{"id":10959,"date":"2020-02-20T14:48:35","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T22:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10959"},"modified":"2023-06-11T16:03:03","modified_gmt":"2023-06-11T23:03:03","slug":"microsoft-ai-powers-better-conversations-between-sellers-and-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/microsoft-ai-powers-better-conversations-between-sellers-and-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft AI powers better conversations between sellers and customers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Using Microsoft AI and sales data from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Digital built an intelligent sales tool called Daily Recommender to drive richer, more productive conversations between buyers and sellers. Daily Recommender packages buyer insights and recommends next best actions to help Microsoft sales executives prioritize effectively and drive more business. Learn how AI applied to Dynamics data strengthens the buyer-seller relationship and adapts to customer needs by augmenting the seller experience.<\/p>\n

Microsoft internal sales executives who manage a large number of accounts operate in a challenging environment. They sell a rich suite of products using an assortment of different sales tools and fragmented data. As a result, they spend too much time gathering and verifying customer information, and too little time helping customers realize how they can achieve their business goals through Microsoft technologies.<\/p>\n

Microsoft is hardly alone in this. Distilling compelling insights from disparate, siloed information systems has historically been a complex and time-consuming task for sales executives in all industries. A holistic view of data and insights at the commercial-account level simply hasn\u2019t been available. For sellers, the challenge is that too many tools take too much of their time away from focusing on their customers.<\/p>\n

To address these challenges, Microsoft teams within sales, marketing, product groups, and Microsoft Digital partnered to build an AI-enabled sales solution called Daily Recommender. Using Microsoft AI technology, Daily Recommender packages customer insights and recommends next best actions to help Microsoft sales executives prioritize effectively and drive more business.<\/p>\n

The evolving role of sales<\/h2>\n

The modern business-to-business (B2B) buying journey has changed. Buyers no longer depend on sellers to provide basic product information upfront. Instead, customers tend to perform a significant amount of research themselves.\u00a0According to Forrester research<\/a>, nearly three quarters of B2B buyers researched at least half of their work purchases online, and 59 percent don\u2019t want to lean on salespeople as the primary source of research.<\/p>\n

In most circumstances, customers want to interact with sellers later in the buying journey, when they\u2019re closer to making a decision. Because they\u2019re more informed at this point, they expect a more personalized, productive, and efficient interaction.<\/p>\n

To accommodate this shift, the role of the seller must evolve to focus on educating buyers on how they can integrate products into their day-to-day workflows and transform their business. These conversations require deeper technical knowledge from the seller, both of the product suite and of the buyer\u2019s needs. The buyer has done their research, and they expect the seller to have done their research, too.<\/p>\n

Historically, that research took the form of preliminary conversations and meetings in which basic customer requirements were established. In this new selling landscape, sellers are expected to be equipped with that information upfront so the initial conversation is a deeper dive into technical requirements, without all the buildup.<\/p>\n

The goal for sellers in this new landscape is to remove obstacles and to facilitate a more productive and richer dialogue. To do this, sellers need access to relevant insights before speaking with the customer. They might have downloaded a white paper, attended a conference, submitted a customer-service ticket, purchased a product, or signed up for a newsletter\u2014all actions that can provide insights into the specific problem customers are trying to solve. These details can be difficult to glean in a quick phone call or meeting, and each individual signal can be seen as extraneous and not worth mentioning. By piecing this information together, however, sellers can better understand where their customers are coming from before the initial contact.<\/p>\n

The problem is that details such as these aren\u2019t easy to find in the first place, let alone piece together. They\u2019re buried in disparate, often siloed systems. Sifting through these systems and their mountains of data to find relevant insights is a time-consuming task, and one that requires exceptional research skills.<\/p>\n

The goal of Daily Recommender is to surface these signals to help sellers respond to and anticipate customer needs while respecting their valuable time. To do that, Daily Recommender augments the selling experience with scientifically generated customer insights and actionable recommendations designed to help the seller identify opportunities for net new business.<\/p>\n

Surfacing insights with AI<\/h3>\n

As illustrated in Figure 1, Daily Recommender processes more than 1,000 data points from more than 15 sources. Analyzing these signals using 20 AI models and a rule-based orchestrator, Daily Recommender provides two types of input to sellers: recommended actions and customer insights.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1. Daily Recommender input funnel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Recommended actions are actionable and time sensitive. For example, they might alert sellers to create opportunities for net new business (such as new product recommendations) or to potential churn risks.<\/p>\n

Customer insights surfaced by Daily Recommender are relevant, self-explanatory pieces of information that, although not directly actionable, provide valuable context and supplementary information to help sellers do their jobs more effectively.<\/p>\n

These recommended actions and insights are presented to sellers in Daily Recommender in three components:<\/p>\n