Field Sales Platform Thrives on Amazon Redshift
A global health and wellness company sought to develop a cloud-native sales enablement platform to support and grow its crucial network of independent sales agents.
The organization leveraged NTT DATA's expertise in cloud transformations on the AWS Cloud to create the robust data warehouse and services needed to ensure the performance and scalability of its new sales platform.
Business Needs
Data is the lifeblood of many companies undergoing digital transformation.
Harnessing that data allows a company to explore and analyze datasets to find hidden patterns, uncover market trends and derive valuable insights to make critical business decisions and predictions. As the size and complexity of datasets grow, many companies turn to the cloud to efficiently store, manage and perform analytics on their data.
A global health and wellness products and services company undertook that journey.
One of the organization's key sales channels is a network of thousands of independent sales agents serving millions of customers. The organization saw a strategic opportunity to develop a digital sales enablement platform that would foster marketing success and help grow the company's international footprint. The platform would present each agent with a unified view of their customer data, sales metrics and product information, and, in effect, become the core platform for conducting business.
Outcomes
- Delivers core functionalities in less than eight months
- Provides a unified view of products, customers and sales performance
- Drives field sales success and engagement
- Enables 2X growth in sales network since the rollout
- Fosters network growth in new markets and geographies
The cloud-native sales platform gives this company a competitive edge to attract agents in new markets and geographies, driving sales and profit while improving the health and wellness of customers around the world.
Solution
Field sales application backed by a powerful data warehouse
The company's internal software development team crafted a cloud-native mobile and desktop application to serve as the agents' portal to the sales platform, knowing that the large volume of product, customer and sales data required by the thousands of agents using the application would tax its on-premises database infrastructure. In response, the company leveraged NTT DATA's Cloud Transformation services to create a scalable, highly responsive cloud-native data warehouse and supporting analytics services on AWS to store, process and present data in the sales platform.
The Shift to AWS Redshift
The company evaluated potential data warehouse and analytics platforms that would work specifically, but concluded that many lacked the scalability and responsiveness required. Seeking an optimal solution, the cloud transformation team elected to build and deploy the back end of the sales enablement platform on the AWS cloud using Amazon Redshift as its foundational data warehouse.
Amazon Redshift offered the performance and scale needed to power the sales platform then, and into the future, as the company grew its network of sales agents and customers. By dynamically provisioning and intelligently scaling data warehouse capacity, Amazon Redshift could cost-efficiently support new workloads as the sales platform evolved.
Redshift offered two performance features that appealed strongly to the cloud transformation team: Amazon Redshift Spectrum and Amazon Redshift's support for materialized views. Both features provide significantly faster queries of datasets stored on the AWS Cloud.
While this formed the data warehouse of the sales enablement platform, the teams used several other AWS products and services to engineer the platform's design, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon API Gateway, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail.
New platform drives growth and future capabilities
The cloud transformation team developed and deployed the core functionalities of the sales enablement platform in less than eight months. The uptake and use of the platform by the organization's sales agents have been dramatic: the agent network has doubled to 80,000 agents serving 4.5 million customers.
The company has achieved such success with the sales platform that it has already begun developing additional capabilities. For example, the analytics services of the AWS-powered platform enable the company to determine which products a sales agent is selling successfully and identify and recommend complementary products that would also benefit that agent's customers.
In addition, the platform's design allows for seamless integration of the data warehouse with future applications. The open API framework of the platform will enable applications to access the data warehouse easily and provide additional analytics and dashboards to sales agents and the organization.
The flexibility and power of the cloud-native sales platform give this company a competitive edge to attract agents in new markets and geographies, driving sales and profit while improving the health and wellness of customers around the world.
About This Case Study
A global health and wellness company worked with NTT DATA to develop a cloud-native sales enablement platform using AWS capabilities.