, we’ve had a huge amount of feedback on how to use AI to identify upside deals not just in current quarter but also in future quarters. All of this and more is possible with applying machine learning to the sales process. Aviso’s newest product update, Opportunity Acceleration, gives you insight into the vast and confusing field of hay that is your existing and future pipeline. We created Opportunity Acceleration because we know that in addition to knowing what deals are most likely to close in the current quarter, sales teams also need to know which deals can be brought in to close the gap. A Surprising Fact about Where Revenue Actually Comes From: Aviso Pull-Ins are what powers Opportunities Acceleration. Pull-ins help sales teams accelerate their opportunities and grow revenue faster by determining which opportunities have the highest probability of closing early if pulled into the current quarter. This is extremely valuable in order to meet your number. Why? Because of this surprising fact about sales: On average, 15% of a company’s quarterly revenue comes from deals pulled from future quarters into the current quarter. How Predictive AI Can Help: By applying predictive artificial intelligence to your pipeline, you can see exactly which deals marked to close in future quarters can actually be moved up to be closed much sooner with certainty. Let’s talk about why this cannot be done with a traditional CRM system. Forecasting in CRM ties the date entered with predicted success. In reality, this won’t paint an accurate picture of predicted deal success because reps choose the forecasted close date with inherent biases, such as picking a date closer to the end of the month or not considering all of the factors going into a deal close. With machine learning, this task is data-driven, insight focused, and 96%+ accurate. As we mentioned earlier, think of your entire pipeline as a giant hayfield. Artificial intelligence can identify the hay stacks within the field (deals with the highest probability of closing if pulled-in) and show you the needles (the amount of deals you’ll actually close that are pulled-in from future quarters) hidden inside. With all this done for you, now you just have to get out there and sell! We like to think of this process as combining the best of AI insights and human execution. Pull-Ins: Prospects, Yield, and Insights: Pull-in Prospects  We know that not all next quarter opportunities are created equally. Aviso’s Pull-In Prospects provides you a curated list of pull-in opportunities the AI engine has identified as worth targeting in the current quarter. Pull-in Yield  Within the set of Pull-In prospects, Aviso’s Pull-In Yield helps better understand how many of your booked opportunities for the quarter will come from next quarter pull-ins. The yield is the ratio of predicted pull-ins that will close to total quarterly predicted booked opportunities.On average, we’ve found that 15% of quarterly revenue comes from pulled-in deals. Pull-in Insights and Charts  Aviso knows a significant chunk of bookings come from Pull-Ins and Anticipated Pipe. Pull-In Insights give enhanced perspective on bookings by showing the breakdown of bookings for the current week in the last quarter. Pull-Ins Charts help understand bookings and explore their breakdown.