THE SCIENCE OF LEAD SCORING, PRIORITIZATION & SALES SUCCESS

Transcription

1 THE SCIENCE OF LEAD SCORING, PRIORITIZATION & SALES SUCCESS Andrew Parry Head of Product Marketing & Strategy Steve Durham Product Manager

2 Introduction Page 2 Introduction Here s a sobering statistic: 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales. That means inbound reps waste a lot of time chasing the wrong leads. Outbound sales teams often don t know the best prospects to target, either, further stalling your sales engine. So it s no surprise that sales leaders are frantically searching for ways to improve lead scoring and prioritization to enable their teams to target the buyers most likely to convert and close. This has created a tsunami of interest in predictive analytics. New sales and marketing technologies keep popping up, all of them claiming to offer the most analytics value. It is easy to get lost in all the noise that predictive analytics vendors are making. Worse, it s easy to buy into applications that are not tailored to your specific sales problems. Most solutions on the market make predictions, but don t prescribe the actions needed to put that insight to practical use. And stitching together several different applications can cost you as much as 20% in lost productivity as your team struggles to navigate multiple apps. has developed a dynamic lead scoring and sorting technology that sits comfortably within the CRM you are already using. This technology has been shown to increase revenue by as much as 24%. This advanced technology, called NeuralView, goes well beyond simple lead scoring by prioritizing sales activities and prescribing the best way to communicate with your prospects (phone, , text messages), what day and time to reach out and even what messaging to share. In this ebook, you will learn how NeuralView enables you to analyze your sales process and identify opportunities to accelerate sales. You also will see how this breakthrough technology prescribes the best course of action to take advantage of data-driven insights in real time.

3 Table of Contents Page 3 Introduction 2 About the Authors 5 Sales Problems Solved 6 1. Who to Contact? When to Call? How to Accelerate Sales?...9 The Power of Neuralytics 10 Sort Signals From Noise...10 How Does NeuralView Help Sales Managers 13 I don t know which leads are ready for sales conversations...13 I don t know what an ideal lead looks like...13 I don t have much marketing feedback regarding lead quality...14 I don t know if my reps are working leads effectively...14 I don t how to coach certain reps...15 NeuralView In Action Likelihood to Close Likelihood to Contact...16 Close Deals Faster: A Case Study 17 Lift Connect and Close Rates...17 NerualView Vs. Competitors 19 Prescriptive Lead Sorting That Is Not Biased...19 Provides Two Data Point Scores Relevant To Your Business Model...20 Frequently Asked Questions 21 Summary & Credits 24 Published by 34 East 1700 South Provo, Utah Copyright 2015 / 06v1 All Rights Reserved

4 About the Authors About the Authors Page 4 Andrew Parry Head of Product Marketing & Strategy Steve Durham Product Manager An expert in product strategy, Andrew delivers reliable business growth and value through his ability to manage projects and teams. A champion of long-lead planning, Andrew works closely with executive leadership in developing product vision, growth strategy, feature definition and prioritization. With an MBA from Harvard Business School, Andrew contributed his product strategy skills to organizations including Xbox LIVE and Electronic Arts before joining the team in As a product manager for, Steve develops innovative solutions for the inside sales space and frequently works with enterprise clients and sales managers in providing the latest best practices associated with the products he oversees. Holding an MIS degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Steve has delivered technical elegance and the highest levels of customer satisfaction to the clients of General Motors and Spillman Technologies, where he contributed to key strategic projects before joining the team in 2014.

5 Sales Problems Solved Page 5 Sales Problems Solved + + Who is Interested? When to Contact? What Content? When to call? Most salespeople simply don t have access to enough information to know the best day of the week or the best time of day to contact a particular prospect. A hot lead is only good if you can reach them. Although most predictive lead scoring solutions assign leads a score, they don t provide any guidance on optimal contact times. This leaves reps to blindly call leads in the dark, like bats without sonar. Who to contact? Imagine how you could grow your business as you identify engaged prospects with actionable analytics. Sales reps often apply the same effort across all of the leads marketing supplies them. Are you spending time on the leads most likely to convert and close? Are you focusing too much on unqualified prospects while good leads decay in your queue? How to accelerate sales? What if your reps activities could be prescribed throughout their day in the most advantageous way? Do you find it easy to manage, analyze, understand and make business decisions based on your data? Companies don t automatically develop data competencies simply because they have invested in the tools. If your tools are too complex to adopt and use, they might prove to be a waste of time and investment.

