Mike Boyle:

You used the word nudge there. How can AI be used to nudge sales teams to success?

Phil Everhart:

Yeah. The technique of nudging is not only for sales teams, it also can attract customers, but the best way to implement it and to help salespeople make good decisions. The way to do this is by providing them an AI tool that is very easy to use, is timely, and it actually provides motivation like incentives to do the work. The key to all of this is having controlled artificial intelligence. That’s something we have in our system, we call that CAI, to ensure that the leadership team is providing the right nudges to produce the accurate outcomes the company desires.

Mike Boyle:

Let’s move into accurate sales forecasting, which I know is near and dear to your heart. For those who may not know, let’s start here, why is sales forecasting and doing it correctly so important to a company’s bottom line?

Phil Everhart:

Well, accurately forecasting sales is truly the lifeline to success for every business. The reason why we know that is that Wall Street says that it’s their number one indicator if a business is going to be successful. What I mean by that is it’s what helps companies plan to pay their employees in the future, cover, operate, and expenses, buy more inventory, market new products, and even attract new investors. That’s why it’s so important to have a good sales forecasting model.

Mike Boyle:

I often hear, and I’m sure you do on a daily basis, the sales forecasts are always wrong. Why is that?

Phil Everhart:

Primarily it’s because they are subjective. Let me explain the facts behind that. In 2019, a study from a notable company, called Inside Sales Labs, was performed on 270 plus thousand closed opportunities in the CRM systems, making up 18.1 billion in closed sales revenue from many companies involved in this study. What they found out is that sales forecasts were wrong 72% of the time outside of 90 days of closure and 47% of the time within 90 days of closure. Because of this problem, investors and others just have no confidence in most sales forecasts.

The reason why these stats are so bad and sales forecasts are typically wrong, is sales reps enter subjective forecast in their CRM system, meaning guesses, based on their own emotion, rather than objective data points like accomplishments and milestones. Humans just naturally do this by design while making decisions, which by the numbers and stats I just gave you prove that there’s such a big problem within accuracy of sales forecasts.

Mike Boyle:

You have a methodology that you like to talk about. It’s structure plus accountability plus accuracy equals results. Can you explain that methodology?

Phil Everhart:

Yes sir. As a part of our overall mission at SmartFox Technologies, we’ve implemented these three roles, which are the foundation of SmartFox Prime’s business forecast management system we built with Salesforce. This structure, as you said, accountability and accuracy equals results. Let me explain that.

First you have to have the right structure. What that means is the right processes in place, expectations, and having a good CRM system is one of the most important technology investments a company can make to ensure they have the right structure for growth and success. Next you have to have the right leaders who hold people accountable to acquiring the right structure. Finally, to end this, if employees agree that they have the right structure and then people can be held accountable because they’ve agreed upon it, the accuracy of their accountability brings good results. That’s the foundation of what SmartFox Prime is built on. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Mike Boyle:

Well, let’s get into SmartFox Prime technology here. Until now, Salesforce and other CRMs didn’t have a tool that helped business leaders determine a forecast model that guarantees accuracy. Talk about your SmartFox Prime technology and how you came up with it.

Phil Everhart:

Sure. Salesforce and other CRMs just don’t have a tool, like you said, that helps business leaders determine a forecast model that guarantees accuracy. The reason is Salesforce stays away from being responsible for predicting outcomes for company sales. They don’t want that responsibility. Most sales leaders are then forced to use Microsoft Excel or similar spreadsheets to help them objectively weigh their sales team’s subjective predictions.

To fix this problem, SmartFox Technologies partnered with Salesforce to build SmartFox Prime and the first ever business forecast management system. SmartFox Prime’s technology basically uses a controlled artificial intelligence to help CRM users across the world save millions by fixing inaccurate sales forecast while eliminating poor opportunity management. What this tool does is SmartFox Prime is basically an easy to use Salesforce add-on for sales teams that helps guide a sales rep through milestones in each stage of a sales cycle, use an objective performance rather than subjective guessing to predict accurate sales forecast probabilities and closing dates.

The AI outcome is that SmartFox Prime continues to fix forecast accuracy problems and save companies millions in missed forecast revenue because once we get the results, we know how to fix them on the front end as an admin to ensure we continue to drive performance. So that’s why the product was made and what the product does.

Mike Boyle:

If there are folks out there who are interested in SmartFox Prime and getting a demo, they just would have to go to your website, right?

Phil Everhart:

That’s right. We provide two options. Salesforce customers can download five free trial license of our SmartFox Prime for free. No obligations. It’s done directly from their Salesforce app exchange. That’s like their Apple shopping cart environment for Salesforce. It’s easy to install within their Salesforce org, and usually we recommend them doing in a test development environment first to try it. Also, they have the option of reaching out to us because we have the ability to create demo orgs, which are already pre-configured environments that they can play with for a period of 30 days so they don’t have to install it in their own Salesforce if they just want to do that to start off with.

Mike Boyle:

Of course we would send folks right to your website to do that. That’s smartfoxtechnologies.com, right?

Phil Everhart:

Yes sir.

Mike Boyle:

People can also contact you via the website directly as well.

Phil, thank you for giving us such a clear picture of how accurate sales forecasting and AI go hand-in-hand these days and telling us all about SmartFox Prime. It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Phil Everhart:

Thank you, Mike. It was nice to be here.

Mike Boyle:

If this is the first time you happen to be listening to our podcast and you like what you heard, make sure you follow us. We’re on all of the podcast channels. Doesn’t matter; you’ll find us everywhere. Additionally, if you happen to be a podcaster who is looking for guests who can talk about all things Salesforce and MuleSoft, you can contact us here at Ad Vic and we’ll hook you up with one of our experts. You can just go to our website, go to the contact page. Our website is advic.com; A-D-V-I-C.com. I will put a helpful link in the episode’s notes here where you can contact us and some other additional resources regarding AI and accurate sales forecasting and some of the other things that we talked with Phil about here today.

I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Vic. Thank you for joining us for our latest episode of Salesforce Simplified. Our next episode is just around the corner.