The Challenge
Avaya’s forecasting process required countless hours from multiple teams each quarter. In order to produce accurate forecasts, Avaya was spending valuable hours discussing the likelihood of opportunities to close in the field, and then manually adjusting weightings, validating inputs, and aggregating data. And not all bookings were tied to opportunities with some “blind bookings” ordered without an associated opportunity. With Forecasting views located on different tabs/apps users had to swivel back and forth between them to get their forecast view, which was not efficient.
The Solution
Avaya partnered with Atrium to update its Sales Cloud application and to implement Einstein. To solve the challenges Avaya was facing, Atrium developed a customized Einstein Discovery model predicting “Propensity to Close in Quarter” for opportunities, customized the Einstein “Time Series” model used to calculate “blind bookings,” and customized CRM Analytics forecast dashboard for easy exploration and discovery of forecast results. For quick and seamless access to Sales Rep forecasts, Atrium embedded the Sales Rep dashboard in Avaya’s lightning homepage.
The Results
With CRM Analytics, Sales Reps, Managers, and Sales Ops spend far less time assembling quarterly forecasts. And the forecasts for Sales Reps and Sales Manager are now available on the Sales Rep home page so reps and managers always know where they stand without having to swivel between different apps. Also, data from CRM Analytics gives Avaya the ability to see insights into what factors are driving “likeliness to close” scores, making their quarterly forecasting effort more efficient.
More specifically, 80% of high adoption users on the sales team had quota attainment of over 95%; Avaya reduced its number of dashboards from 5,000 to 12, dramatically decreasing maintenance costs while significantly increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of its sales team. Additionally, there was an immediate 2x increase in rep adoption of dashboards. Sales reps quickly realized their efforts were more effective, and it saved them valuable time; adoption continued to steadily grow week over week.
