In this blog post, we will look at the history of Intelligent Sales Add-On, followed by the features available. Then we’ll look at the prerequisites for enabling Intelligent Sales Execution in our C4C tenants.
ISE_History
Let’s look at how Intelligent Sales Add-On has evolved over time. Connor Murphy and Ray Smith founded Data Hug Limited in 2010, and it was once known as Data Hug.
It was acquired by CallidusCloud in 2016 because Datahug was/is a leader in intelligent forecasting and pipeline management solutions. Later, SAP acquired CallidusCloud in 2018, and Datahug became a part of SAP’s sales automation solutions as a result.
With 2005 Release, SAP renamed and introduced DataHug as Intelligent Sales Add-On for SAP Sales Cloud.
Intelligent Sales Add-On_Features
- Machine Learning This add-on uses ML to predict if an opportunity in status open or in process will be won or lost.
- Customer Insights There is a recommendation view functionality in customers to provide sales reps with a curated set of inputs, to help them identify how and where they must invest your time, make better decisions throughout the sales cycle.
- Relationship Intelligence Based on the engagement or interaction history with contact, this feature helps in identifying the most important contacts based on the relationship score, something like Deal score and which sales rep contacted them the most, when was the first contact made and when was the last contact made.
- Guided Selling It is visualized as a Kanban board with all the opportunities by phases and prioritized by Machine Learning algorithms. It also suggests some activities like Schedule an appointment or call, to accelerate the opportunity to the next phase.
- Intelligent Sales Execution This feature has 4 sub-modules: Pipeline Manager, Forecast Tracker, Pipeline Flow and Trend Analytics. This solution provides insight into how opportunities are progressing through the pipeline.
- Sales Assistant is more of Voice assistant available as part of mobile app.
Intelligent Sales Execution (ISE)
- Pipeline Manager – to check the overall health of your pipeline; to check the opportunities in need of immediate attention. You can quickly identify opportunities that are promising or at risk and reprioritize them accordingly.
- Pipeline Flow – We can see at a glance how the opportunity pipeline has changed over time, which ones aren’t progressing as expected and take action.
- Forecast Tracker – The forecast tracker compares submitted forecast data against sales targets and aggregated opportunity amounts for the selected fiscal period. When discrepancies occur, sales managers can follow up to discover the cause.
- Trend Analytics – To analyze how far sales team is into the current quarter compared to where the team was at the same point in previous quarters and to understand the historical success rate per forecast category and arrive at whether there are enough opportunities in the pipeline to hit the targets
Prerequisites to enable ISE
| License Model | Enterprise Edition license is necessary to enable Intelligent Sales Execution |
| Scope and Configure | Once we have the Enterprise License Model, we can enable ISE via Scoping and Fine-Tuning activities. If there is an issue, Customers can raise incident within SAP C4C Tenant to enable ISE.
Each SAP Cloud for Customer tenant is provisioned with a new tenant in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Attributes that are relevant for the add-on solution, say, Master data such as account, employee, organizational and opportunities are replicated to that tenant. SAP takes care of this replication by copying this data to the tenant. |
| Business Role | Next step is to assign the WC to necessary business roles. Activate ISE for relevant users at the business role level |
| Territory / Sales Unit | Depending on the forecast hierarchy of company that is using, define territory or organizational structures in SAP Cloud for Customer |
| Fiscal Calendar | This setup allows users to view their opportunities by fiscal month, quarter, or year |
| Currency Exchange Rate | Pipeline aggregates and Opportunity amount values are converted from currency to currency and displayed based on the selection. |
| Aggregated Total | Define whether to use opportunity expected value or negotiated value for calculating aggregated totals in Intelligent Sales Execution |
| Forecast Categories | Opportunities must be assigned to forecast categories. Opportunities without a forecast category maintained aren’t available in Intelligent Sales Execution.
· Committed – Opportunities that are certain to become closed-won · Best Case – Opportunities that may become closed-won · Pipeline – Opportunities that aren’t expected to close in the current fiscal period · Additional Category – You can include one more category between commit and best case, such as “Most Likely”. |
| Deal Intelligence | Deal Intelligence / Opportunity scoring – The pipeline manager module uses the opportunity score to create the visual representation of the opportunities in the pipeline. The forecast tracker and pipeline flow don’t require opportunity scoring. |
| Customization | This functionality is currently not available for extension by adaptation, personalization, or with SAP Cloud Applications Studio. |
| Web Browsers | ISE is incompatible with Safari, Internet Explorer, and any version of Microsoft Edge other than Microsoft edge Chromium. |
Intelligent Sales Add-On Help Portal has a lot of information about the ISE features. Thanks for reading!
