Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. IBM helps its clients capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to its clients.
Nomination Category: Solutions & Implementations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Management Solution - Implementation
 Nomination Title: IBM Technology and Consulting Sales Collaboration bot
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated implementation, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- State the the date on which the nominated solution was first available:
The Collaboration Slack bot was released globally on July 1, 2024.
- Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated Sales Management Solution (up to 350 words):
Total 346 words used.
The IBM Chief Analytics Office (CAO) team implemented a solution which allows to analyze and match sales opportunity data where collaboration b/w the technology and consulting teams could yield better outcome. Then, it stimulates collaboration through targeted communication with strategic opportunity owners in a way that makes it easy for sellers to identify and track deals that can leverage these advantages as well as assess the impact of collaboration and direct investment to the right areas. This solution utilizes an automated bot that sends a notification to the sellers asking them to validate/confirm if they are collaborating (via Slack collaboration tool) and records their response directly in the sales platform (Salesforce).
In particular, the algorithms identify against the following criteria:
- Identifying which products can be sold in collaboration: A heatmap of associated offerings between the different brands created using semantic matching and indicating a likelihood score
- Identifying sets of opportunities that have products from each brand at the same client, within a specified timeframe
- Identifying clients, within a market, that have a high likelihood of joint sales collaboration due to their strategic importance
These opportunities are identified automatically every week and fed to a message handler that initiates communication from the bot within the Slack collaboration tool.
The benefits of the system include:
- efficiency for the sellers – they don’t need to manually review all their opportunities to ensure they’ve tracked this information, instead it is all automated through a push notification from the Slack bot
- stimulation of new collaboration to increase overall sales revenue - the message from the Slack bot includes a link for sellers that may not be aware, but would like to begin collaborating in the process
- an improved ability to study the practice and impact of collaboration to target accounts and offerings that show high potential for additional collaboration – the results of this tracking help to quickly identify key accounts and sellers that would benefit from focusing more on collaboration and additionally create a history of successful collaboration that can be used to identify best products to be sold together.
- Outline the need or problem that was identified, why the solution was chosen, how the solution was implemented, and the results of your implementation to date (up to 350 words):
Total 276 words used.
There is no simple way to identify from the existing data which opportunities are likely to have collaboration, resulting in approximately 50% of targeted sales being untracked, unreported, and un-analyzed. This was the key need that prompted the development of the Slack bot.
By assisting and encouraging brand sellers to collaborate, the Slack bot allows to deliver stronger value to clients while increasing the revenue. IBM sees an average of 800% increase in Technology Sales contract value when sold alongside IBM Consulting services, and with a similar win rate. Measuring, championing, and enabling this collaboration requires consistent tracking of collaborative opportunities. When enterprise technology and services are acquired together from IBM, clients benefit by having implementation of software enabled by the experts who are deeply engaged with that technology, while also lowering the risks associated with the project.
Since its launch, the solution has tracked an additional $299M in collaborative technology opportunities across 384 opportunities, which would not have occurred without this program. Of these, $88.5M are now won, contributing to IBM top line revenue. Additionally, 2,870 hours of data entry time were saved by using this solution.
“Without this, our system of record would be up in the air. If we don’t do it right, we can’t track collaboration. This is the heart of the whole program. The automation will ease the time on the seller and make it more accurate” – Sevgi Koklu, VP, IBM Technology Consulting Alliance
“I believe the slack bot is an excellent tool to allow sellers to share their collaboration efforts between IBM technology and consulting. Provides them with alerts and reminders too. “ ITCA Slack Bot User
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
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