Predictive analytics aids sales forecast accuracy at RingCentral 8/16/19, 12)28 PM

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Predictive analytics aids sales

forecast accuracy at RingCentral
By Phil Wainewright September 18, 2014
SUMMARY: Data science startup Aviso applies predictive analytics to
sales projections. Customer RingCentral says its sales
forecast accuracy has been spot on

On July 1st this year, startup Aviso's Insights product spat

out its predictive analytics of the new quarter's sales
projections for charter customer RingCentral. Over the
eleven weeks of the quarter that have elapsed since then,
those projections have proved uncannily accurate, says Bill
Dolby, senior director of sales operations at the cloud
business phone systems provider:

" Our actuals have tracked dead on for that forecast. It's actually blown away our
sales managers.

Dolby is now eagerly awaiting the next quarterly projection, knowing that it will instantly

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surface whether any corrective action is needed.

" I can't wait to see what Aviso is going to predict for us in Q4. If it's not enough,
I've got a whole quarter to put strategies in place to change history.

For a recently listed company — RingCentral had its IPO a year ago in September 2013
— it's hugely valuable to have this kind of foresight, explains Dolby.

" We've actually seen it be dead on during the quarter. The value of that is
incalculable.

We're a new public company and you can imagine the focus we have on being
accurate with our projections to Wall Street, and how damaging a miss would be.
That's very high value for a young company like ours.

Quant data smarts

Aviso has been able to bring this level of sales forecast accuracy by applying data
science honed in the field of financial portfolio management — co-founder and CTO
Andrew Abrahams is a former head of quant research at JP Morgan Chase.

This brings data smarts to a field that still gets by largely on spreadsheets and gut feel,
says co-founder and CEO, K V Rao:

" Sales forecasting, even in large public companies, is tedious and is managed in
spreadsheets. Large Fortune 500 public companies literally have armies of
analysts and manage their forecasting in legions of spreadsheets.

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While other companies have

applied predictive analytics in
marketing, Aviso claims it is unique
in the way it has targeted its data
smarts at the sales pipeline. This
doesn't come cheap — annual
subscriptions start at $100k for
50+ sales reps.

The onboarding process starts by

loading at least four years of sales
data into Aviso's cloud-based
analytics engine. It takes around
two to four weeks to calibrate the
predictive algorithms against the
data, back-test to check that it's all
working and then configure the
application to the client's business
processes. Once this is done, the
data is kept up to date with short,
automatic batch updates. K V Rao, Aviso

Tailored solution
The painstaking steps are labor-intensive but Dolby says that he welcomed Aviso's
willingness to tailor the solution to the way RingCentral operates.

" When I talked to many vendors they would say, 'Why would you do it that way?'
and I'd have to twist their arm and they would say, 'Maybe I could put that in my
next release'.

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Predictive analytics aids sales forecast accuracy at RingCentral 8/16/19, 12)28 PM

Aviso were very customer focused in customizing our views for us. That made a
huge difference for us. We felt like Aviso had a customer focus that was different
than other companies.

RingCentral is one of half a dozen early customers — others include Saba Software,
Replicon and Damballa. There's a skew towards technology companies but that reflects
the early adopting customers Aviso has access to as a startup based in Silicon Valley
rather than a limitation to the software, says Rao.

" It's more a matter of how we get started than any particular type of company.
Whether you're selling airplanes or software — or services even — the technology
is applicable.

Rao, who previously founded subscription commerce vendor Zuora and before that was
chief scientist at WebEx, also confirmed the product works across "the full cycle of
revenue in any B2B business," from new business through upsells, crosssells and
renewals. While most current customers are using Salesforce, the product will also
work with other CRM tools and there is already one customer using it with Microsoft
Dynamics CRM.

Making an impact
Dolby cited three aspects of sales operations where Aviso is making an impact at
RingCentral.

" The first is, I can see my pipeline and forecast in many different ways. Aviso's
hoovered up the data and presented it in very flexible ways for us.

RingCentral has several hundred sales representatives serving more than 300,000

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Predictive analytics aids sales forecast accuracy at RingCentral 8/16/19, 12)28 PM

customers globally. The customer base splits into various segments, with several high
volume segments where customers typically have less than 10 users, and a more
traditional enterprise sales operation for customers with anything up to 1000+ users.
Getting insight across those segments wasn't possible in Salesforce or by using
spreadsheet-based visualization, says Dolby.

" We have so much data with the high volume of transactions we have in the
quarter, it's so difficult to see any trends in that data. Salesforce's native reporting
structure is just not fast enough for us to drill into the data.

Aviso allows us to see our business changing day-to-day and when we see
something unusual we can just click on it. Sometimes it's a mistake in how the
data came into Salesforce, sometimes it's a deal that got deferred.

Weekly review meetings

The second aspect where Aviso has made a significant impact is in the weekly sales
forecast review meetings that first-line sales managers have with their individual sales
reps.

" You've got to have good data or you're just having a verbal meeting. With Aviso
we're able to give our sales managers several views of how a sales
representative is doing at the click of a mouse. That's with no preparation, it's all
just instantly available in Aviso.

They have all the data they need and the sales rep can't pull the wool over their
eyes any more. It motivates the rep to go clean up and make their pipeline more
accurate.

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Predictive analytics aids sales forecast accuracy at RingCentral 8/16/19, 12)28 PM

The third aspect is the predictive nature of Aviso's data analysis, says Dolby.

" Where Aviso really stands out from standard BI tools like Tableau is they have
predictive analytics.

They look over the historical data and find a pattern for each rep. Each rep has a
pattern that's predictable.

They're able to score every deal in our pipeline and predict what the revenue yield
is going to be and for each sales rep how many new deals they're going to build
within the pipeline.

Now I can really do the people management I need to do to make sure my reps
make their numbers.

Verdict
We're beginning to see predictive analytics being applied in various fields of business
that in the past have always relied heavily on a combination of gut feel and mammoth
spreadsheets. It may be galling to discover that a computer thinking in just 0s and 1s
can get a better handle on the data than all of our human intuition, but you can't really
argue with it if it works.

RingCentral is just one customer and we haven't had a chance to speak to others but
Dolby's testimony is emphatic. Coming from a hugely experienced sales operations
manager it's an impressive tale.

Of course the predictions can only ever be as good as the data and the algorithms —
you must always be on your guard against those black swan events that aren't built into
the model. But given the scope for human error built into spreadsheets and gut instinct,
bringing predictive analytics into this kind of business critical forecasting seems to be a

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no-brainer.

No doubt others will debate Aviso's claim to be the first data science solution in the
sphere of sales forecasting but one thing's for sure — there will soon be many more,
both in this field and elsewhere.

Disclosure: Salesforce.com is a diginomica premier partner.

Image credits: Finance globe © Artur Marciniec - Fotolia.com; KV Rao headshot and
product image courtesy of Aviso.

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