6 Page 6 Sales Problems Solved 1. Who to Contact? HOW DO REPS SPEND THEIR EFFORT? In some companies, sales reps spend as much as 40% of their time just looking for someone to call. Even if your reps do spend more time on the phone, data shows that an average rep allocates their efforts equally across their lead lists, working just as hard on their worst prospects as they do on their best prospects. And you can t blame them. Without the right insights, reps are left in the dark. NeuralView targets sales reps efforts to the opportunities most likely to engage and most likely to close by scoring each lead with a predictive and prescriptive selflearning engine that processes massive and complex data sets in real time. Close Rate Worst Prospects Rep Effort Close Rate Best Prospects

7 Page 7 Sales Problems Solved 2. When to Call? WE ALIGN EFFORT PREDICTIVE MAPPING To truly target a sales rep s efforts, however, more is needed than just big data predictions. NeuralView takes the analytical predictions about a lead s likelihood to close and seamlessly injects those predictions into a rep s workflow, delivering not just analytics, but action and results. This prescriptive part of the platform prescribes the order in which a rep should target leads based on two variables: Likelihood to Close + Likelihood to Contact The ability to rank leads on likelihood to contact in addition to likelihood to close is what makes NeuralView so powerful for sales teams. Consider the value you miss out on without access to this kind of datadriven technology. Close Rate Worst Prospects Often a lead rated as likely to close is wasted simply because the prospect isn t in the office when your rep tries to call, and the average sales rep will only make between 1.7 and 2.1 call attempts to reach a prospect before giving up. Rep Effort Close Rate Best Prospects Making matters worse, you might be shocked to learn that industry research suggests only 27% of inbound leads ever get contacted at all. Think about it. That means 71% of internet leads, some of your warmest leads, are being squandered.

8 Page 8 Sales Problems Solved 3. How to Accelerate Sales? Because NeuralView has the ability to prioritize your sales reps call lists in real time, a prescriptive workflow coupled with increased rep effort can yield dramatic results. In highly optimized sales environments, where all other automation and manual prioritization efficiencies have already been achieved, the simple addition of NeuralView has been shown to deliver 20% to 25% more sales. Combined with other CRM-enhancing technologies, some customers have seen 30% to 100% aggregate increases in revenue. WE INCREASE EFFORT PREDICTIVE WORKFLOW Close Rate Worst Prospects Increased Rep Effort Rep Effort Close Rate Best Prospects While there are many apps and SaaS solutions that can help optimize different parts of the sales process, reps can lose between 10% and 20% of their productivity switching between apps. NeuralView integrates directly into leading CRMs, like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so your reps can access it right where they already work. NeuralView displays information in a simple, straightforward way, enabling reps to know at a single glance who to call, when to reach them, and what messaging will resonate, based on real-time buying signals.

9 The Power of Neuralytics Page 9 The Power of Neuralytics The Power of Neuralytics NeuralView is powered by Neuralytics, a predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine that drives revenue growth by delivering an optimized experience for both salesperson and buyer. Developed as a system of statistical models and algorithms, Neuralytics underpins innovations like NeuralView with the ability to sequence the sales process by continually analyzing massive data sets. At the time of publication, it includes 150 million customer profiles that is nearly half of the adult population of North America and more than 80 billion sales interactions. Each month about 1 billion sales interactions are added to the Neuralytics database. Sort Signals From Noise Neuralytics uses big data best practices to provide sales teams with relevant, actionable insights. Globalization Larger data sets that include data from adjacent industries and organizations of similar size to your own are more valuable than smaller data sets that focus on data localized only to your specific organization. 24.9% FIRMOGRAPHIC 18.3% PSYCHOGRAPHIC Anonymization Data is anonymized to protect privacy. 31.2% DEMOGRAPHIC 93 SCORE 3.1% GEOGRAPHIC 19.4% HISTOGRAPHIC Normalization If data cannot be tied to outcomes, it has no practical use. In order to predict the most accurate outcomes, data sets must be consistent to minimize redundancy and dependency. With these best practices in place, NeuralView can access the power of the Neuralytics engine to effectively sort signals your customers exhibit about their habits and buying behaviors from other data noise.

