Sales Innovation: Integrating Predictive Analytics with SAP HANA Simplifies Life for End Users

During my travels and speaking engagements representing the Cisco sales planning organization and leading the sales intelligence and analytics team, I’m often asked about the team’s work to transform our global sales processes by integrating the predictive analytics capabilities of SAP HANA with a sales pipeline management tool.¹

Initially, this question appeared to be about the technology; however, I quickly realized that people were more interested in learning about the culture of innovation and collaboration forged between sales and the IT organization over the course of this project. Among the many transformational benefits of the integrated sales tool, the resulting collaborative mindset stands out — and that is because it addresses a key challenge many organizations face, which is a dearth of data scientists who can use statistical analysis to drive business decisions. However, in addition to our sales tool dramatically transforming the sales process, the predictive analytics platform on top of SAP HANA has sparked the transition to where analytics teams can now do the work traditionally reserved for data scientists. SAP HANA flips the long-held belief that data science was 80% assembling and cleaning data with just 20% reserved for actual analysis. Today it’s the opposite, and we’re generating insights that just weren’t possible before without having to make the expected investment in creating an army of data scientists.

Unlocking Insights

The transition from having a predictive analytics team (rather than IT) drive a new solution to enhance sales productivity started with trying to solve the problem of having fragmented, siloed analytics and an inability to run concurrent analytics projects. An existing spreadsheet-based tool just wasn’t scalable; Cisco has more than 20,000 field employees generating roughly $50 billion in annual sales — and each field employee sells the entire product portfolio, with approximately 1,300 product families that represent nearly 200,000 stock keeping units. The extraordinary amount of time and effort it took to prepare even rudimentary pipeline analysis and the stark need for a common data foundation is what drove the initial use case for SAP HANA. We developed a joint go-to-market strategy with SAP to prove out a use case for SAP HANA on Cisco Unified Computing System, and that was the beginning. It got us thinking: How do we take elements of the data mart we were building and provide it on a real-time platform for sales executives?

From this use case, we scaled a simple bookings and pipeline application within a few months to more than 2,000 sales executives who could now see at any point in the quarter current sales versus projections. In working closely with IT to develop this application, our team thought that with direct access to the data on the back-end SAP HANA databases, we could begin to do simple data exploration and quick ad-hoc analysis. This was the “Aha!” moment that ignited the spark for the innovative mindset and accelerated the SAP HANA evolution at Cisco. With the compression available on SAP HANA, we moved all our sales reference data and marketing models onto the platform, essentially creating a critical mass of data — everything needed to run an analytics project. In parallel, we set up analytics models in an SAP Predictive Analytics pilot program to generate real-time insights that were significantly faster than anything we had done before. This included predictive pipeline analysis to highlight at-risk deals, product associations, and product recommendations.

An Evolving Innovation Framework

Other SAP HANA customers worldwide that are building dashboards on the predictive analytics platform have said they are excited by the same discovery because they are finally “out of the dashboard business.” Traditionally, their analytics teams weren’t true analytics teams because their time was spent collecting requirements and managing or maintaining data. With SAP HANA, these teams are now focused almost entirely on predictive and advanced analytics. 

Beyond the innovation we’ve realized with this integrated sales solution, there’s enormous value in the recognition that we’ve unlocked the potential for greater innovation. Right now, in fact, we’re looking at projects like putting more models directly on dashboards, and exploring the potential for integrating predictive analytics with the Cisco Spark Board and SAP Digital Boardroom. In essence, these projects are extensions of the value we tapped into when we brought sales and IT closer together: driving greater collaboration within the company and making life simpler for the end user. For more information, visit www.cisco.com/go/sap.

^{1 Cisco received a 2017 SAP HANA Innovation Award for its work on this project. [back]}