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August 10th, 2011
Nearly all of our focus is on driving incremental revenues through predictive analytics via sales. That’s all good, but what prospects and customers see and use, interact with and judge are the actual sales and marketing communication vehicles. No matter how precise the analytics and the lead scoring in marketing automation systems, there needs to be an option for the recipient to “just take a break.” We call it correcting for outliers.
We faced one such moment on an overseas trip. When I powered up the Blackberry, a message popped up from … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
August 2nd, 2011
Customer life stage is the standard bearer of segmentation. Customer stages like “new,” “active,” “lapsed” and “lost” serve an important purpose by grouping customers into homogenous, manageable clusters for marketing, value measurement and investment decisioning. However, these definitions have limitations that you should consider and correct prior to sales applications.
Here are key limitations and how to overcome them.
 Measurement windows are too broad: Most of these segments have a 6- or 12-month horizon for comparison. A “new” customer stays … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
July 13th, 2011
 When you change your lead scoring and lead delivery using predictive analytics, don’t forget to train sales reps to think different as well.
It’s well-known that salespeople don’t qualify leads, they disqualify them. The more leads provided, the faster leads seem to get disqualified and bounced back in the holding queue. Reasons could be due to lack of data (such as invalid or no phone number), bias (“can’t possibly be a large enough deal”), or simply attitudes (“the more I close out, the sooner I will find … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
June 28th, 2011
 This post was inspired by a recent entry on The Sales Blog that discussed how it is easy to do the enjoyable things, when instead we should focus on things needed to improve sales results. Such as, resolving customer problems. Problems with a customer don’t go away, unless the customer goes away.
So from our quantitative perspective, how would we suggest making it easier for salespeople to engage in difficult conversations? Three ways this could be done:
Mix up the servings. … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
June 13th, 2011
 Inside sales teams are at it every day, making thousands of calls to prospects, seeking an appointment or a sale. They are given scrubbed lists with contact names, job title, phone numbers and a good luck pat. On the back end, managers track calls, appointments and sales. The cycle continues when reps deplete their assigned leads and it starts over again.
There are times when this well-oiled prospecting machine can under-deliver – and you may not be aware. But there are easy fixes. Here we explore three cases, and discuss how … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
April 25th, 2011
 Marketing automation has evolved over the last decade from typically managing a single channel (direct mail or email) to facilitating multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns that are at the core of revenue performance.
One valuable aspect of marketing automation tools is to nurture a lead until the prospect is ready to engage with sales. Coupled with the new reality that prospective customers do not contact the sales person until well into the decision process, marketing automation is now front and center to enabling sales to maximize the chance of … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
April 19th, 2011
 People like fun n’ games.
If yours is like most sales organizations, there is at least one program or motivational initiative with a fun theme to it, possibly involving sports or other games. A desire for recognition and winning brings out something extra in us, and what better place than sales to showcase that, where there’s motivation to scale new heights against the competition and to personally and professionally benefit.
According to gamification.org – a terrific collection of resources – gamification is “the process of adding … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
April 5th, 2011
 Predictive analytics needs a foundation of clean data. Here are top tips from our most recent lead gen implementation on Salesforce.com. You can use these immediately in any environment:
Address standardization and change of address. Typically up to 30% of records lack complete address information. This affects both deliverability and duplicate search. If you have not done so in 3 years, run a Change of Address (NCOA) process to get your customer’s new addresses. Stay up to date on your customers because 10% … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
March 29th, 2011
On a recent assignment for setting up lead generation, we took on an existing customer database to build a statistical model to score a leads database. The client does business in 7 countries, or so they said and I believed them. But they quickly added a caveat, “no one has looked at our database in awhile.”
First, we looked at their billing country field. This had been an open text field in their Salesforce.com system that could be edited by just about anyone. What we found was amazing. … Continue reading entire post on next page … »
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We make life easier for sales professionals, by using predictive analytics to get more revenue and more profitable results from sales data.
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