Interest in expert sales systems is on the rise. Sellers could save significant time and travel expenses if they had an expert sales system with the knowledge of a crossfunctional sales team. On the buy side, business-to-business purchasers want quicker, easier ways to find out how their business needs can be addressed by software, hardware, and service products. At IBM Research we have developed a web-based expert sales system called SEAS (Sales Enablement Across Solutions) that IBM uses in its daily sales operations. SEAS questions users about their business problems and translates those business problems into solution areas such as B2B and CRM. It also recommends specific solution vendors based on the user's industry, subindustry, revenue, and hardware platform. The purpose of this paper is to share our experiences in developing SEAS. We will relate the lessons that we have learned, illustrated by SEAS design information.
By: Shubir Kapoor, Steve Buckley, Kaan Katircioglu, Heng Cao, Guillermo Gallego, Oyedele Oladeji
Published in: RC23002 in 2001
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