AI’s influence is extending fast across everyday life, our devices, and how we do business. Most businesses (77%) allocate specific funding for AI, while 35% of CROs are forecast to have centralized generative AI operations teams.
For many services quoting organizations, the question is this: How can we use AI to impact our most critical business KPIs, such as margins and revenue, while also providing personalization at scale? Four new purpose-built features in Provus have the answers.
Provus AI capabilities allow professional services leaders to take ownership, take action, and make better decisions with AI services quoting. Start with the right AI data foundations, and see the quoting process elevated end to end while minimizing delivery risks to individual projects and the wider business.
Provus Copilot
Meet your new collaborative colleague for the quote-to-cash process. Provus Copilot will give you AI-powered help and guidance for every step when developing a quote, whenever you need it. That means providing the essential element of contextual knowledge to ensure timely and relevant insights. And always gathering more data based on interactions, to continually improve and adapt outcomes.
That could be asking for help to navigate the platform and add in critical scoping elements like COLA adjustments. Maybe ask for win data on specific service types with a customer, so you can better prepare for your upcoming meeting.
Whatever the use case, Copilot carries out conversational processes consistently, supporting reps to build repeatable frameworks. Plus, the outputs come without biases that can impact proposal transparency.
Recommendation
AI accelerates and maximizes the project planning phase, acting as a proposal generator. There’s no need to start from a blank page, or empty spreadsheet, ever again. The predictive feature brings past insights into the present, for AI guided quoting and scoping.
Multi-service templates provide an easy way to start populating the right information. Work breakdown structures and questionnaires allow the quote to be further refined and modeled. This provides the foundation for the overall quoting process.
Provus AI then provides recommendations, such as adding services to increase deals, and revenue or adjusting discounts to improve win rate probability. In real-time, too, for added agility. The insights come from analyzing historical data, to lay out adjustments for improving your quotes and revenue outcomes.
Business Insights
Human insight is further augmented with Business Insights. This feature offers descriptive and diagnostic tools for advanced services KPIs and metrics, to examine the symptoms and causes of what’s happening across the services sales process. It allows you to explore trends, understand sentiment with peer review analysis, and conduct root cause analysis.
It starts with connecting and analyzing sales and delivery data from across the organization, producing more complete analysis, better answers, and reliable results. For example, by uncovering existing customers’ needs, it becomes easier to improve their experiences. The resulting insight can be used with other prospects, to address their objectives quicker, and in turn close deals in less time.
Goal Seek
Finally, reps can quickly adjust pricing scenarios with confidence, and without adding risks to projects. Goal Seek removes the guesswork from quote creation, and replaces it with data-driven certainty. What’s more, this can all be done in a few clicks, without laborious setups.
Imagine a rep has been asked to uncover an extra 2% in a services project’s margins. After a few price adjustments within some of the phases, the spreadsheet arrives at the desired 2% projection. Of course, when executed, that type of broad brief would lead to a potentially broad range of outcomes, ranging from good to bad to horrible for the bottom line
Now imagine that’s taking place within an enterprise deal. Those negotiations will involve plenty of twists and turns, with pressures, opinions, and requests coming from multiple areas of the business. Adjusting coordinates by 2% before setting off might not seem like much. But later on, that seemingly minor change to a pricing lever can result in a landing very far from the original destination, perhaps even meaning the project is undeliverable.
That’s where Goal Seek comes in. The feature gives you the ability to set the destination of a 2% margin increase, or a revenue amount, and then evaluate all the variables and conditions on the way. By factoring in current and historical data, skill levels, and locations, you can automatically generate new work breakdown structures. It’s AI-guided selling in action, delivering the optimum route to revenue maximization, while dynamically adjusting for risks along the way.
Optimizing people, processes, technology with Provus AI
This takes the AI conversation beyond simply looking at productivity gains or giving sellers more time in their day. That’s already possible by deploying AI to automate routine processes. Instead, by using time more effectively, organizations realize more value from their time. And across multiple dimensions – from margin optimization, customer experience, and overall profitability – by using AI in all quote-to-cash processes.
Together, these four capabilities serve the nature of modern professional services quoting. Where human emotion and intelligence join with AI’s power and capabilities at scale. Moving beyond the already-established advantages of efficiency that AI-based automation provides, toward the more strategic results that Provus AI brings to people, processes, and technology.
To explore how the Provus AI can guide, optimize, and boost your lead-to-cash processes, book a demo today.
