In modern sales applications, automatic script extraction and management greatly decrease the need for human labor to collect the winning sales scripts, which largely boost the success rate for sales and can be shared across the sales teams. In this work, we present the SmartSales system to serve both the sales representatives and managers to attain the sales insights from the large-scale sales chatlog. SmartSales consists of three modules: 1) Customer frequently asked questions (FAQ) extraction aims to enrich the FAQ knowledge base by harvesting high quality customer question-answer pairs from the chatlog. 2) Customer objection response assists the salespeople to figure out the typical customer objections and corresponding winning sales scripts, as well as search for proper sales responses for a certain customer objection. 3) Sales manager dashboard helps sales managers to monitor whether a specific sales representative or team follows the sales standard operating procedures (SOP). The proposed prototype system is empowered by the state-of-the-art conversational intelligence techniques and has been running on the Tencent Cloud to serve the sales teams from several different areas.
During live sales calls, customers frequently ask detailed product questions that require representatives to manually search internal databases and CRM systems. This process typically takes 25-65 seconds per query, creating awkward pauses that hurt customer experience and reduce sales efficiency. We present SalesCopilot, a real-time AI-powered assistant that eliminates this bottleneck by automatically detecting customer questions, retrieving relevant information from the product database, and displaying concise answers on the representative's dashboard in seconds. The system integrates streaming speech-to-text transcription, large language model (LLM)-based question detection, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over a structured product database into a unified real-time pipeline. We demonstrate SalesCopilot on an insurance sales scenario with 50 products spanning 10 categories (2,490 FAQs, 290 coverage details, and 162 pricing tiers). In our benchmark evaluation, SalesCopilot achieves a measured mean response time of 2.8 seconds with 100% question detection rate, representing a 14xspeedup compared to manual CRM search in an internal study. The system is domain-agnostic and ca
User willingness is a crucial element in the sales talk process that affects the achievement of the salesperson's or sales system's objectives. Despite the importance of user willingness, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has addressed the development of automated sales talk dialogue systems that explicitly consider user willingness. A major barrier is the lack of sales talk datasets with reliable user willingness data. Thus, in this study, we developed a user willingness-aware sales talk collection by leveraging the ecological validity concept, which is discussed in the field of human-computer interaction. Our approach focused on three types of user willingness essential in real sales interactions. We created a dialogue environment that closely resembles real-world scenarios to elicit natural user willingness, with participants evaluating their willingness at the utterance level from multiple perspectives. We analyzed the collected data to gain insights into practical user willingness-aware sales talk strategies. In addition, as a practical application of the constructed dataset, we developed and evaluated a sales dialogue system aimed at enhancing the user's intent
Grocery retailers frequently apply price discounts to stimulate demand for expiring perishables. However, integrating these discounted sales into future demand forecasts presents a significant challenge. This study investigates the effectiveness of incorporating a fixed share of these sales as \textit{regular} demand into the forecast, as commonly applied in practice. We employ a two-step regression approach on data from a major European grocery retailer, covering over 1,700 products across 676 stores. We reveal that forecasts underestimate actual demand for most SKUs when discounted sales occur. This residual uplift effect is significantly influenced by the number of sales at reduced prices. Our findings underscore the necessity for more precise approaches to integrate discounted sales into demand forecasts, thereby preventing excess inventory and the associated economic and environmental impacts of spoilage in the grocery sector.
