At Upland RO Innovation, we are committed to empowering sales and marketing teams with innovative tools that deliver customer references and drive sales success. We are thrilled to announce a significant update to our Sales Wins feature, incorporating AI capabilities to transform how you capture, analyze, and leverage intelligence from every sales opportunity.  

The journey to get here would not be possible without our customers and the community of marketers and salespeople we have spoken with over the last few months. We’ve co-innovated with customers for decades. Now, with the possibilities presented with AI, we’re excited to keep that tradition going.  We are equally excited about the updates we have in store now and what is on our roadmap.  

Sales intelligence and customer references make all the difference in B2B sales success. As we explore our new and soon-to-be-released AI features, let’s consider why they are crucial.   

The Power of Sales Wins and Customer References  

According to a study by IDC, 91% of prospective B2B customers are influenced by word-of-mouth referrals when making purchasing decisions. Furthermore, customer references can increase win rates by up to 30% and accelerate deal closure times by 35%. Happy customers, loyal customers, and customer references go a long way. 

Still not convinced? Sales professionals who effectively leverage data and customer success stories are 2.5 times more likely to achieve sales targets. This becomes important when 60% of sales reps and other sales professionals do not make yearly quotas. Are you a sales rep, a sales leader, or in a sales career? Do not let that be you or your team!  

These statistics underscore the importance of effectively capturing and utilizing sales opportunity data and customer references. Our first set of updates makes the sales process more efficient, insightful, and impactful than ever before. With RO Innovation, your team wins together. 

Introducing AI-Powered Sales Wins to Your Sales Process 

Our new AI-enhanced Sales Wins feature combines human expertise with AI to help you win future deals. You can now streamline the process of capturing data from every sales opportunity, ensure higher-quality internal documentation, and unlock deeper insights into tactics that drive future sales success.  

Let’s explore how these updates will empower your sales team to reach its growth potential. 

Charting the Road Ahead: Upland RO Innovation’s Vision for Sales Intelligence 

Sales intelligence and customer references are the backbone of successful sales strategies. As we explore our new AI-powered features, it’s crucial to understand their significance and how they’ll improve your sales process.  

Right now, you’ll have access to these tools: 

• AI-assisted form completion
• Advanced data validation
• Intelligent summarization of sales wins
• Automated reference identification

These features will streamline your workflow, ensure data accuracy, and help you leverage customer references more effectively. 

As we dive into each feature, you’ll see how Upland RO Innovation is committed to empowering your sales team with cutting-edge AI technology while preserving the invaluable human touch in your customer relationships. 

1. AI-Assisted Form Completion

We have integrated AI technology to help sales reps complete the summary form when an opportunity closes. This feature guides sales reps through the submission process by providing contextual examples and suggestions for each field on the form. You can even adjust the tone. 

This helps sales reps provide more relevant and detailed information about the sales process and resulting outcomes, good or bad. This feature ensures that critical details are captured consistently, creating a rich database of intelligence that can be used to refine the sales approach for future deals.  

Step 1: Generate a sample in the ‘What were the customer pain points/business issues/challenges?’ field.  

Step 2: RO AI Assistant provides contextual examples and suggestions. 

Step 3: Insert AI-generated content into the field.

Step 4: Adjust the tone of AI-generated content.

2. Advanced Data Validation  

The quality of your sales intelligence is only as good as the data you input. That’s why we’ve developed an advanced AI-powered data validation system as a core component of our Sales Wins feature.  

Our configurable AI uses prompt engineering techniques to create customized validation rules for your desired data. This intelligent system acts as a guardian, ensuring that only high-quality, relevant data enters your sales intelligence ecosystem.  

By setting up tailored guardrails, we help you capture the most pertinent information for your unique business needs. The result? A streamlined approval process, faster content creation, and better-quality inputs lead to more valuable insights and outputs.

Step 1: Type your command and click ‘Validate Content’.

Step 2: ROAI Assistant will validate your data and generate relevant results.

Step 3: ROAI Assistant explains why data is relevant to the field.

3. Intelligent Summarization of Sales Wins

One of the most exciting new features is our AI-powered summarization tool. It automatically generates branded and concise summaries of single or multiple-win results to share with various stakeholders. This encourages knowledge sharing and nurturing a culture of high performance and benefits your sales team in diverse ways, such as:  

• For sales reps: Quick, actionable insights on winning sales strategies and sales techniques.  

• For sales managers: Comprehensive overviews of team performance and successful tactics.  

• For customer reference managers: Demonstrate the value of your customer reference program to stakeholders. 

• For executives: High-level summaries focused on strategic implications and business impact. 

Step 1: Generate a summary in ‘AI Sales Win summary’.

Step 2: AI-generated sales win summary is provided.

Step 3: You can also generate multi-sales win summaries.

4. Automated Reference Identification

Our sales wins approval process automatically identifies potential references or recruits. It factors in your customer’s mapped attributes of your customer, from your CRM to flag high-potential reference candidates based on their geography, industry, and more.  

