AI Needn’t Be Complex
GE Capital Fleet Services developed a tool that assisted its sales managers, when meeting with prospective company CFOs, in discussing with some degree of fluency the financial benefits of its service offering. The tool was built with algorithms in Microsoft Excel and self-contained in the sales staff’s laptop computers. Its use, during the discovery phase in the sales process, gives the sales manager an appraisal of a prospect’s financial health. By not pursuing prospects with poor prognosis, costs of more sales calls and credit analysis were avoided.
As the twentieth century was ending, Fleet Services have defined its sales process with a Six Sigma methodology. This GE subsidiary provided a basket of financial and maintenance management services to car and truck fleets of private organizations such as General Mills, Honeywell and Allied Signal. The sales manager’s first contact with a prospective customer occurred at a face-to-face meeting with the company’s CFO. While each sales manager received basic training in corporate finance, the administration of Fleet Services realized that credit analysis has to happen at the discovery meeting with the prospect’s CEO. Knowing that credit analysis data at that initial meeting is prohibitively costly and to request financial statements premature, the Six Sigma project team arrived at specifications for a financial work pad with AI-type algorithms based on Microsoft Excel. An added requirement was to avoid the use of costly IT resources.
At the initial meeting, the sales manager asked if the CFO was interested in comparing the prospect company to its average peer in the industry. With five financial statements’ data typed in, the financial work pad gave the sales manager a diagnosis. If the prospect company’s was below average, the sales manager relays comparative strength and weakness information across the desk to the CFO. The sales tool also gave the sales manager a cryptic character indicating credit assessment which if good suggested sending this prospect through Fleet Services sales pipeline.
The implementation of the redefined sales process with the enabling sales tool went as planned and cost savings identified in the project’s business case was as proposed. The credit assessment capability of the tool was robust and was also used later to identify acceptable commercial real estate for packaging into the securitized real estate financial market.
By Noel Jagolino, contributing consultant