ABB

ABB is a technology leader in electrification and automation, transforming society and industry by connecting engineering know-how and software to optimize how things are manufactured, moved, powered, and operated. 

ABB Low Voltage Motor partnered with Reaktor to improve productivity within their sales teams. The magic key was an AI-powered sales tool – enabling sales experts to cut down time spent on routine work. The new tool saves time and provides more accurate solution offerings to clients faster.

ABB wanted to improve the productivity of sales teams while providing consistent and accurate offers for their customers – faster. With an initial solution in mind, ABB partnered with Reaktor to refine and crystalize the vision and make it a reality.

With ABB and their sales team, we created a vision for a future workflow that allows sales experts to focus on the work that produces the most value. Our team worked with ABB experts worldwide to create solution concepts involving the end user while validating the business and technical aspects of potential solutions. The loop was to identify a use case, develop a hypothesis, and see the results.

Our priority was to execute ideas that could provide immediate value and get people on board. Stakeholders from different parts of the organization evaluated the business value of the ideas. With that, we devised a plan for the bespoke tool to help reduce tedious and manual tasks from technical sales experts and bring concrete business benefits.

The magic key was an AI-powered, bespoke support tool – enabling sales experts to cut down time spent on routine work. The new tool saves time and provides more accurate solution offerings to clients faster. 

The coexistence between humans and machines helps save time and avoid tedious, manual work. It also makes the process less prone to errors as the human is only in charge of checking the machine's job. The tool also reduces the cognitive load and automatically points out possible inconsistencies and incoherencies. This helps sales experts provide potential solutions to customers faster, with better accuracy, and overall higher quality. 

This is precisely what the demanding B2B customer base expects from the best-in-class providers.

The piloting phase of the tool began in the summer of 2023, with feedback looking very positive. The pilot users recommended rolling out the tool to all users in their organization. Based on a questionnaire given to the pilot group, sales experts believe that the tool will:

• Enhance sales productivity 4.5/5
• Help in creating offers faster 4.5./5
• Enhance offer quality and consistency 4.3/5
• Support collaboration 4.6/5
• Make my life easier 4.7./5

After the initial version of the support tool was put together, we devised a longer-term roadmap for further driving sales efficiency with ABB. The roadmap explored opportunities in leveraging existing customer and sales data to improve offer hit rate, bettering internal collaboration, and even reimagining how sales teams could interact with the customer.

Following the successful pilot, ABB and Reaktor are now moving toward broader implementation. We are now scaling the solution across additional divisions within ABB, bringing productivity gains to a wider set of teams. Longer-term, the shared vision includes:

• Enterprise-wide scale-up: Tailoring the solution to fit other ABB business units
• Smarter decision-making: Leveraging accumulated data to provide tailored proposals matching the customer's need and context, and predict offer success.

• Concept design 
• Technical proof of concept and architecture definition
• Analysis of current workflows and pain points
• Designing of bespoke AI support tool
• Development of a homegrown AI solution
• Building a future roadmap for further driving sales efficiency