Customer reviews and recommendations are the best way to convince new customers to make purchase from you. This sales method is often successful as people prefer to make decisions on whether to make a purchase based on how reliable the product is and how much other customers like it.
Every sales rep says something like "This is the best selling product on the market," or "More than 1000 customers have purchased this product in the past few months" to convince prospects of their product's popularity.
As recommendations play such a vital role in sales pitches, it is important that the reps are armed with all the details they need about customer numbers, products, and deals while talking to new customers, so they can share the right information during sales calls or email follow-ups. Zia Similarity provides detailed insights into this type of information, so your reps never have to scramble for the right details again.
Watch this short video on how Similarity Recommender works in Zia.
How does Zia Similarity make sales easier?
Zia Similarity can identify information related to the contact, product, deal, or other record, that a rep is looking at and provide it on the record's detail page for reference.
For example, it will display the contacts who have previously purchased a product, or the customers who showed interest in similar deals, or the students that took a particular course.
Along with the customer details, it will also display the factors used to identify similarity such as interest, demography, geographical location, or the industry they belong to. For example, the image below shows the reasons why the "post pandemic readiness" campaign is similar: campaign type, revenue expected to be generated, recipient count etc.
Your sales reps can refer to these suggestions to understand how a deal is likely to progress through the different stages in the process. Corrective and preventive measures can also be taken to ensure the deal closes successfully.
Business scenarios
Align sales activities based on their success rates
A deal's progress depends on multiple factors. Some transactions close quickly while others take longer. Sales teams often add notes to a record to document its progress, reasons for any delay, the actions taken, documents requested, offers that were declined, and the sales tactics that led to a successful closure of the deal.
These notes are invaluable for the reps to refer back to decide how to approach similar deals. They can provide ideas for how to troubleshoot difficult negotiations, plan their activities ahead of time, and let the customer know well in advance about any compliance-related or other special requirements for a deal.
All these insights can be helpful in ensuring successful deal closure and preventing inadvertent errors.
Follow the path of loyal customers
To persuade potential customers, sales representatives often take reference from the similar transactions of loyal customers and pitch offerings that were beneficial for them like loyalty reward points, extended warranty, additional reward points, etc. Given the amount of data in your CRM, it is a time-consuming job to scout for those similar deals. This is where, Zia can help you. You can use Zia Similarity recommendation to analyze all closed deals and know which records are similar and apply the same pattern to convert your prospects into a loyal customer.
Identify patterns that could affect your business
Let's take the banking sector for example. Receiving monthly loan interest is an important income for banks. It helps them to forecast their revenue and profit. When customers pre-close their loan, it will impact the bank's revenue. With Zia's similarity recommendation, you can identify customers who are likely to pre-close their loans and forecast the prospective revenue dip, based on the behavioral patterns and insights from previous records.
Losing the customers to competitors
Customers mentioning your competitors in their email correspondences are often a signal for losing the deal. With Zia's similarity recommendation, you can monitor similar customers that might eventually be churning out of your business and track and optimize the communication activities for them proactively.
Only CRM administrators who have the permission to manage configurations in their profile can create a similarity recommendation rule and only admins who have the View Results permission can see a record's similarity score and other details.
Note that users can only see similarity scores for modules they have permissions for. For example, if John has the View Results permission but doesn't have permission to access the Leads module, he will not be able to see similarity scores for leads.
To set permissions
-
Go to
Setup > Users and Controls > Security Control.
-
Click the Profiles tab.
-
Select the profile (admin or cloned admin) which you want to give the permission to.
-
Under
Setup permission
, click
Zia
.
-
Toggle
Similarity
on if it is not enabled already.
-
Click the dropdown and check
Manage Configuration
and/or
View Result.
Configuring similarity recommendations
Zia's similarity recommendations can be viewed on the
Recommendation page
. While configuring similarity recommendations, admin can select fields from the layout and related lists to be displayed on the record's detail page.
For example, in a similarity recommender for the Deals module, in addition to selecting the
Deal Name
and
Deal Amount
fields, fields from related lists like
Activities, Tasks,
and
Note
s can also be selected.
Note
: Zia's similarity recommendation is not the same as the Recommendation Builder. Similarity recommendation can be configured independently; it is not necessary for the Recommendation Builder to be configured in your org for this feature to work.
Points to remember
-
Only orgs which have more than
20 user licenses
can configure similarity recommendation.
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Zia Similarity Recommender is available for Europe, US, and India users.
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A maximum of five similar records and their related details will be displayed on the record's detail page.
-
A maximum of three fields (including both layout fields and related list fields) will be displayed for similar records.
-
Availability
: Enterprise 1 rule per org, Ultimate 10 rules per org, but only 1 rule per module.
Check Feature Availability and Limits
-
Go to
Setup > Zia > Recommendation > Similarity Recommendation.
-
Click
Get Started
.
-
In
Create New Rule
page, enter
Rule Name
and select a module for which similarity recommender is been created.
-
In Criteria, select either
All records
or
Selected records
for
Criteria
Specify the criteria if you chose
Selected records.
-
Select the fields you want to include in the
Please select the fields you want to view in the record detail page
box.
You can select up to three fields.
-
Click
Save
.
Filter records based on similarity recommendation
Once you have enabled Similarity recommendation, Zia will add a system defined filter called "Similarity recommendation", to the advanced filter of the relevant module. For example, if a similarity recommendation is configured for the Accounts module, then the Similarity Recommender filter will be added to the Accounts module.
Using this filter, you can sift through records that have similarity recommendation or those without any recommendations.
Furthermore, you can delve deep to find records based on similarity scores or even find similar records like existing records in the module.
Thus, instead of opening individual record to know similarity scores or recommendations, you can view all such records at the click of a button using the advanced filter. Click
here to learn more about advanced filters.