Many companies have the ability to automatically capture a limited amount of information from sales reps’ email and calendar accounts. Most tools (including Salesforce.com Inbox) are restricted to a rudimentary form of “logging an email” or “logging a calendar event” within a contact in Salesforce but require some form of sales rep intervention.
This week we released yet another feature that highlights the automation capabilities that the SalesDirector.ai platform can provide for those using Autoscribe (Activity Data Capture). Available immediately, Autoscribe users have the ability to log time against an Opportunity.
This means that a Sales Engineer has the ability to create an event for themselves in their own calendar (Google, MSFT, etc.) with a specified time/date and SalesDirector will automatically log time for the Sales Engineer.
The Sales Engineer simply specifies something in the subject line of the calendar event such as: “Prep for United Airlines”
Since SalesDirector already understands who the Sales Engineer is and which Opps they are working on, SalesDirector will automatically log the appropriate time against the United Airlines Opportunity. This interpolation is based on fuzzy-matching of text in the subject line and can be customized to accommodate your organizations selling motion.
B2B enterprise selling motion can be resource intensive on the entire sales team. Often times, managers want the ability to measure the sales engineering resources and the loads that they are carrying. Sometimes this information is used to determine if a particular Opportunity needs additional support (more SE resources) or if Opportunities could be spread amongst other SEs. This sort of information can be used to identify cost-saving opportunities in the sales organization, load-balancing of resources or to help inform your sales engineering hiring model.
The other obvious advantage of this feature is that it can also be used to roll-up Sales Engineering time spent on an Opportunity that might eventually get billed to the Client (this depends on the arrangement between the buyer and the seller).
Many tools “check the box” when it comes to activity capture but do not do a good job of capturing the necessary information. Expectations about what the tools claim to do are often misaligned with the reality of what the activity capture tools are actually doing. Like many things in the software industry – the devil is in the details. The difference is that those details have a significant impact on the quality of data that is being captured which, in turn, has a degrading impact on your reporting.