Billy Beane, former General Manager of the Oakland A’s, forever changed how baseball players were evaluated.

Saddled with big expectations for his team but a limited (some said laughable) budget, he needed to identify lower-salaried players who could get on base with equal or greater frequency than the expensive players that he could not afford.

Working with Paul DePodesta, Billy turned everything scouts knew about finding baseball talent on its head and used data analytics to find and recruit bargain players.  Instead of trusting his scouting to the traditions of “gut feel” and “scout’s eyes”, Billy Beane turned to data, and as a result was able to identify overlooked players who had game-winning potential.

Thanks to his revolutionary method, the Oakland A’s built a winning team on a shoestring budget and made history in the process.

TRAQ is solving a similar problem in today’s sales environment. Like the early baseball scouts, salespeople use “conventional wisdom” to drive sales forward; they rely on experience combined with intuition to prepare their plans and forecasts and use their memory and gut-feel to drive deals through the pipeline.  At best, it’s inaccurate. At worst? It’s just plain wrong.

Far too often, when salespeople prepare their strategies, they’re practically guessing at what pipeline stage the deal should live in and how likely it is to close.  They’re taking unstructured data – the sales conversations and communications they have in meetings and on phone calls –  then layering on a hefty dose of subjectivity, opinion, and past experience. Worse, they’re using that information to actually report to management, who in turn are using those reports to inform strategy and forecast revenue. It’s not an ideal way to run a sales organization much less a company.

So, we’re aiming to change all of that.

TRAQ has a vision that will change the nature of sales.  We’re applying Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning to all of that unstructured sales data – those meeting notes, emails, call transcripts and documents – to better understand each sale, and more accurately evaluate the participants, the sales process, the pipeline and the probabilities of winning the business. Our approach will finally deliver data-driven insights and data-driven decisions to sales teams, yield prescriptive insights, and offer prescriptive direction to sales professionals and leaders so they know what actions to take to move deals forward.

It’s time to apply math and science to sales. To turn to data to help us develop our strategies. To use the information we gather to map out a clear, revenue-generating path forward with our customers and for our business.

At Traq, we’re not stopping at “the art of the sale”. Artificial intelligence is here, and we’re creating a future for sales that’s part art, part science, and totally transformed.

Want to learn more? Click here to try Traq and become part of the latest revolution in sales technology.