10 Page 10 The Power of Neuralytics Neuralytics is s predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine. Contextual Data Categories NeuralView is the prescriptive technology that utilizes the predictions Neuralytics generates to tell reps who to contact, when to call and what to say. Firmographic Demographic Geographic Psychographic Histographic s sales lead scoring & prioritization application is called NeuralView, powered by Neuralytics. Founded Date Funding Events Revenue Industry Gender Age Region Education Location Weather Lunar Sporting Events Empathy Resilience Ambition Openness Stock Data Macro Economic Holiday Zodiac Traditionally, many models have included a human element for some aspect of their lead scoring. These models suffer from shortfalls associated with human efforts, such as biases and finite energies and timetables. With human-led predictive modeling, data can be compromised by misinformed predispositions. Running the predictive algorithms exhausts the human brain long before all the data-set possibilities are exhausted. So your results are inevitably flawed, skewed or at best not comprehensive. Machine learning, on the other hand, sorts data at lightning speeds, deducing in seconds what an entire team of analysts could take months to conclude. Massive data sets sorted by scientific algorithms also eliminate bias to ensure no opportunity is overlooked. Neuralytics uses more than 400 data points across five categories: Demographic, Firmographic, Geographic, Histographic and Psychographic.

11 Page 11 The Power of Neuralytics ebook Align sales & marketing to boost revenue Neuralytics also provides additional features that inform the way NeuralView works within your specific business model. These elements tailor NeuralView to your organization to grow your top-line revenue and strengthen your bottom line. Trust Reports Neuralytics provides Trust Reports that reveal the detailed inner workings of Neuralytics and NeuralView in your system. These reports can help you identify sales trends unique to your organization. Find out how many calls your reps need to make to reach high-scoring leads, accurately identify how much revenue to expect from each lead score range, and gain additional insights on your ideal customers. Trust Reports support successful sales strategies and forecasts. Company-Specific Modeling Neuralytics delivers best practices and recommendations tailored to your particular business and customers through the NeuralView scores given to your reps. Multiple Models For large companies with a variety of products and customer segments, Neuralytics allows users to create individual NeuralView models for each product offering or selection of customers. Custom Inputs Neuralytics uses the key factors that influence your business. By referencing user-specified custom fields in your CRM, Neuralytics leverages this information to train your company model through the insights it delivers via NeuralView.

12 How Does NeuralView Help Sales Managers How Does NeuralView Page 12 Help Sales Managers NeuralView helps sales managers solve these common problems: I don t know which leads are ready for sales conversations By sorting and scoring your leads in real time, NeuralView can identify the leads most likely to close, showing you how many leads are qualified and likely to convert. I don t know what an ideal lead looks like By identifying which leads are most likely to close, NeuralView provides important insight into which leads are most eagerly adopting your solutions. This knowledge can help your organization more strategically identify and target specific buying The Lead Quality report helps sales management understand whether the feedback loop generated using NeuralView is helping to attract better leads over time. personas, bringing greater alignment to your sales and marketing teams. Trust Reports generated by NeuralView can help you identify the specific industries that most eagerly adopt your solutions.

13 How Does NeuralView Page 13 Help Sales Managers I don t have much marketing feedback regarding lead quality Sales reps often complain marketing is not providing enough quality leads. Marketing fires back that sales isn t following up on the leads they have provided. Between the bickering, business slips away. NeuralView sorts and scores all leads as marketing provides them, identifying the most important leads to contact right away. I don t know if my reps are working leads effectively By using NeuralView, sales managers can prescribe which leads and opportunities should be prioritized ahead of others. For example, a rep working an opportunity that has seen lots of engagement and is projected to close can use this insight to The Industry View report allows sales management to view the breakdown of lead scores within different targeted industries. shift gears and simultaneously focus on another opportunity that requires a little more effort and nurturing.

