SmartFox Technologies™ – AI that ensures Sales Forecast Accuracy

Accurately forecasting sales is the lifeline to success for every business. It’s what helps companies plan to pay their employees, cover operating expenses, buy more inventory, market new products, and attract new investors. Sales Leaders now more than ever need accurate and up-to-date information from their sales representatives to ensure their company hits their sales and revenue goals. Unfortunately, those same sales leaders struggle with clearly laying out company expectations to ensure consistency and accountability across their sales team.

It’s a challenge that Phil Everhart faced as a sales leader, so he took his years of experience and developed a new type of AI technology that continues to fix forecast accuracy problems and corrects missed forecasted revenue.  

Phil Everhart: President & Founder of SmartFox Technologies

Inspired by a pair of wild foxes who frequently visited his home, he created SmartFox Technologies and partnered with Salesforce™, the leading CRM software provider in the world to create SmartFox Prime©, the first-ever Business Forecast Management (BFM) system. SmartFox Prime’s technology uses an invention called controlled artificial intelligence (CAI) to help CRM users across the world save millions by fixing inaccurate sales forecasts while eliminating poor opportunity management.

Everhart discovered that often the information provided by his sales representatives was incomplete or incorrect, forcing the sales managers to spend a significant amount of time fixing this information within the company’s CRM system.

“Every company I’ve been involved in, over the past twenty years has faced this problem and I intend to show others how CAI technology will fix it. Research shows that there’s a huge challenge in forecasting sales for almost every sales team. I knew that creating an easy-to-use controllable artificial intelligence tool that removes subjectivity and guessing on future probability would save companies millions in missed forecasted revenue”. 

In building the software, Everhart had two key goals in mind: ease of use and consistency. “Simplifying a structured system for a sales team improves behavior and performance, resulting in more accountability which then leads to accuracy and results. That’s what sales teams want and companies need” he said. “SmartFox Prime requires sales teams to simply check off milestones and not provide lengthy and detailed information. SmartFox Prime removes a huge burden from the sales representatives who no longer are required to guess or predict inaccurate forecasts. Company leaders can now rely on management insight, past success, and sales representative performance instead, which brings consistency and cadence to sales forecasts”. 

“Using our CAI solves the forecast problem upfront, rather than trying to fix it afterward” he said. The software uses groundbreaking controllable features which outputs allow sales leaders to continue improving their sales process to ensure results. SmartFox Prime is the only business forecast management system in the industry and the only one using this trademarked platform. 

With the growth of artificial intelligence use in business, Everhart believes tools like SmartFox Prime will be critical for companies to be more accurate to investors. Wall Street measures the success of a company by how well they meet their sales forecasts.

“The term ‘AI’ scares people, but it’s going to be one of the most important things to the future of business,” Everhart said. “Salesforce has the ability to extract information but each sales representative is different by design in how they enter and report updates. The data entered is likely subjective, inconsistent, and often unrealistic.”

SmartFox Prime extracts good AI using objective data points to ensure forecast accuracy instead. AI can pull employees away from mundane tasks and let them focus on more necessary assignments making them more efficient and a company more effective. “Today sales managers spend up to 50% of their time fixing inaccurate forecasts and poor opportunity management from their sales team in Salesforce. Imagine a world where a company could free up 50% of this activity using AI” he said. 

Everhart is well-versed in the needs that corporations have for how to utilize artificial intelligence to their benefit. “AI is the top adoption growth area for sales teams” he said. A recent study performed by Salesforce states that “AI is the top growth area for sales teams — its adoption is forecasted to grow 139% over the next three years” 

SmartFox Prime not only corrects inaccurate forecasts, but it can control the behavior patterns of sales teams. SmartFox Prime shows sales leaders how to incentivize Sales Reps to make good decisions. “Our technology nudges the sales representative to make good choices by design because it’s easy to use, desirable, timely, and social” he said. “Companies that embrace our CAI can easily motivate their sales team with social recognition and social pressure amongst their colleagues”.

Everhart has spent his life forecasting and simplifying processes so that businesses can be more successful. “History repeats itself; just like good sales representatives repeat themselves. If you have control and confidence in your sales process and data, then you can predict future outcomes based on using management insight, past success, and employee performance” said Everhart,