This makes it easier to search for and filter potential references, enabling reference program contributors to quickly find relevant and willing customers who are eager to share their success with others. This feature streamlines the process of building and maintaining a robust customer reference program, while lowering the risk of burning out existing references. 

See Sales Wins in action  

Innovation in Progress: Your Reference Pipeline 3.0 

As we look ahead, we continue to gather customer feedback on our product roadmap. It’s important that the features we put in RO Innovation truly align with what customers need and want.  

By listening to and integrating their insights, we can ensure that we deliver practical, value-driven solutions that impact their work. We continue building our AI features and have three exciting capabilities currently in development on our roadmap. 

These upcoming features will further enhance your ability to create compelling content, gain deeper insights from your wins, and maintain the perfect balance between AI assistance and human expertise. 

Let’s take a look at each one:  

1. Success Story Draft Generation

Sales Wins will generate the first draft of case studies based on the win data submitted. These drafts include key elements such as challenge, solution, and results, providing a solid starting point for your marketing team to refine and polish. 

Sample Success Story

2. Data Maintenance

Understanding where you have gaps in customer references can be tricky. With our future AI capabilities, you’ll be able to spot the missing pieces. You can then ensure your customer reference pipeline is as complete as possible across different areas, like industry, persona, use case, and more.  

This will help you prioritize where to focus your recruitment efforts. Additionally, you always want to keep your data fresh. Our future AI capabilities will proactively identify stale or aging customer data, unused data entry fields, and untagged records or pieces of content stored in RO Innovation. With better-quality data, you’ll ensure that information is accurate and remains useful. 

3. Search Intelligence

Our AI-powered Search Intelligence feature ensures that your sales reps can easily locate the best matches for their needs, streamlining the search process and driving efficiency. This feature prioritizes results based on relevance, allowing teams to quickly identify and engage with potential customer references that align with their objectives. 

With this, sales reps can effortlessly find the most relevant information, ensuring that they focus their efforts on high-value engagement opportunities. The ability to filter and refine search results based on specific criteria means that your team can spend less time searching and more time building relationships and closing deals. 

4. Win Analysis

By analyzing patterns and wins across multiple sales opportunities, our AI will soon identify trends in customer challenges or pain points, objections, successful solutions, and outcomes. More importantly, it will also identify which references close deals. Then, search prioritizes these references when you need them! 

This will also help to convert prospects into customers by surfacing more information about the purchase journey. This information will guide product development, product marketing strategies, and sales approaches.  

A Balancing Act: Productivity Meets Authenticity Through AI 

AI will inevitably speed up a lot of manual work that happens today.  However, we believe that the key to success lies not in replacing human creativity but in enhancing it. That is why we are developing a unique feature that allows you to customize how and where AI assistance is utilized within your sales workflow.  

With our Customizable AI Limits, you can select specific fields for AI enhancement and set parameters for the best usage. 

By striking the perfect balance between AI-driven efficiency and authentic human input, your sales reps can focus on what truly matters: building relationships, understanding customer needs, and crafting compelling narratives that resonate with your audience. 

See Sales Wins in action  

The Impact of AI on Sales Performance  

Incorporating AI into the sales process has shown remarkable results across industries. Companies that use AI for sales have seen up to a 50% increase in leads and appointments.  

AI-driven sales forecasting can also improve accuracy by up to 82%. On top of that, sales teams leveraging AI report a 40-60% reduction in time spent on repetitive tasks, allowing more focus on high-value activities and are 1.3 times more likely to see revenue increase.  

Our AI-enhanced Sales Wins feature speeds up sales processes and helps sales professionals refine their tactics. This helps sales leaders and their teams work smarter, increase speed to close, and close more deals! 

Increase the Impact of Your Win Data and Case Studies with Upland RO Innovation  

To help you make the most of these new features, here are some best practices for leveraging your sales opportunity data:    

1. Encourage consistent use: Make submitting opportunity data a standard part of your sales process. The more data you collect, the more valuable insights you will gain. 
2. Share success stories widely: Use AI-generated summaries to share wins across your organization, fostering a culture of success and knowledge sharing. 
3. Integrate with sales training: Use the insights gained from win data to inform and enhance your sales training programs. 
4. Regularly review and analyze: Set up regular reviews of your win data to identify trends, successful strategies, and areas for improvement. 
5. Align with marketing: Work closely with your marketing team to turn win data and case studies into powerful marketing collateral. 

Win More Deals with Upland RO Innovation’s AI-Powered Sales Wins   

At Upland RO Innovation, we believe that understanding and leveraging data from sales opportunities is crucial for sustained success in B2B sales and your customer reference program. It is more than just selling.  

By automating data capture, ensuring data quality, generating actionable insights, and facilitating the creation of compelling case studies, we empower sales teams to learn from their successes and replicate them consistently. This will help strengthen your customer reference program, too. 

We are excited to see how you will use these new features to drive their sales performance to new heights. As always, we are committed to continual innovation and improvement, and we look forward to bringing you more powerful tools to support your sales success.  

Want to learn more? Let’s chat about how our AI-enhanced Sales Wins feature can transform your approach to sales intelligence and customer references.