Supernova Award Category

Marketing & Sales Effectiveness

The Problem

Cisco’s sales team was faced with the challenge of getting visibility into their sales pipeline to leverage information during the sales cycle, which can run six to nine months. The sales team worked closely with other internal teams, such as marketing, to try and understand what they do, but were not as close to the lead process as they had hoped to be.

As a $50 billion business, Cisco operates globally in a number of maturing categories. Strong growth is essential, but sometimes difficult to achieve. Challenges include:

• The sheer scale of Cisco’s business presents a data analytics challenge
• Data relevant to sales is distributed across systems, regions and business units, with partner channels contributing to sales data disaggregation
• Cisco reps are effectively leaving money on the table due to pipeline optimization challenges. Each rep handles up to 200 opportunities, often relying on subjective experience to decide which deals are worth the effort to close

The Solution

Lack of visibility into their sales pipeline resulted in the need to integrate predictive analytics capabilities with Cisco’s own sales management tools to transform its global sales process and productivity.

Cisco’s team realized they needed a tool that would allow them not only more flexibility, but one that would combine data sets to find different data views.  With the predictive analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, Cisco is able to integrate the tool with its own sales pipeline management tools to transform its global sales process.

The solution enables the predictive analytics team, rather than IT, to drive improvements in sales productivity, by developing predictive analytics models to provide data and recommendations to sales management and sale reps.

The results

By highlighting sales techniques that are working, identifying opportunities most likely to close, and offering region-by-region product recommendations based on account analysis, SAP HANA has enriched the Cisco sales teams’ potential to thrive and reach aggressive growth targets.

Not only does the integration of SAP HANA allow the Cisco sales team to build out a platform that unifies the data analytics for sales, but also allows them to the ability to pull from one specific data source rather than many. This speeds up sales data analysis to help drive strategic planning in a practical timeframe. Additionally, it also enables the predictive analytics team, rather than IT, to drive improvements in sales productivity. The platform automatically updates models based on new data, offering insights into which variables affect sales effectiveness.

The Cisco sales teams’ potential to thrive and reach aggressive growth targets has now significantly grown. SAP HANA empowers social selling to gain combined knowledge and experience, driving more informed sales processes across regions and teams and transforming the global sales process.

Metrics

Cisco’s use of SAP HANA for sales analytics has resulted in a number of technical innovations that allow the company to realize greater returns on its technology assets:

• All data - 20TB - available in real time, including 1.2B rows of Pipeline, 700M rows of Bookings and 2.2B rows of Forecast
• Fast building and testing of models
• Sales teams access analytics data through a live dashboard called “Customer 360”
• The solution can push data from predictive models to salesforce.com – enabling more productive field use of CRM
• Different data sets can be merged within the Data Manager without requiring use of SQL
• 90% predictive confidence, 60% predictive accuracy

The Technology

• SAP HANA – Provides real-time access to all Cisco sales data and related data sets
• SAP HANA Predictive Analytics Library (PAL) – Enables powerful analytics across regions and product lines
• SAP HANA Data Manager – Allows non-IT people to quickly build data sets and predictive models
• SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics – Used to build, train, test and deploy predictive models
• SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics - Predictive Factory 

Disruptive Factor

SAP HANA is changing both Cisco’s sales processes and the underlying thought process that powers it. First, the sales pipeline model benefits account teams by providing a data-driven approach to identifying the opportunities most likely to close, instead of picking and choosing opportunities to focus on based on their comfort level. Second, regional teams get a more accurate product association based on country or market segment – most importantly, how accounts in a region buy the same products in a similar amount of time (based on history, like an “Amazon Basket”).

“We’re using the power of SAP HANA to go beyond basic diagnostics. We are helping people in the field today with virtual selling and social selling. We get our sales people to use data to optimize their pipelines, getting them away from ‘gut feel’ and into real data-driven decision making about which of their hundreds of opportunities are viable. We offer helpful guidance on the most important question these reps face, which is, ‘What’s really likely to close and what isn’t? We are also understanding the opportunities unlikely to close, and shifting our strategies ‘real time’ to adapt to these challenges. We are using the power of SAP HANA to dynamically evolve sales strategy as well as impact the execution.” - Larry Goryachkovskiy, Worldwide Sales – Cisco Systems

Shining Moment

For a project named “SAPPHIRE”, the goal is to unite all of our Sales teams to use one data infrastructure for all of their reporting and analysis. With the use of SAP HANA, providing one unifying SSOT, we are able to make decisions and execution faster for greater complex questions.  With the current success, our team has internally been awarded a “Sales Accelerator Award”, helping move sales into the future through real-time data decision making.