Opportunity Mining Solution for Industry Leading Software Company

Business Objective
A multi-billion dollar software product company based in Redmond, WA had an enterprise sales opportunity identification and account planning process that was extremely daunting, labor intensive and very inconsistent across the organization. There was no easy way to easily identify top sales opportunities using an intelligent and standardized methodology. This wasted substantial time and energy while the sales team was not focusing their energy on the best sales opportunities. This resulted in a very inefficient sales planning process and millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

Our client wanted to create a strategic enterprise account planning tool that allowed enterprise account sales teams to consistently mine for top sales opportunities across product lines and customer segments. The business logic behind the new tool needed to take into account historical spending patterns and best practices by industry verticals, company size and product groups.

The opportunity mining tool needed to identify ideal cross-sell, upsell and increased penetration scenarios, by product line, product version, licensing type and sales scenario.

Solution
eSage Group tapped into historical sales data stored within SAP and combined this historical financial information with CRM pipeline and account/territory data to create a new opportunity mining tool and datamart based on the latest Microsoft Analytics and BI technologies.

We worked with various sales and marketing teams to determine a set of prospecting best practices that had been used effectively in the past within the organization. eSage then developed custom opportunity mining logic and machine learning algorithms to extract the strongest correlations between historical sales, company vertical, company size, product category, etc.

We combined these prospecting best practices with the new opportunity mining logic to create a layer of business rules that could be consistently applied to the sales, product, licensing and CRM data within the new opportunity datamart to surface the highest potential sales opportunities for the enterprise sales teams. Top opportunities were summarized and presented in newly developed reports and account planning tools by product line, industry vertical, geographic region and sales scenario.

eSage Group has designed, built, maintained and enhanced various versions of this enterprise account opportunity mining tool for numerous US and International sales and marketing teams at this client for the past 10+ years.

Results
The opportunity mining and account planning tools that eSage Group has developed and maintained for this client have resulted in the easy identification of millions of dollars of hidden opportunities across 1000’s of enterprise organizations worldwide. The tools have encapsulated a consistent and proven set of opportunity mining logic to locate top sales opportunities across a very large product line and client base. The tools have resulted in a substantial reduction in the time required to perform account planning and have allowed the sales teams to focus on sales tactics and approaches instead of manually mining data for hidden opportunities across the product line.
Deliverables
  • Opportunity mining datamart with automated feeds/ETL’s from various enterprise data source systems
  • Powerful opportunity mining logic and pricing algorithms across the product line
  • Portfolio of web based account planning tools for various sales scenarios and different US and WW sales and marketing teams