Why Most Sales Leaders Want To Hire a Data Scientist?

As I was walking the halls of Moscone Center, shuffling through 170,000 people and 10,000 technology at display, I was looking for the answer to this question — why this sudden infatuation with the data scientist.

In my role as a Salesforce system architect, I have been observing that most sales leaders are not happy with the standard charts and reports from salesforce. They want to look at additional data sources and build an account 360. Remember the time when we used to say that if it is not in salesforce, then it didn’t happen. Now we live in a world where 90% of the meaningful customer and prospect data is not even in the salesforce. These meaningful data live in email inboxes, slack channels, zoom meetings, meeting invites, LinkedIn, and text messages. This is why the modern sales leader who are interested in the insights from these data sources wants to hire a Data Scientist who can use AI and ML algorithms to mine the intelligence from the data.

So what does a system architect do? Well, we architect. Start with something like hive, build connectors to pull data from all sources, and then custom build patter matching AI code to look for signals and plot them in Tableau. Well, you can guess the rest of the story.

So while walking the halls of Moscone Center, I met the two co-founders of a small company called BoostUp.ai. And after spending an hour with them, I concluded that I had found something cool, worth value. They call it the datadog of the sales performance.

BoostUp team believes that most meaningful insights are buried in the emails and other communication systems like slack, zoom meeting, etc. These guys have created a technology which automatically ingests all communications and maps it to your CRM data thereby creating a time series equivalent of the sales communication. Additionally, they mine this data and extract insights out of it, which are then presented in exciting views and alerts.

The message that the truth is buried inside your communication channel is not new, and I have seen a lot of tools that analyze the communication channels. However, the analysis by these tools is generally limited to communications which are available in the SFDC and analyzing only the metadata.

What I saw with BoostUp is way more and way detailed, and I do like their positioning that it’s the datadog of the sales performance. Once you have captured, stored, and have the power to metricize all the communication data, you can pull the “right” insights to help the sales team get actionable and early warning signs in your accounts and opportunities.