14 How Does NeuralView Page 14 Help Sales Managers I don t how to coach certain reps Because NeuralView can accurately predict where prospects are in the buying journey and prescribe the right ways to contact and the right messaging to use, it can also help you to quickly identify and correct gaps in a sales rep s process. By looking at historical conversion rates broken down by stage, areas of weakness can be identified. For example, if one of your reps historically converts tons of opportunities between the first and second stages and at the bottom of the funnel but doesn t see an impressive conversion rate between the second and third stages, it might tip you off that this rep is doing something wrong in this stage. Maybe the rep isn t demoing well, or maybe she is being too lenient in letting less-qualified opportunities come in at the top of the funnel. With this information, you can prescribe better actions and specific coaching advice to help your rep raise his or her conversion rate. Trust Reports are used to help managers understand more about how NeuralView is working in their CRM, what value is being driven by the product, and where their reps are expending effort. Imagine if you could channel all of your reps experience and energy to the prospects most likely to qualify and close? Using NeuralView, a sales manager can prescribe a rep s daily prospecting process.

15 NeuralView In Action Page 15 NeuralView In Action Displayed in easy-to-consume visuals, NeuralView eliminates any guesswork reps traditionally faced about knowing who to call, when to reach them and what to say. Key Metrics NeuralView shows two key metrics used to prioritize sales activities. 1. Likelihood to Close First, the Neuralytics engine assigns each lead a score based on the likelihood to close. This insight is culled from the data in your own records combined with data points from the Neuralytics database. 2. Likelihood to Contact Second, the contactability function of NeuralView prescribes who to reach out to and when to call. It sorts leads into a list of optimal contact times by weighing the NeuralScore as well as a number of other variables, including available demographic, geographic and company information. This process is continuous, recurring every hour to give up-to-date recommendations. In a single view, reps can see the lead source, the contact s current title and organizational information like total funding. A similar window can be accessed referencing the lead s contactability. Reps can see if their lead has been contacted on a previous deal, what time zone their prospect is in and what the weather is like on location at that particular moment. Within the same interface, reps can also quickly look at the lead s history to see all previous contacts and touches they may have had with this lead.

16 Close Deals Faster: A Case Study Page 16 Close Deals Faster: A Case Study Lift Connect and Close Rates NeuralView lifts connect and close rates, even in a highly optimized sales process. OutboundEngine has leveraged NeuralView to fine-tune its highly optimized sales process. Scott Leese, senior vice president of sales, and Claire Morris, senior operations manager, say NeuralView plays an important role in driving top-line revenue growth for their company. OutboundEngine is a technology company based in Austin, Texas, that provides social and marketing solutions. Before turning on NeuralView to better prescribe rep workflow, OutboundEngine already operated in a highly optimized sales environment. We were under this impression that our engine was as optimized as it possibly could be. We lived in the data. Every day we talked about how we could optimize our dials, our connect rate, our pitch, and everything. When we were first considering whether or not to turn on the NeuralView product, on one hand it was really exciting to think about all of the potential upside, but on the other hand it was really scary to think about relinquishing all of the control over those data-driven decisions that we had been doing thus far. Claire Morris After implementing NeuralView, OutboundEngine s sales team could see which leads in their pool were the most likely to connect and the most likely to close. Neuralytics is scoring the leads and surfacing the ones that we should call first, the ones that have the highest probability to close. Neuralytics is one of the most important technology developments I ve seen for sales. Scott Leese NeuralView is helping OutboundEngine s sales reps have more conversations, with a lift in contact rates of at least 30%. More conversations lead to more wins for the company. We saw our close rates improve because we were spending time calling higher-quality leads. Not only that, we were seeing them close at a higher rate too. Overall, today, revenues have gone up about 24%. Claire Morris

17 Page 17 Close Deals Faster: A Case Study As sales leaders, Morris and Leese noticed that their reps welcomed the prescriptive NeuralView workflow. All of the feedback we ve gotten so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Scott Leese One of the reasons NeuralView receives such a positive response is because it saves reps incredible amounts of time and increases productivity. Reps no longer have to spend time looking for someone to call. They can instead focus on the best leads available to them, and the contact information for those leads is seamlessly injected directly into their workflow. At the end of the day, any rep is going to be thrilled to have some of these more complicated decisions taken off of their plate so that they can spend more time doing what they do best, which is pitching and closing deals. Claire Morris +30% Contact Rate NeuralView is easy for sales reps to use and embrace. It doesn t require any special training; the Neuralytics engine does all of the work for your team. You simply keep SUCCESS +19% Rep Productivity Claire Morris Senior Operations Manager +24% Revenue focusing your sales talents and let science direct which leads your reps execute on. With NeuralView, you have access to the sales insights that you have always wanted.

