Been innundated these past few days with questions about how Foretuit does what it does. Great question. But without giving away the farm, let me explain the essence of our approach.
When people connect in a social sense, they are “friends.” There’s no more simple construct as they are literally peers — friends, neighbors, relatives.
On the flip side, when people connect in a business sense, they are “colleagues.” People that work together and have a defined role. Their role defines their social standing in an organization. They are worker, manager, sales person, marketer, pricer, boss — you get it.
More important, each colleague has a need to collaborate to perform a specified task at a particular time during a particular process. This is hugely important. Why? Well, understand the role and purpose, you can understand the business.
This is the very nature of collaborative structures and it lies at the heart of our approach. When applied to a specific context — like sales, you begin to understand our method. Foretuit leverages these collaborative structures to identify patterns of unstructured activities within the chaos of daily business life.
For sales, it creates a real-time model for deal flow, and maps that deal with other deals to create a knowledge base of deal sequencing – like a sales genome. Understand the genome on an individual, group, organization, industry or global level, and you have achieved the holy grail to determine deal maturity, and the confidence to know the likely outcome, positive or negative. In fact, our alpha results have been extraordinary and indicate a high likelihood of correctly predicting outcomes at a very early stage. Thus, we are on the verge of greatly reducing friction in the sales process thereby eliminating the subjective nature of deal proctology.
Think about the impact. Today, most experts, board members, executive management believe the sales process is entirely ineffective and totally inefficient. The amount of resources (think capital) required to operate the sales process is burdened by significant over investment in lead generation, pipeline coverage and operational oversight. Yet with all that investment, deals don’t just slip at the end of the quarter — they vaporize as if they never existed in the first place.
Thus, the environment is dysfunctional at best as it breeds distrust and lives on regular interrogation. The investments required to generate 10x lead flow and 3x pipeline coverage are huge, and the outcomes hit or miss. Organizations spend over $18 billion per year on CRM applications alone.
A small relative improvement in deal cycle management could yield significant upstream and downstream benefits. Not just from better allocation of management and operations time, but in improved upfront targeting and resource allocation. Plus, if you live in a product organization, think about the benefits to downstream production and alignment with supply.
Sales resource is expensive and precious. With improved foresight, comes better allocation of sales resource. And with the amount of time compression at the end of any quarter, there is a critical need to understand how best to utilize scarce resource. Most customers skew their purchase cycle to the closing weeks of any quarter. With the proper foresight, management would know where and when to focus and, perhaps more importantly, where not to. More importantly, this benefits the sales rep as sales quota obtainment would be higher and thus compensation and job satisfaction much greater.
Thus it’s in everybody’s interest to improve deal lifecycle management. Today’s tools and applications tend to enable the current dysfunction but do little to change the game. Our approach is certain to change that — and that’s a quick overview on how Foretuit does what it does.
