IBM - Best Integration of Thought Leadership into the Sales Process

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: Thought Leadership Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Integration of Thought Leadership into the Sales Process

Nomination Title: Lead to Cash Transformation with AI

IBM’s Quote to Cash (Q2C) is a sales optimization process that integrates and automates various business processes in the sales cycle. Q2C includes domains such as opportunity and lead, configure, price and quote, contract life cycle management, order management, revenue management, billing and invoicing, cash collection, and dispute management.

Prior to 2016, IBM managed globally integrated support processes for opportunity-to-order (O2O) and order-to-cash (O2C) as two separate processes. IBM optimized both processes, but the handoff between them created problems with:

»data—siloed data systems limited traceability, preventing the organization from fully integrating AI capabilities;
»cycle times—the pause between O2O and O2C increased overall cycle times;
»talent—the siloed structure limited employees’ career growth opportunities and prevented the organization from fully leveraging their skills; and
» the customer experience—customers built close relationships with bid support teams in the O2O stage of their journey but were then handed off to an entirely new team for O2C.

As a first step to resolve these issues, IBM merged the two transactional support teams, O2O and O2C. This new integrated organization had a common mission and a common vision, to improve the horizonal end-to-end process: quote-to-cash (Q2C)

To meet the growing needs of IBM Sales and Operations teams, IBM Quote-to-Cash Transformation Team embarked on this revolutionary transformation journey to infuse AI as part of the Q2C. The goal was to seamlessly integrate AI solutions using IBM Watson AI and other deep learning models into our Quote-to-Cash processes and tools with a focus on exceptional user experience.

The transformation thought leadership changed the way the Q2C were handled and revolutionized the way by focusing on 5 major areas as outlined below.

Introduction of Intelligent Workflows: Intelligent Workflows are end-to-end processes that integrate data and technology using AI and automation to improve speed and the quality of decision making directly in the workflow instead of handing off to another role or team. This approach has improved productivity in some areas by as much as 95 percent.

AI infused Enterprise Contracts Life Cycle Management: integrating AI throughout contract lifecycle management allows IBM to look at the “big picture” across contracts.This transformation enabled over $15M in productivity improvements annually primarily due to reduced cycle time.

Data Management: The organization’s common data models ensure that data is clean and standardized, allows data to move seamlessly across the cloud-based systems used for automation and AI.

Cloud: Cloud is the enabler that allows us to use cutting edge technologies despite this complex and challenging environment.

Q2C Operations: Q2C Operations teams structure their work and operate in Agile squads, allowing them to focus on what matters the most.

Introduction of guided selling experience and infusing AI in all components of Q2C are key differentiators.

AI has helped to put the right level of predictive data in the hands of the users at the right point in time during the end-to-end sales cycle to allow them to make the most informed judgement and provide them with the ability to do timely intervention and mitigate losses, either in pre-sale or post-sale phases.

Some of the key components that are unique for Q2C transformation are provided below. While they can work as standalone solutions delivering better productivity, shorter cycle times, allowing time for higher value and more meaningful work, and much more – their real power stands-out when they work in concert together, allowing the entire Q2C end-to-end process be streamlined and supported with the right data available at the right time in the right form.

BlueBot provides a unified platform for information through an intelligent virtual agent built with cutting edge natural language processing (NLP) and AI methodologies developed by IBM Watson. BlueBot has helped the Sales organization become more productive, cutting down thousands of workhours. It’s a global tool deployed across all geographic regions and available in multiple languages.

With Contracts Advisor, we created an AI capability which extracts clauses from templates enabling creation of consolidated clause library. It identifies the differences across families of templates and allows the language to be standardized across Geos and across different families of templates such as relationship agreement, statement of work etc..

Listed below are some of the AI integrated tools deployed in support of the end-to-end Quote-to-Cash process:

WinSights is a cognitive solution that provides the fastest way to build proposals, using a corpus base built with all past proposals. It serves as a trusted source for proposal writing content resulting in a drastic reduction in cycle times, the higher win rates, faster execution and lower costs on qualified opportunities

Contracting Language Analyzer allows sellers, legal, risk managers and project managers to run their contracts through the AI engine to identify non-standard terms, risky words and sentences in context, and missing basic terms/clauses, enabling them take preventive actions before it is sent to the customer for signature.

Contracts AI: Enterprise contract Repository provides a single source of truth for contractual documents with high metadata quality based on an enterprise-wide contract data model which is implemented in connected CLM systems as well. Contracts AI provides search and text-analytics that uses innovative, market-leading natural language processing to understand contracts domain and its unique language within & across universe of contracts in the enterprise.

COPRA (COgnitive PRicing Analytics) delivers the premier AI-based pricing model to improve the sales, pricing, and negotiation processes, making it easier and more effective for sellers and business partners.

Intelligent Workflow: IBM’s Intelligent Workflows embed AI directly into employees’ workflows, improving speed of execution and the quality of decision making.