In the area of commercial auto sales system, high-quality lead score sequencing determines the priority of a sale's work and is essential for optimizing the efficiency of the sales system. Since CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system contains plenty of textual interaction features between sales and customers, traditional techniques such as Click Through Rate (CTR) prediction struggle with processing the complex information inherent in natural language features, which limits their effectiveness in sales lead ranking. Bridging this gap is critical for enhancing business intelligence and decision-making. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for improving recommendation systems, this study introduces asLLR (LLM-based Leads Ranking in Auto Sales), which integrates CTR loss and Question Answering (QA) loss within a decoder-only large language model architecture. This integration enables the simultaneous modeling of both tabular and natural language features. To verify the efficacy of asLLR, we constructed an innovative dataset derived from the customer lead pool of a prominent new energy vehicle brand, with 300,000 training samples and 40,
Salespeople frequently face the dynamic screening decision of whether to persist in a conversation or abandon it to pursue the next lead. Yet, little is known about how these decisions are made, whether they are efficient, or how to improve them. We study these decisions in the context of high-volume outbound sales where leads are ample, but time is scarce and failure is common. We formalize the dynamic screening decision as an optimal stopping problem and develop a generative language model-based sequential decision agent - a stopping agent - that learns whether and when to quit conversations by imitating a retrospectively-inferred optimal stopping policy. Our approach handles high-dimensional textual states, scales to large language models, and works with both open-source and proprietary language models. When applied to calls from a large European telecommunications firm, our stopping agent reduces the time spent on failed calls by 54% while preserving nearly all sales; reallocating the time saved increases expected sales by up to 37%. Upon examining the linguistic cues that drive salespeople's quitting decisions, we find that they tend to overweight a few salient expressions of
Enterprises increasingly need AI systems that can answer sales-leader questions over live, customized CRM data, but most available models do not expose transparent, repeatable evidence of quality. This paper describes the Sales Research Agent in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, an AI-first application that connects to live CRM and related data, reasons over complex schemas, and produces decision-ready insights through text and chart outputs. To make quality observable, we introduce the Sales Research Bench, a purpose-built benchmark that scores systems on eight customer-weighted dimensions, including text and chart groundedness, relevance, explainability, schema accuracy, and chart quality. In a 200-question run on a customized enterprise schema on October 19, 2025, the Sales Research Agent outperformed Claude Sonnet 4.5 by 13 points and ChatGPT-5 by 24.1 points on the 100-point composite score, giving customers a repeatable way to compare AI solutions.
This study explores the application potential of a deep learning model based on the CNN-LSTM framework in forecasting the sales volume of cancer drugs, with a focus on modeling complex time series data. As advancements in medical technology and cancer treatment continue, the demand for oncology medications is steadily increasing. Accurate forecasting of cancer drug sales plays a critical role in optimizing production planning, supply chain management, and healthcare policy formulation. The dataset used in this research comprises quarterly sales records of a specific cancer drug in Egypt from 2015 to 2024, including multidimensional information such as date, drug type, pharmaceutical company, price, sales volume, effectiveness, and drug classification. To improve prediction accuracy, a hybrid deep learning model combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks is employed. The CNN component is responsible for extracting local temporal features from the sales data, while the LSTM component captures long-term dependencies and trends. Model performance is evaluated using two widely adopted metrics: Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Root Mean Squared E
Current approaches to sales conversation analysis and conversion prediction typically rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with basic retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These systems, while capable of answering questions, fail to accurately predict conversion probability or provide strategic guidance in real time. In this paper, we present SalesRLAgent, a novel framework leveraging specialized reinforcement learning to predict conversion probability throughout sales conversations. Unlike systems from Kapa.ai, Mendable, Inkeep, and others that primarily use off-the-shelf LLMs for content generation, our approach treats conversion prediction as a sequential decision problem, training on synthetic data generated using GPT-4O to develop a specialized probability estimation model. Our system incorporates Azure OpenAI embeddings (3072 dimensions), turn-by-turn state tracking, and meta-learning capabilities to understand its own knowledge boundaries. Evaluations demonstrate that SalesRLAgent achieves 96.7% accuracy in conversion prediction, outperforming LLM-only approaches by 34.7% while offering significantly faster inference (85ms vs 3450ms for GPT-4). Furthermore, integrat
Amazon is the world number one online retailer and has nearly every product a person could need along with a treasure trove of product reviews to help consumers make educated purchases. Companies want to find a way to increase their sales in a very crowded market, and using this data is key. A very good indicator of how a product is selling is its sales rank; which is calculated based on all-time sales of a product where recent sales are weighted more than older sales. Using the data from the Amazon products and reviews we determined that the most influential factors in determining the sales rank of a product were the number of products Amazon showed that other customers also bought, the number of products Amazon showed that customers also viewed, and the price of the product. These results were consistent for the Digital Music category, the Office Products category, and the subcategory Holsters under Cell Phones and Accessories.
