AI Facilitates More Than 70,000 Business Deals in Six Months

Two unique long-term initiatives at Otsuka were behind the use of AI: The first was the establishment of a business model to increase sales without increasing the number of employees: until the late 1980s, employee growth was linked to sales growth. In recent years, however, the company has continued to expand its presence in the market without increasing the number of employees through a variety of systems that improved productivity and efficiency. To continue this business model, Otsuka needed to make sales activities more efficiently than ever.

A second initiative was the Sales Process Reengineering (SPR) system, a sales tool used by all Otsuka sales representatives since 2001 to capture data on all sales activities. Since 2000, more than 50 million business negotiations and more than 1.2 billion sales details have been accumulated in the system. This vast data set includes not only the details of business negotiations and transactions, but also information on post-sales support, accumulating sales activities, and customer status.

Even though Otsuka has been promoting efficiency against this backdrop, there have been challenges. Each sales representative has his or her strengths and weaknesses, and performance between salespeople varies. “Every company has a certain percentage of salespeople who can sell, but that is not enough to improve the company’s bottom line. We had to find a way to give every salesperson the ability to sell beyond their capabilities.” recalls Mr. Jinushi.

Having accumulated data for more than 20 years, Otsuka Corporation wondered if it would be possible to use AI to analyze this data to capture previously unseen changes in the market and customer needs.

Because there is a vast amount of data, even leveraging traditional data science processes can take months of effort to get to the point of designing features that quantify the objects and characteristics that AI should analyze. For Otsuka, the benefit of dotData is that it automates the pre-processing part, including feature extraction, shortening the time needed from months to just a few days, allowing the company to immediately build AI models and analyze the data.

“Our data is vast and highly diverse. It is necessary to find the changes in the market and customers’ IT needs and deliver them quickly to the sales staff. Using dotData, we can analyze data with a sense of speed “ Mr. Jinushi.

In 2019, Otsuka began to leverage dotData to develop its “AI Sales Lead Guide,” an initiative aimed at improving sales activity efficiency. The AI system automatically schedules appointments in SPR’s calendar based on features analyzed by dotData that complement Otsuka’s sales goals.

For example, Otsuka leverages AI models to predict the optimal destination for an in-person meeting based on the time interval from the last in-person meeting and an analysis of increasing market demand. The AI system supports sales staff with intelligence by suggesting customers in areas where sales can travel to in between meetings.

How do dotData features impact AI destination guide suggestions to salespeople? Ikuo Ochi of Otsuka explains the features provided by dotData and how they are interpreted.

“For PC order forecasting, dotData extracted features based on natural language processing of customer inquiries. For example, inquiries about the topics ‘year-end adjustment’ and ‘revision upgrades’ are likely to generate demand for PCs.”

For salespeople to make effective use of the insights provided by dotData’s feature data, Otsuka has created a business process for “deciphering” feature data. By having both the analysis and operations departments interpret the meaning behind the feature values, the information can be used in sales activities in a way that is easy for salespeople to understand.

As a result of internal training efforts, the number of members who can decipher the feature data is increasing rapidly. Their success in using AI is also due to the fact that Otsuka has trained people who can gain insights in the field that require information analysis.

In some cases, Otsuka found unexpected relevance from the number of characteristics in dotData. One example is the relationship between multifunction device operation data and orders for LED lighting. “Otsuka Corporation handles all aspects of the office, providing not only PCs and MFPs, but also LED lighting and other products. In that context, dotData has discovered customers who have increased their facsimile use of MFPs over the past two years and have generated more orders for LED lighting. The relationship between facsimile usage and LED lighting purchases is a novel concept that would never have occurred to a human analyst. “Discovering hidden insights like that is one of the powers of dotData’s features,” says Mr. Ochi.

Other examples include the relationship between a salesperson’s success and the interval between sales activities.dotData was able to identify that the optimal interval between sales activities was neither too short, nor too long. Mr. Ochi credits dotData’s feature extraction capabilities with giving him many insights into relationships that he would not have been able to find without it, and relationships that he had sensed and understood but which the data supported.

AI-driven destination guidance is another project that has been impacted by dotData. By leveraging Otsuka’s vast data, dotData was able to analyze market and customer needs and propose ideal destinations for business meetings. With this new process, the number of AI-driven business negotiations has grown by 300% to 74,300 in the first half of 2021, compared to the same period a year earlier. The impact of AI business negotiations has also led to an increase in the overall number of business negotiations, with an increase of 8.4% in the first quarter of 2021.” Says Mr. Jinushi.

One of the key success factors is that AI is now able to create sales proposals with high accuracy, and salespeople have come to trust AI. Another is the integration between AI-driven business proposals and SPR – the sales team’s daily calendar tool. The power of dotData’s fast, automated data analysis can be used for more than just AI destination guidance. As part of their management strategy, Otsuka is also promoting the use of AI in human resource development, and expanding the use of dotData’s features to measure employee performance. The next generation of young salespeople are quickly discovering the value of using the system and getting results.