IBM - Award for Innovation in Sales

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Sales - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: BlueSeller – An Intelligent Platform for an Effective Salesforce

Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2018, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words

IBM is a global company and, as such, has thousands of products and services. For sales professionals to do their jobs effectively, they need trusted information fast. Currently, there are many disparate systems of data that have a separate entry point, content, and accuracy. It is incredibly inefficient for sales to navigate multiple sources to find answers for their customers.

BlueSeller is a scalable AI solution able to analyze and process both structured and unstructured data. BlueSeller was built to keep up with the growing demands of our sales organization. It provides a unified platform for information through an intelligent virtual agent built with cutting edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI methodologies developed by IBM Watson. BlueSeller has helped the sales organization become more productive - resulting in $2.3M of savings by reducing 20,500 workhours - and more effective - resulting in $135M of influenced revenue in 2018. BlueSeller is creating an entirely new model, allowing sellers to self-serve, reducing their dependency on SMEs, and drastically cutting the time required to address client questions.

BlueSeller leverages IBM Watson's learning capability to get information across multiple sources via a single, easy-to-use interface. The configurable and expandable design allows many different areas of knowledge to be incorporated. Simultaneously, the intelligent orchestration layer is able to understand the context behind an inquiry and find the most relevant response by searching through various corpora. This simplification masks the complexity of the system to end-users. The virtual agent drives value to our sales organization by quickly responding to questions with relevant information from IBM's internal trusted sources.

From the end user perspective, BlueSeller is highly configurable and is available through channels, including Slack, SameTime, Web, and Mobile apps. It is already embedded within various platforms leveraged by sales and the Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) Operations teams and is a one-stop-shop that allows the sales team to be productive 24x7. BlueSeller is a global tool already deployed across all geographic regions and is available in multiple languages.

The configurable design also allows the process to be duplicated for many groups. Two other groups within IBM use the same framework and point to a different knowledge source to respond to questions relating to incentives and commissions.

The BlueSeller virtual assistant is a global solution that comprises 23 areas of knowledge and is available in multiple languages. The Machine Learning (ML) model behind the cognitive solution auto learns and provides the correct response to the user. In addition, the content is continuously kept up-to-date by closely working with the business stakeholders and SMEs appointed for each domain's area of knowledge. BlueSeller allows the end-users to provide feedback directly in the app by simply pressing a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" button, which allows for continuous improvement. The agile methodology is in place with active product owner engagement, rigorous backlog management, and deployment of prioritized requirements across iterations.

BlueSeller is hosted on the IBM Cloud, and uses IBM’s own AI capabilities (Watson) including Watson Assistant (short tail answers), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Text to Speech, Speech to Text, and Watson Discovery Services (long tail answers). All of the user interaction, feedback and responses are retained in a central database for analysis. Through this, the model is continuously updated by both the ML algorithm and SMEs to keep the content current.

Business Results

BlueSeller influencesadditional revenue by providing faster answers to sellers enabling them to close deals faster. It improves sales productivity & turnaround time to close deals.

*We have already overachieved our 2019 Revenue Goals by 30%.