Aviso: A NoCRM approach to Sales

Arun Penmetsa

July 30, 2019

1 min read

Sales technology is one of the cornerstones of enterprise software. There are hundreds of vendors and billions spent by organizations to develop efficient and intelligent processes to drive revenue. As a bellwether for sales technology spending, Worldwide CRM revenue which totaled just $16 billion in 2011, has grown to over $120 billion.

At the same time, there has been an inexorable decline in the productivity of sales reps. The average rep uses 7 tools, but only 43% of sales reps achieve quota and only 47% of forecasted opportunities close and it is getting worse.

Why this paradox? There are many reasons for this including an overall expansion of the industry, but a key challenge is that most tools do not add enough value towards closing a deal. Instead, they compound the inefficiency with countless lost hours spent manually updating hundreds of data fields to track every opportunity, a process that doesn’t yield actionable insights.

Salesforce itself estimates that 91% of CRM data is incomplete, 70% of data decays every year, and 66% of rep time is spent in non-customer activities. All that time could have been better spent closing deals. Just like other databases before and after it, CRM is important. But this religious belief around data entry has gotten sales teams lost.

“Used CRM for forecasting and insights, but it was just guessing. All we were doing is feed a giant beast endlessly” — Customer

CRM to NoCRM

What the industry needs are solutions that augment existing tools and provide value in every interaction towards the goal of winning customers. This emphasis on empowering the sales organization and shifting the focus from data to deal acceleration is the cornerstone of noCRM.

The ultimate goal is to empower all levels of sales and Go-to-market teams to address one key question “how can we help more reps close more deals with less?”. This can be achieved in a number of ways

• Manual to Intelligent Data Entry — Manual data entry kills sales productivity. CRMs have hundreds of fields and reps spend an average of 7.5 minutes entering data for a single call. While the data is valuable, the manual approach and enforcement is a leading cause of inefficiency. A noCRM approach would vastly reduce the volume of data required to be entered through proper integration, intelligence, and automation.
• Fragmented Spreadsheets to Unified Forecasting — Although CRM platforms are the source of truth, the lack of data quality makes it difficult to rely on that data to forecast performance. A noCRM approach would use multiple data sources to augment and refine this data automatically to create a much cleaner and actionable data set.
• Forced Actions to Guided Nudges— Even with the right data, the next course of action in a deal is not always apparent. It is also difficult to transfer and standardize learnings across the organization. A noCRM approach would make the system proactive with realtime relevant recommendations as nudges to move deals faster and more reliably. It would codify guided selling to respond to dynamic customer needs.

“What I really needed is a Waze for my sales teams, not outdated paper maps that they have to fold out every time they get lost” — Customer

An AI Driven Sales Compass

Aviso has pioneered this noCRM approach by applying AI and provides the compass for sales organizations to consistently beat their revenue goals.

• Value for Sales Representative — Aviso’s AI-driven engine goes through multiple data sources including CRM data to provide the right insight at the right time for every deal. This guided selling approach has let Aviso customers close 20% more deals with over 90% predictability without spending any additional resources as seen below.
• Value for Sales Manager— Since the Aviso platform offers an incredibly accurate forecast at the aggregate, deal, team and rep level, forecast calls and coaching conversations are more productive. The leadership can focus on actual at-risk deals and manage the pipeline in an effective way.

“By Week 3 of the quarter, Aviso’s forecast was 99% accurate” — Customer

• Value for Sales Operations — The Aviso platform takes the guesswork out of forecasting for ops teams. Winscores let you determine exactly how each deal impacts the quarter and the ops teams can easily collaborate with the entire go-to-market team through purpose-built deal rooms.
• Value for VP of Sales / CRO — Aviso offers the VP of Sales visibility into how the team is performing without the need for a complex system of checks and balances. It lets the head of sales or CRO track and report on a realistic close rate early in the quarter and understand how playbooks are performing. Deal insights also provide the right level of coaching to continuously improve the team’s performance.
• Value of CEO / CFO —Aviso’s platform enables predictable, repeatable revenue growth and controlled access to the revenue workflow to teams like finance, pre-sales, customer success and support without having to buy expensive licenses for existing solutions. In addition to driving revenue, the company now can also reduce spending by up to 20–25%.

Over the last few years, Aviso has built an ideal AI platform to help enterprises like Dell, Splunk, Honeywell, and FireEye drive growth. More importantly, it has enabled go-to-market teams to overcome the chaos of databases, scattered data lakes, and human biases to beat their targets.

“Aviso is fully deployed. The pre-sales team, finance team, and support team want access to the platform” — Customer

Team

At Storm, we are thrilled to join Aviso on their journey. Aviso’s CEO Trevor Templar is an exceptional sales leader having led revenue and Go-to-Market teams at Salesforce, Oracle, and Tact.ai. The combination of human and AI judgments is the future of enterprise application workflows and the Aviso team has built an incredible platform for sales organizations everywhere.

You can learn more at their website. Follow them on Linkedin, and Twitter.