Client story: baked goods manufacturer
Enhancing data-driven sales with real-time predictions
Increasing sales effectiveness by offering tailored product recommendations based on customer behaviour insights
This company is a global leader in manufacturing frozen and fresh bakery products. They offer a wide range of brands, products, and solutions for professional customers and consumers alike. With a worldwide presence, the company aim to reach billions of people in all countries and demographics.
They are passionate about innovation and continuous product development, enabling them to bring the best bakery products to market. With 2021.AI, the company innovated its sales strategy using AI, giving their sales force access to state-of-the-art machine learning predictions in their everyday work.
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The challenge
The company operates in a highly competitive global market. To best retain and expand their customer base, they must continuously ensure that they accurately fit their offerings to varied regional needs.
Recently, they expanded their sales force in Norway to help boost sales. If the Norwegian sales force are to succeed, they need to improve how they respond to and meet specific customer needs by understanding and suggesting the most suitable products.
To get the best customer-product match and accurately predict sales, the company looked to innovate their sales strategy with AI. Depending on how well the recommender performs in the Norwegian market, they intend to expand the model into more countries in the future.
The solution
2021.AI combined three machine learning models to create a unique solution for the Norwegian sales force. The models consist of sales forecasting, collaborative filtering, and product success classification. Individually, they help forecast, suggest product recommendations, and help define why a product might be successful. Used together, they create a robust overall prediction engine. 2021.AI integrated management rules related to the market share and whether a customer can purchase a given product based on the company’s customer segments. The final model was trained using thousands of transactions combined with related customer and product information. The prediction output is available including descriptive statistics of the data in an easy-to-use dashboard.
The results
In Norway, the key account managers and sales representatives use the dashboard in their day-to-day work to assess the machine learning predictions and recommendations for their customers. It allows the salesforce to become more data-driven and strategically customize product recommendations to fit each clients’ needs better. Through the AI solution, sales representatives now have an overview of the best products to recommend at their fingertips, helping them fulfill their customers’ needs and meet their quotas.
This project lifts the company’s overall business intelligence strategy from descriptive to including predictive elements that, together with 2021.AI’s platform, can be easily scaled across other markets.
Project highlights
- Identifying the potential improvement of data-driven sales
- Building an AI model to forecast sales and product recommendations using the Grace enterprise AI platform
- Giving the company’s salesforce access to state-of-the-art customer predictions in their everyday work
- Adding predictive elements to sales intelligence in one market has lifted the company’s overall business intelligence strategy, with plans to expand to more countries and regions
About the project
The project was run in collaboration with Valcon Consulting. 2021.AI powered the AI solutions, including use case and model development, continued platform support, and retraining of models.
About the company
This company is one of Europe’s leading suppliers of high-quality bakery products to retailers, wholesalers, and the food service industry. With 36 bakeries in 21 countries across Europe, the US, and Australia, they offer a wide range of brands, products, and solutions for professional customers and consumers alike. The company markets their leading frozen and fresh bakery products for retail and food service markets in more than 60 markets worldwide.