Infor Launches Sales Intelligence for CRM
Infor, a provider of cloud-based business applications, today added Sales Intelligence—a technology that leverages customer data to help sales teams make better decisions, strengthen customer relationships, and boost sales—to its CRM system.
As part of Infor's Customer Experience Management Suite, Sales Intelligence for CRM helps sales professionals prioritize customers and therefore tend to the most promising ones. The technology ranks each prospect from 1-10, according to his likelihood to buy, and assists users in initiating customer conversations by providing them with product recommendations, and the reasoning behind those recommendations. According to the company’s website, the intelligent recommendations may also help users cross-sell to their customers, as they can determine which products are best suited to them at a particular moment. For instance, the system will avoid recommending a product the customer already owns.
The system uses data science algorithms to surface the top results and includes a self-learning engine that adjusts its procedures over time, with each new piece of data it absorbs. Rather than indiscriminately adding prospects to a company’s sales funnel, the idea is to determine where end users should focus their efforts, and see where where the customer is on what the vendor refers to as the "purchase continuum." The solution's goal is to nudge users to reach the full potential of each of their relationships, strengthen customer satisfaction, and stimulate loyalty, by fostering interactions that takes into account personal needs.
According to Jason Rushforth, general manager and vice president of Infor's Customer Experience Suite, Sales Intelligence's biggest differentiator in today’s market is its ability to predict purchase likelihood within a defined time period. Many tools on the market are said to be focused on sales intelligence but are often more focused on scoring leads "to move a lead through the funnel, and not necessarily to a close," he says. Others tools look "for additional ways to increase data with nominal value added to the organization, which leads to a more complex and costly implementation."
Sales Intelligence, Rushforth says, can be easily configured, as it calls for simple integrations with
Infor or Salesforce.com. The system's embedded machine learning algorithms mold themselves to sync with an organization's data characteristics, allowing users to draw from commonly available customer files and transactional data.
In a separate statement, Rushforth noted the need to put customer data "to work":
"Analytics are continuing to drive business decisions, and organizations need to do more than just collect customer data—they need to put it to work. By analyzing customer preferences, companies are able to allocate resources where they're most cost-effective and ultimately grow the business. Infor's innovative data science applications are able to unlock the potential of a company's data to improve customer relationships, and can provide the edge an organization needs in a highly competitive market."
According to Rushforth, Infor's customers are both seeing an increase in revenue and experiencing an increase in soft benefits such as voicemail call return rates. One early tester, investment management company Lord Abbett, has already realized several results, Rushforth says. These include a wealth of client data in an easily readable format; a deepened knowledge of client needs and behavior; and a substantial improvement in achieving sales force goals.
Infor's Customer Experience Suite aims to integrate customer data across the enterprise to boost customer engagement and profitability. It includes CRM, marketing, configure-price-quote (CPQ), contract life cycle management, and omnichannel campaign management products. These solutions, specialized by industry, are tailored for the distribution, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and high-tech and electronics verticals.
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