One of the important factors of profitability is the volume of transactions. An accurate prediction of the future transaction volume becomes a pivotal factor in shaping corporate operations and decision-making processes. E-commerce has presented manufacturers with convenient sales channels to, with which the sales can increase dramatically. In this study, we introduce a solution that leverages the XGBoost model to tackle the challenge of predict-ing sales for consumer electronics products on the Amazon platform. Initial-ly, our attempts to solely predict sales volume yielded unsatisfactory results. However, by replacing the sales volume data with sales range values, we achieved satisfactory accuracy with our model. Furthermore, our results in-dicate that XGBoost exhibits superior predictive performance compared to traditional models.
In a two-sided marketplace, network effects are crucial for competitiveness, and platforms need to retain users through advanced customer relationship management as much as possible. Maintaining numerous providers' stable and active presence on the platform is highly important to enhance the marketplace's scale and diversity. The strongest motivation for providers to continue using the platform is to realize actual profits through sales. Then, we propose a personalized promotion to increase the number of successful providers with sales experiences on the platform. The main contributions of our research are twofold. First, we introduce a new perspective in provider management with the distribution of successful sales experiences. Second, we propose a personalized promotion optimization method to maximize the number of providers' sales experiences. By utilizing this approach, we ensure equal opportunities for providers to experience sales without being monopolized by a few providers. Through experiments using actual data on coupon distribution, we confirm that our method enables the implementation of coupon allocation strategies that significantly increase the total number of provide
The delivery of drug samples allows increasing sales of pharmaceutical products [6]. However, we discovered some problems that can be improved in the supply chain that delivers drug samples (used for the treatment of excess glucose). Databases were integrated; then we apply data extraction and transformation; and finally we apply multiple regression analysis to explain drug sales. The first analysis evaluates the integration of regional data and the second analysis refers to data dis-aggregated by region. We identify the region with the greatest impact on sales and the impact of the delivery of drug samples in the Mexican market.
The finding of small price changes in many retail price datasets is often viewed as a puzzle. We show that a possible explanation for the presence of small price changes is related to sales volume, an observation that has been overlooked in the existing literature. Analyzing a large retail scanner price dataset that contains information on both prices and sales volume, we find that small price changes are more frequent when products sales volume is high. This finding holds across product categories, within product categories, and for individual products. It is also robust to various sensitivity analyses such as measurement errors, the definition of small price changes, the inclusion of measures of price synchronization, the size of producers, the time horizon used to compute the average sales volume, the revenues, the competition, shoppers characteristics, etc.
B2B sales requires effective prediction of customer growth, identification of upsell potential, and mitigation of churn risks. LinkedIn sales representatives traditionally relied on intuition and fragmented data signals to assess customer performance. This resulted in significant time investment in data understanding as well as strategy formulation and under-investment in active selling. To overcome this challenge, we developed a data product called Account Prioritizer, an intelligent sales account prioritization engine. It uses machine learning recommendation models and integrated account-level explanation algorithms within the sales CRM to automate the manual process of sales book prioritization. A successful A/B test demonstrated that the Account Prioritizer generated a substantial +8.08% increase in renewal bookings for the LinkedIn Business.
