IBM - Sales Distinction of the Year
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 Distinction Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Distinction of the Year - Computer Services
Nomination Title: Smart Revenue through Sales Management Support
Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the achievement since July 1, 2018 of the nominated sales organization, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words
Sales play a pivotal role in growing business, driving revenue and retaining existing customers. Working with big amounts of opportunities can always be challenging and many companies struggle with how to properly manage sales teams, pipeline input and wrangle historical and current data to maximize revenue.
At IBM, our sales force is nurtured with advisory services coming from Sales Management Support (SMS), an internal organization that provides customized insights and recommended actions for every business unit and geography to help our sales in the process of identifying, progressing and closing deals.
Sales Management Advisors (SMAs) support several thousand sales leaders across all geographies. During second half of 2018 and up to the first quarter of 2019, SMS has enabled our sales team to achieve $2.7B revenue for IBM.
SMAs have a simple task: being essential. One of their main activities is to actively participate in sales meetings, where insights and recommended actions are discussed so that actions can be taken. We’ve enabled our team with resources that allow them to give advice in the most efficient way.
When SMAs prepare their insights, they analyze big data sets taking advantage of IBM assets such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive indicators for prescriptive analysis. Two examples of these assets are:
IBM Sales Dashboard (ISD) – Online dashboard that allows teams to access real time information from CRM tools. It allows SMAs to eliminate time spent in retrieving data and creating spreadsheets and effectively increasing their ability to provide up to date analysis, maximize time in meetings tracking deal progression and understanding the strength of the sales pipeline. Dashboard is customizable to every Sales Leaders’ needs.
Sales Action Quadrants (SAQs) - Cognitive recommendation system that can categorize sales opportunities into a simple 2X2 segmentation matrix. SAQs is an AI based predictive model designed to analyze ‘seller confidence’ metrics. SAQs have helped SMAs and Sales Leaders in driving significant focus to deals that are not yet identified in seller’s forecast but have high propensity to win.
The SMS Team delivered following benefits in our Sales Organization and IBM:
Improved revenue - enabled $2.7B revenue impact (2Q18-1Q19) across all IBM Business Units by delivering creative tools to manage sales.
Enhanced Sales Management System – The usage of ISD is changing the experience of our sales teams when managing their deals and presenting their results in a customized way, showing only what’s relevant to their business and saving time for sellers to spend it with clients.
Smart Analysis – The usage of cognitive indicators has allowed SMS to save up to 180,000 hours per year in retrieving data manually.
Building Smart Revenue – Infusing analysis with cognitive indicators allows sellers to better understand their clients, build stronger relationships and helps them reaching out to new potential clients.
Cost Savings – The usage of our assets like ISD has allowed IBM to deliver up to $1M annual cost savings by eliminating 400 reports.
Our sales leader’s feedback is important. Every year, we deliver a survey using NPS index to review overall value of the organization, but we also evaluate the support given by our analysts. From the result, we derive actions and continuous improvement strategies allowing us to remain relevant and enhance our activities.
For 2019, our sales leaders’ satisfaction is high, and the number of promoters has increased compared to last year.
-Sales Management Support Organization reached NPS@50, increasing 14 points YTY.
-As for Sales Management Advisors, NPS@64, increasing 30 points YTY.
By using these assets, our SMAs are essential to the business in a smart way using the best technology available. Their support is pivotal to pre-qualify sales pipeline so that when a new quarter begins, Sales Teams can focus on building, refining and progressing strong deals in the upcoming weeks, allowing them to increase client facing time and provide integral, tailored solutions which translates into satisfied clients.