What You Can Do with Einstein Opportunity Scoring :

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January 21, 2021
What You Can Do with Einstein Opportunity Scoring
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“We don’t really know.” “We will try it and then find out.” These are the typical answers I get when I ask customers how they will use Einstein Opportunity Scoring, a feature that uses artificial intelligence to tell you the likelihood that an opportunity will be won. Not having a clear sense of why to use a product is a recipe for low adoption, frustration, and, eventually, indifference. And as an #AwesomeAdmin, it’s your job to help your users understand the benefit and the WIIFY (what’s in it for you/them).

After reading this blog post, you’ll know how to identify the users who can benefit the most from using Einstein Opportunity Scoring. You’ll also get the tools needed to guide those users on best practices to drive the most reward out of this product

Sales managers need objective pipeline inspection

Sales managers want to help their teams hit their quota. They also want to maintain an accurate forecast for better planning and reporting.

But they face two significant challenges to meet their goals:

  • They just can’t track every deal because there are too many.
  • In many cases, the data reported to Salesforce is partial, not-accurate, or reflects sandbagging.

Ideally, they would review or question each and every deal, but that’s just impossible. Sales managers seek tools that surface the deals that are worth their attention. That way, they can invest their time on the deals that impact their quota and coach reps on the critical things.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring provides an unbiased, objective prediction of the likelihood of closing a deal, based on data patterns found on previously closed deals. Sales managers can use it as an additional data point that uncovers hidden information and optimizes their time toward important deals.

The best way to use Einstein Opportunity Scoring for sales managers

Use the scores in the right context and look for anomalies

Deals in late stages with low scores need your attention! For example, when the stage is negotiations, and the score is <30.
These are the opportunities that might slip if you don’t take action.

On the other hand, if you’re about to close the month/quarter and you seek quick wins, check out the opportunities with an early stage and a high score. For example, the stage is qualification and the score is >80. You might find that you can move them forward in the pipeline faster than expected.

It’s worth keeping in mind that low scores for early stages are normal and might not be actionable. High scores for late stage are amazing but also might not be actionable. I recommend using these cases as a validation for your pipeline progress and accuracy.

Here’s an example of an opportunity in a late stage (Negotiation) with a very high dollar amount and a low score (19):

Prioritize a high volume of opportunities

Sales reps who manage up to 20 deals in their pipeline are less likely to need Einstein Opportunity Scoring. They know their deals by heart. They don’t need an algorithm that tells them the status of their deals.

However, as a tool, Einstein Opportunity Scoring becomes critical when you have increasingly more deals in your pipeline. You need Einstein Opportunity Scoring when you face difficult questions, such as:

  • Which deal is more important?
  • Where should I invest my time?
  • Who should I reach out to first?
  • Who should I schedule a meeting with?
  • Which deal should I get a discount for?
  • Which deal should I surface to my manager?

The best way to use Einstein Opportunity Scoring for sales reps

Prioritize deals

Sort the deals according to the score. The score helps you decide which deal is more critical at the moment. It becomes more important when you lack prior information about the deals and need another data point to decide. For example: Say you have two deals that are progressing very well, and both are relatively mature, but you’re not sure about either of them. Use the score to decide.

Identify low-hanging fruit

In many cases, opportunities land on our pipeline when they’re immature. We need more time for the discovery phase, and sometimes, we end up wasting our time on the bad deals. Use the scores to identify the opportunities with the highest scores in the early stages, so you know where to put more resources.

Pro tip: An opportunity score is only as good as the data within the opportunity. If you see a low score for an opportunity that was just created, don’t be bothered. Use that as guidance to fill in more information or conduct more discovery.

What you need to know about key factors

Key factors, or insights, are the reasons behind the scores. They’re the most significant factors that influenced the deal’s score. You can learn what action to take to move the score and the deal forward in some cases; for example, the lack of recent activity.

In other cases, they’ll describe the deal’s characteristics where you don’t have a real influence; for example, record type is “new business.” That’s okay!

Keep in mind that some additional factors (AI features) are considered and are not visible. This is mainly because they’re not always business-meaningful, but prove to be accurate to the prediction, so they can’t be presented to end users such as sales reps and managers.

Get started with Einstein Opportunity Scoring today

Einstein Opportunity Scoring is an excellent tool that sales managers can use to get an objective evaluation of their pipeline to identify deals that need their attention, so they can handle critical conversations with their sales reps. And, sales reps can benefit, especially, if they deal with a high volume of opportunities.

Be sure to Enable Einstein Opportunity Scoring from setup. Follow these guidelines from help & training, and consider using a subset of your opportunities when building the scoring model.

So go and pick a few sales managers and sales reps that you think are more likely to embed innovation in their day to day. Equip them with these learnings and best practices, and collect their ongoing feedback.

Resources

The post What You Can Do with Einstein Opportunity Scoring appeared first on Salesforce Admins.


January 21, 2021 at 01:37AM
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