By harnessing advanced data, analytics, and generative artificial intelligence (AI), our solutions boost sales productivity by up to 30%, says Oliver Wyman Partner Julien Boulenger. We focus on evaluating market opportunities and prioritizing sales efforts, helping companies optimize performance. By integrating CRM systems with our AI sales platform, we enhance transparency and improve user experience, achieving high adoption rates. Our methodology includes analyzing customer demographics and spending patterns to unlock cross-selling potential. In this video, we explore how our innovative solutions drive significant improvements and propel growth.

Very often, companies lack the right approaches and insights when prioritizing their sales efforts. This results in a lack of focus, inefficiencies, and major missed sales opportunities.

However, businesses can increase sales productivity by 30% if they know how to leverage advanced data sources, analytics, and generative AI. So, what can they do to make it happen?

Hi, I’m Julien Boulenger, a Partner in Oliver Wyman’s Pricing, Sales, and Marketing Practice and co-lead of the Travel, Leisure, and Business Services Practice in the Americas. In my 15 years with the firm, I have been helping our clients around the world ignite profitable growth, working on strategic topics that help them determine the best customers, geographies, services, and products to invest in. That work has also included a concentration on mergers and acquisitions (M&A), commercial performance, organizational and technology levers.

One key challenge many of our clients’ face is that their sales teams pursue unattractive opportunities, oftentimes in a reactive manner. Their teams also spend a lot of time on manual tasks, which limits their selling time and further reduces sales productivity.

Fortunately, we can now better and address sales opportunities using advanced data sources and new technologies. Doing this well involves four critical elements.

First, companies must develop the right use cases. Some key ones involve evaluating the potential opportunity and chances of winning at the market, territory, and account or individual levels.

For example, we recently worked with a travel company to identify cross-selling opportunities among its customers. Using our own AI sales platform, we were able to identify customers with the highest cross-selling propensity based on customer demographics, experience, spend and visit history. This made a huge difference in the sales efforts.

Second, it is important to activate opportunities at different levels of the organization. Sales and business leads should be able to review market dynamics, the sales team’s performance against those dynamics, and whether territories are well covered. Sales teams need to identify which leads, prospects, and customers they should focus on, why, and what the outreach should look like.

A third key aspect is combining the right internal and external data sources and analytics. This also involves ensuring proper data cleaning to maintain integrity.

For example, in our work helping hotel groups enhance their B2B sales strategies, we leveraged datasets such as CRM, reservation story, booking demand and pricing, local maps and economic trends. This allowed us to estimate a local hotel spend of different businesses to inform sales prioritization.

The fourth aspect is having the right interface and solutions. It is important to provide transparency in how prioritization is done. Solutions should also be integrated with CRM systems for ease of use.

For this one, I’ll give another example. For a food services company, we integrated our AI sales platform as a series of widgets within the client’s CRM system to create a one-stop shop. We also explicitly showed the drivers of prioritization. All of these enabled smooth processes and created trust, allowing for great adoption.

These strategies have measurable — and often dramatic — results. And we look forward to continuing to help our clients improve their commercial performance even further. It’s a very exciting time! I’m Julien Boulenger and this is my take on sales productivity.

This transcript was edited for clarity.

By harnessing advanced data, analytics, and generative artificial intelligence (AI), our solutions boost sales productivity by up to 30%, says Oliver Wyman Partner Julien Boulenger. We focus on evaluating market opportunities and prioritizing sales efforts, helping companies optimize performance. By integrating CRM systems with our AI sales platform, we enhance transparency and improve user experience, achieving high adoption rates. Our methodology includes analyzing customer demographics and spending patterns to unlock cross-selling potential. In this video, we explore how our innovative solutions drive significant improvements and propel growth.

Very often, companies lack the right approaches and insights when prioritizing their sales efforts. This results in a lack of focus, inefficiencies, and major missed sales opportunities.

However, businesses can increase sales productivity by 30% if they know how to leverage advanced data sources, analytics, and generative AI. So, what can they do to make it happen?

Hi, I’m Julien Boulenger, a Partner in Oliver Wyman’s Pricing, Sales, and Marketing Practice and co-lead of the Travel, Leisure, and Business Services Practice in the Americas. In my 15 years with the firm, I have been helping our clients around the world ignite profitable growth, working on strategic topics that help them determine the best customers, geographies, services, and products to invest in. That work has also included a concentration on mergers and acquisitions (M&A), commercial performance, organizational and technology levers.

One key challenge many of our clients’ face is that their sales teams pursue unattractive opportunities, oftentimes in a reactive manner. Their teams also spend a lot of time on manual tasks, which limits their selling time and further reduces sales productivity.

Fortunately, we can now better and address sales opportunities using advanced data sources and new technologies. Doing this well involves four critical elements.

First, companies must develop the right use cases. Some key ones involve evaluating the potential opportunity and chances of winning at the market, territory, and account or individual levels.

For example, we recently worked with a travel company to identify cross-selling opportunities among its customers. Using our own AI sales platform, we were able to identify customers with the highest cross-selling propensity based on customer demographics, experience, spend and visit history. This made a huge difference in the sales efforts.

Second, it is important to activate opportunities at different levels of the organization. Sales and business leads should be able to review market dynamics, the sales team’s performance against those dynamics, and whether territories are well covered. Sales teams need to identify which leads, prospects, and customers they should focus on, why, and what the outreach should look like.

A third key aspect is combining the right internal and external data sources and analytics. This also involves ensuring proper data cleaning to maintain integrity.

For example, in our work helping hotel groups enhance their B2B sales strategies, we leveraged datasets such as CRM, reservation story, booking demand and pricing, local maps and economic trends. This allowed us to estimate a local hotel spend of different businesses to inform sales prioritization.

The fourth aspect is having the right interface and solutions. It is important to provide transparency in how prioritization is done. Solutions should also be integrated with CRM systems for ease of use.

For this one, I’ll give another example. For a food services company, we integrated our AI sales platform as a series of widgets within the client’s CRM system to create a one-stop shop. We also explicitly showed the drivers of prioritization. All of these enabled smooth processes and created trust, allowing for great adoption.

These strategies have measurable — and often dramatic — results. And we look forward to continuing to help our clients improve their commercial performance even further. It’s a very exciting time! I’m Julien Boulenger and this is my take on sales productivity.

This transcript was edited for clarity.