Honeywell’s AI Sales Guidance Journey With Aviso
About the Company
Industry - Aerospace
Founded in 1906 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, employs over 110,000 people and operates in the aerospace, building technologies, performance materials and technologies (PMT), and safety and productivity solutions (SPS) industries.
"Aviso does a great job of serving two masters. It gives management what management wants to see, but really, the heart of it is that it takes all the stuff that they put into Salesforce and it gives them insights back. So it becomes a two-way relationship."
Charles Forsgard
Global VP, Sales
Honeywell
Honeywell’s Need For A Revenue Operations And Intelligence (RO&I) Platform
In 2018, Honeywell defined a strategic initiative to implement a global design model (GDM) for its CRM solution. The initiative resulted in a high-level blueprint of recommendations with crucial inputs from more than a hundred Honeywell employees working across different functions.
As a next step, Honeywell looked for a suitable sales forecasting tool. The objective was to help business units improve sales forecast accuracy, enable informed decision making, and predict short and long-term performance.
Challenges Faced By Honeywell
Before using Aviso, Honeywell faced numerous challenges such as:
Disconnected CRM instances maintained across business units
Inability to predict short and long-term deals and opportunity performance with high accuracy
Lack of real-time deal insights
Overspending on underutilized CRM licenses, and ineffective call recording tools
Why Did Honeywell Choose Aviso?
Honeywell intended to identify and select the right technology partner offering functionalities that would help achieve the impact and return on investment. Below are the must-have functionality requirements that Honeywell needed from vendors:
Forecast Data
TrackingDashboard and Reporting
Deal Inspection
Pipeline Analytics
Opportunity Management
Activity Tracking
Communication and User Experience
Technology (MI/AI/platform) / Administration
Mobile Capabilities (iOS/Android)
Among all the competing vendors, Aviso offered best-in-class functionalities combined with competitive pricing and attractive contractual terms (such as implementation, support, etc.). Besides functional requirements, Honeywell wanted a vendor with expertise in SFDC technology and prior experience in implementing appropriate technical and aesthetic solutions for Fortune 100 industrial organizations. Aviso fitted well with these requirements.
How Did Aviso Enable Forecasting And Deal Guidance Across Honeywell?
Honeywell operates across multiple global teams under a complex revenue process and uses a mix of sales tools and spreadsheets. Aviso provided Honeywell with a unified, global forecasting process that included roll-ups for managers across different teams and businesses. In addition, Aviso was able to customize the solution through bespoke columns and hierarchies. After successfully using Aviso’s sales forecasting solution, Honeywell later added deal guidance dashboards as well.
Aviso’s sales forecasting tools allowed Honeywell's sales team’s to provide their individual perspective and predictions for success. Multiple and overlapping teams got both the combined forecast as well as individual components they’re responsible for. This enabled them to view customized dashboards for their own specific forecasts using the same Aviso tools. Sales managers were able to access multiple trends for the deal opportunities, which helped them identify exact closing risks and take actions to mitigate them.
Aviso also provided Honeywell with effective deal guidance. Aviso focused on providing timely business insight to C-level managers, and sales reps. This enabled them to identify and engage target personas better, track activities and relationships in real-time, and make course corrections. By using Aviso AI and insights platform across different business units, Honeywell has been able to elevate its sales team’s success.
Here's what Charles Forsgard, Global VP of Sales at Honeywell had to say about Aviso-
“Aviso shows managers what deals in their team’s commit have a low chance of converting, and which deals in future have the best chance of being pulled in. They record forecasting calls between managers and reps and use NLP to improve predictions. Aviso enables us to take cost out of Salesforce licenses so GMs, regional sales leaders do not need Salesforce licenses.”
How is Honeywell Expanding The Use of Aviso Solutions?
After reorganizing their sales forecasting around the Aviso AI-guided platform, Honeywell is confidently adding new Aviso capabilities to fulfill their sales technology adoption requirements. From 2019 to 2021, with the implementation of Aviso’s AI-guided selling solution, Honeywell has expanded the platform’s use into several additional divisions, such as Honeywell PPR (Productivity Products) and Honeywell UOP (Universal Oil Products). Aviso has been named Honeywell’s standard solution for intelligent forecasting.
When Aviso first introduced conversational intelligence (CI) as an anchor solution on its platform, Honeywell put Aviso up against an extensive pilot they were running with Gong. Aviso was the clear winner against Gong and was awarded a Honeywell-wide RFP. Aviso is now Honeywell’s standard solution for CI in addition to being named the standard for Forecasting & Revenue Guidance.
Here's what Ujjwal Kumar, VP of Sales at Honeywell had to say about Aviso-
“Aviso is core to my regular weekly pulse and is one tool for our business from global all the way down. Game-changing.”
Aviso’s CI is uniquely positioned to help Honeywell as Aviso is tied in deeply across their revenue stream. Aviso CI supports Honeywell with email and calendar integration as well as engagement analysis. Aviso delivers relationship insights to help Honeywell’s sales teams understand the true level of customer engagement. Aviso’s Forensics on sales representatives’ relationships and activities over time is helping resolve single-threaded deal risks.
In addition, Honeywell’s Safety and Productivity Solutions (SPS) is pioneering Aviso CI at the company level, and expansion plans have been identified for 2022. Honeywell’s SPS business unit will onboard 100+ Inside Sales Reps (ISRs), working across three different salesforce instances, into the Aviso AI platform. SPS will be implementing Aviso’s Relationship Intelligence (ability to see scheduled meetings, most and least engaged contacts, contact relationship map, and deal interactions over time) and Aviso’s CI (recording and transcription of customer calls to perform sentiment analysis and closure recommendations).
The Results (Benefits)
With Aviso, Honeywell has changed how its sales teams work and are getting them future-ready. Honeywell is leading the way for other companies to move from traditional systems of record like CRM towards predictive artificial intelligence. The collaboration provides sales teams with better visibility into their customers’ needs and insights that can improve their performance.
With improved forecast accuracy, sales managers and leaders across Honeywell are able to shift their focus from forecasting and reporting to team building, and better coaching. Honeywell's sales leadership gets the accurate forecasting numbers they need to grasp opportunities, track team activity, and make better business decisions.
“I am bullish about Aviso. They connected to our SFDC instance and gave us a baseline based on AI. Their model predicted CRM Wins for Q3 with more than 95% accuracy without any tweaking. The technology out of the box easily answers questions we have around what deals to focus on.”
Here’s what happened for Honeywell when Aviso applied AI guided selling and revenue forecasting to their sales processes in the last two years:
Estimated one-year benefits for Honeywell
$ 150M+ of total estimated revenue won annually
$ 1M+ of CRM cost savings
$ 100M+ of estimated topline benefit
Additionally, Honeywell observed
80%+ increase in virtual customer encounters
80%+ increase in pipeline activity
70%+ increase in deal creation (even in a down economy)