Idea to Trade / Next Best Product - General

Tags:

• ideatotrade
• nextbestproduct
• salesadvice
• crossindustry

Idea to Trade / Next Best Product recommendation

Executive summary

To support sales people and clients with a “next best product” recommendation, a closed loop flow has been established from Marketing / Research to Sales and eventually to the client. Evaluating which recommendations worked for Sales and Clients allowed for a learning loop informing Product Management to improve selection & tailoring of the offerings.

Problem statement

The information flow from Development and Product Management to Sales and Marketing and eventually to clients does rarely follow a structured path. Instead the company‘s “house view” is communicated broadly to all staff. Sales then use their direct client relationship to assess customer needs and extract specific requirements or ideas from their client interaction. If these match, the resulting research / advice is forwarded to the client. It seems like a lucky punch if product information leads to a trade / product sale.

Target market / Industries

Any industry which has enough data about the customer to make a recommendation for the next action / product will greatly benefit from this use-case.

Solution

Starting with product review and occasion specific sales opportunities, the existing client‘s portfolios and client communication are screened for possible gap / fit. Research / Product Management can then focus their efforts on topics suggested by Sales and Marketing staff and / or clients themselves. Observing and identifying trade success the best practices are understood and can be multiplied across other (similar) client scenarios. Product Management and Sales work collaboratively as they both evaluate which information / proposals / products are presented to clients (and then accepted or not) and which ones are kept back (and for what reasons).

The solution included:

• Clustering & topic mapping of existing marketing material & client portfolio structures
• Optionally inclusion of CRM notes and written Sales to client communication
• Sales Ontology setup & learning loop inclusion & topic matching
• Identification of individual products / topics of interest
• Aggregation of findings, reporting, alerting & action recommendation

Stakeholders

• Top Management
• Sales and Marketing
• Product Managers

Data elements, Assets and Deliverables

As an Input from the client, the following items were used:

• Sales organization setup (desks / books)
• Client to Client / Client to Company graphs

Capabilities utilized:

• Unstructured Data
• Semantic Harmonization
• NLP
• Personalization

Assets & Artefacts:

• Product Ontology
• Analytical CRM Models

The deliverables included:

• Sales & Onboarding Ontology
• Use case specific orchestration flow
• Integration with many info sources

Tags / Keywords

#ideatotrade #nextbestproduct #salesadvice #crossindustry