IBM Data & AI on Z Go-To-Market & Sales Funnel Analysis & Optimization
Client:
IBM
Project Date:
February 2020
Objectives:
Streamline and enhance IBM's sales funnel for AI offerings to drive increased conversions, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth in new upcoming AI products.
Situation & Tasks:
With the AI market evolving rapidly, IBM identified an opportunity to refine its sales funnel to better target potential customers and reduce friction in the AI purchasing journey. The challenge was to understand the existing funnel inefficiencies, gather insights on the customer's needs and preferences, sales team incentives and drivers, and recommend improvements that would make the buying process more intuitive and effective both on the customer and sales side.
Actions:
Data Analysis: Reviewed historical sales data and used analytics tools to identify drop-off points and inefficiencies in the current sales funnel.
Customer Insights: Conducted surveys and interviews with existing and potential customers to understand their purchasing journey and potential roadblocks they encountered.
Seller Insights: Conducted interviews with sales team specialists across IBM Systems’s sales organization to gain insights on drop-off points and sales team motivators.
Funnel Structuring: Modeled IBM’s complex customer funnel & sales pipeline behaviors for quick and easy communication. Identified bottlenecks, areas of cross organizational impact, oversights, and opportunities-lost metrics. Redesigned the sales funnel stages to better align with customer needs and sales motivation, ensuring smoother transitions and reducing barriers to purchase.
Content Enhancement: Curated AI-specific content tailored to each stage of the funnel, ensuring that potential customers received the right information at the right time to aid their decision-making process and facilitating outreach by IBM sellers.
Sales Training: Conducted workshops for the sales team, familiarizing them with the revamped funnel and equipping them with strategies to effectively guide prospects through each stage.
Feedback Mechanism: Integrated a feedback loop for customers post-purchase to continuously gather insights and make iterative improvements to the funnel.
Performance Monitoring: Set up KPIs and monitoring tools to regularly track the performance of the optimized sales funnel, ensuring sustained effectiveness and the ability to quickly adapt to any emerging trends or challenges.
Results:
The optimized sales funnel resulted in a 50% increase in sales opportunities and enterprise license agreement contracts for IBM's AI products, with customers and sellers alike reporting a more seamless and informative buying experience. Additionally, sales teams noted improved interactions with prospects and an ease in explaining AI products in relation to customer needs, leading to better customer relationships and sales opportunities.