Retail sales forecasting presents a significant challenge for large retailers such as Walmart and Amazon, due to the vast assortment of products, geographical location heterogeneity, seasonality, and external factors including weather, local economic conditions, and geopolitical events. Various methods have been employed to tackle this challenge, including traditional time series models, machine learning models, and neural network mechanisms, but the difficulty persists. Categorizing data into relevant groups has been shown to improve sales forecast accuracy as time series from different categories may exhibit distinct patterns. In this paper, we propose a new measure to indicate the unique impacts of the trend and seasonality components on a time series and suggest grouping time series based on this measure. We apply this approach to Walmart sales data from 01/29/2011 to 05/22/2016 and generate sales forecasts from 05/23/2016 to 06/19/2016. Our experiments show that the proposed strategy can achieve improved accuracy. Furthermore, we present a robust pipeline for conducting retail sales forecasting.
This paper studies the relation between activity on Twitter and sales. While research exists into the relation between Tweets and movie and book sales, this paper shows that the same relations do not hold for products that receive less attention on social media. For such products, classification of Tweets is far more important to determine a relation. Also, for such products advanced statistical relations, in addition to correlation, are required to relate Twitter activity and sales. In a case study that involves Tweets and sales from a company in four countries, the paper shows how, by classifying Tweets, such relations can be identified. In particular, the paper shows evidence that positive Tweets by persons (as opposed to companies) can be used to forecast sales and that peaks in positive Tweets by persons are strongly related to an increase in sales. These results can be used to improve sales forecasts and to increase sales in marketing campaigns.
The insurance industry is shifting their sales mode from offline to online, in expectation to reach massive potential customers in the digitization era. Due to the complexity and the nature of insurance products, a cost-effective online sales solution is to exploit chatbot AI to raise customers' attention and pass those with interests to human agents for further sales. For high response and conversion rates of customers, it is crucial for the chatbot to initiate a conversation with personalized opening sentences, which are generated with user-specific topic selection and ordering. Such personalized opening sentence generation is challenging because (i) there are limited historical samples for conversation topic recommendation in online insurance sales and (ii) existing text generation schemes often fail to support customized topic ordering based on user preferences. We design POSGen, a personalized opening sentence generation scheme dedicated for online insurance sales. It transfers user embeddings learned from auxiliary online user behaviours to enhance conversation topic recommendation, and exploits a context management unit to arrange the recommended topics in user-specific orde
Clustering is an important data mining technique where we will be interested in maximizing intracluster distance and also minimizing intercluster distance. We have utilized clustering techniques for detecting deviation in product sales and also to identify and compare sales over a particular period of time. Clustering is suited to group items that seem to fall naturally together, when there is no specified class for any new item. We have utilizedannual sales data of a steel major to analyze Sales Volume & Value with respect to dependent attributes like products, customers and quantities sold. The demand for steel products is cyclical and depends on many factors like customer profile, price,Discounts and tax issues. In this paper, we have analyzed sales data with clustering algorithms like K-Means&EMwhichrevealed many interesting patternsuseful for improving sales revenue and achieving higher sales volume. Our study confirms that partition methods like K-Means & EM algorithms are better suited to analyze our sales data in comparison to Density based methods like DBSCAN & OPTICS or Hierarchical methods like COBWEB.
Recent researches have seen an upsurge in the analysis of consumer reviews. Although, several dimensions have been explored, less is known on the temporal dynamics of events that happen over the lifecycle of online products. What are the dominant sales patterns? How are they affected by review count, rating, helpfulness and sentiment? How is trust characterized and what are its effects on sales and revenue? What happens during a market competition? When does a takeover/recovery happen and by what percentage do sales increase on a takeover? This work aims to answer these fundamental research questions based on a sales time-series analysis of reviews of over 1 million products from Amazon.com. We discover novel temporal patterns of sales and interesting correlations of sales with the ratings. We find that trust and helpfulness are important for higher revenue. Based on the analyses, we propose a model to forecast sales that significantly outperforms other baselines. We then explore the phenomena of market competition. Particularly, we characterize different factors that govern survival/death of a product under competition and a model for competition forecast. Experimental results on