“We don’t really know.” “We will try it and then find out.” These are the typical answers I get when I ask customers how they will use Einstein Opportunity Scoring, a feature that uses artificial intelligence to tell you the likelihood that an opportunity will be won. Not having a clear sense of why to use a product is a recipe for low adoption, frustration, and, eventually, indifference. And as an #AwesomeAdmin, it’s your job to help your users understand the benefit and the WIIFY (what’s in it for you/them).
After reading this blog post, you’ll know how to identify the users who can benefit the most from using Einstein Opportunity Scoring. You’ll also get the tools needed to guide those users on best practices to drive the most reward out of this product.
Sales managers want to help their teams hit their quota. They also want to maintain an accurate forecast for better planning and reporting.
But they face two significant challenges to meet their goals:
Ideally, they would review or question each and every deal, but that’s just impossible. Sales managers seek tools that surface the deals that are worth their attention. That way, they can invest their time on the deals that impact their quota and coach reps on the critical things.
Einstein Opportunity Scoring provides an unbiased, objective prediction of the likelihood of closing a deal, based on data patterns found on previously closed deals. Sales managers can use it as an additional data point that uncovers hidden information and optimizes their time toward important deals.
Deals in late stages with low scores need your attention! For example, when the stage is negotiations, and the score is <30.
These are the opportunities that might slip if you don’t take action.
On the other hand, if you’re about to close the month/quarter and you seek quick wins, check out the opportunities with an early stage and a high score. For example, the stage is qualification and the score is >80. You might find that you can move them forward in the pipeline faster than expected.
It’s worth keeping in mind that low scores for early stages are normal and might not be actionable. High scores for late stage are amazing but also might not be actionable. I recommend using these cases as a validation for your pipeline progress and accuracy.
Here’s an example of an opportunity in a late stage (Negotiation) with a very high dollar amount and a low score (19):
Sales reps who manage up to 20 deals in their pipeline are less likely to need Einstein Opportunity Scoring. They know their deals by heart. They don’t need an algorithm that tells them the status of their deals.
However, as a tool, Einstein Opportunity Scoring becomes critical when you have increasingly more deals in your pipeline. You need Einstein Opportunity Scoring when you face difficult questions, such as:
Now, you can sort the deals according to the score, which helps you decide which deal is more critical at the moment. It becomes more important when you lack prior information about the deals and need another data point to decide. For example: Say you have two deals that are progressing very well, and both are relatively mature, but you’re not sure about either of them. Use the score to decide.
In many cases, opportunities land on our pipeline when they’re immature. We need more time for the discovery phase, and sometimes, we end up wasting our time on the bad deals. Use the scores to identify the opportunities with the highest scores in the early stages, so you know where to put more resources.
Pro tip: An opportunity score is only as good as the data within the opportunity. If you see a low score for an opportunity that was just created, don’t be bothered. Use that as guidance to fill in more information or conduct more discovery.
Key factors, or insights, are the reasons behind the scores. They’re the most significant factors that influenced the deal’s score. You can learn what action to take to move the score and the deal forward in some cases; for example, the lack of recent activity.
In other cases, they’ll describe the deal’s characteristics where you don’t have a real influence; for example, record type is “new business.” That’s okay!
Keep in mind that some additional factors (AI features) are considered and are not visible. This is mainly because they’re not always business-meaningful but prove to be accurate to the prediction, so they can’t be presented to end users such as sales reps and managers.
Einstein Opportunity Scoring is an excellent tool that sales managers can use to get an objective evaluation of their pipeline to identify deals that need their attention, so they can handle critical conversations with their sales reps. Sales reps can benefit from using Einstein Opportunity Scoring, too, especially if they deal with a high volume of opportunities.
Be sure to Enable Einstein Opportunity Scoring from Setup. Follow these guidelines from Salesforce Help, and consider using a subset of your opportunities when building the scoring model.
So, go and pick a few sales managers and sales reps that you think are more likely to embed innovation in their day to day. Equip them with these learnings and best practices, and be sure to collect their ongoing feedback.
Want to find out how else you can work smarter with Salesforce Einstein? Head over to our AI for Admins blog series. Each post features a different AI product or topic, with real world examples.
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