18 NerualView Vs. Competitors Page 18 NeuralView vs. Competitors ebook Optimize the sales process and eliminate time wasters Built Specifically for Sales Teams Lead scoring often has a bad reputation on the sales floor. Why? Because consumer-grade predictive scoring models have never added much value directly to sales. Most consumer-grade predictive models are used by marketing teams. Marketing scores leads to try to prove to sales that their leads are valuable. However, not knowing the best times to contact these leads or what information to give them hurts your conversion rates. NeuralView was created by salespeople for salespeople. NeuralView recognizes that three things are required for sales managers to make sure their people are working on the right leads: 1. Leads must be CLOSABLE The people you are contacting must be buyers. 2. Leads must be CONTACTABLE When your reps call at a certain time, there has to be a good chance someone will pick up the line. 3. Your reps have to actually call the PRIORITIZED lists. Traditional predictive analytics approaches attempt to solve for no. 1, usually through marketing-designed scoring schemas, but don t adequately address points 2 and 3. Prescriptive Lead Sorting That Is Not Biased NeuralView can prescriptively sort the best leads in your pool because it is not impeded by human biases. NeuralView does not care what marketing thinks about a lead. Nor does NeuralView care what the lead source is, what the target industry is or what the current scores coming out of

19 Page 19 NeuralView vs. Competitors applications like Marketo or Eloqua are. NeuralView does not come with a bias. You can enter any data into the engine and it will be treated just like anything else. If the data is predictive for either likelihood to close or likelihood to contact, it is weighted; if it isn t, it is suppressed. Communications Gamification Prediction Data Visualization Provides Two Data Point Scores Relevant To Your Business Model Sales Acceleration Technology Improve sales through science with. Contact the right prospects, in the right way, at the right time. Motivate your sales team by making the sales process visual, competitive, and fun. NeuralView offers insight into two predictive scores, while most consumer-grade analytics engines only provide one. Armed with these two crucial data points, NeuralView can queue up calls for salespeople. This engine can constrain and reorder leads based on business rules specific to your needs and purposes. So if you are building a calling campaign for midsize retailers in the Northeast, you can set the business rules to filter for Northeast, then Work smarter by predicting which leads you are most likely to contact, qualify, and close. retail, then a size range, and then you can require it be between 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. local time. Anything that meets those criteria Bring your sales data to the forefront by making it visual, meaningful, and actionable. is fair game and will be prioritized in your reps call queue based on Closeability and Contactabililty.

20 Frequently Asked Questions Page 20 Frequently Asked Questions Q: Does this product have to be tied to a CRM? Yes. NeuralView is designed to support your workflow process in the CRM you are using. NeuralView sits comfortably inside your CRM, eliminating any need to switch between applications in order to carry out your sales process. Q: What is the installation process for NeuralView? Installing NeuralView and adopting its usage is simple. Our experts will conduct a brief interview with your organization in order to understand your company targets and goals. We will then tailor and train a model of NeuralView that is specialized for your purposes. Before implementing your specific model, it will be tested and back-tested. Of course, to be most effective, NeuralView is implemented with a PowerDialer feature. Without a sales calling paradigm to work within, NeuralView will still sort and score leads, logging those scores to your CRM where reps can then either ignore the scores or game your system and only work the leads they think are good enough. This wastes the opportunity to optimize the value NeuralView adds to your sales process. With a dialing system in place, NeuralView will automatically prescribe the calls your reps should make to their dialing queues. The lists are refreshed hourly. Now instead of reps building their call lists with their best guesses, the NeuralView engine builds them with sophisticated predictive and prescriptive science. Q: Does NeuralView work with Salesforce? Yes, NeuralView can be fully integrated with Salesforce so you can have full access to NeuralView directly from within Salesforce. Salesforce records are synced with NeuralView records. In fact, because of the compatibility of and Salesforce solutions, is considered a Salesforce premier partner. Q: Does NeuralView sync with Microsoft Dynamics CRM? NeuralView integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics, providing users with full access to NeuralView s patented lead scoring and lead sorting functions directly from Microsoft Dynamics. This compatibility works so well that Microsoft recognizes as a Global Independent Solutions Vendor Partner

21 Page 21 Frequently Asked Questions Q: Who in an organization uses NeuralView? Webinar Typically, 100% of inside sales and field sales reps will use NeuralView to gain actionable sales insights. Sales managers can use NeuralView to prescribe a day s actions for their reps, and can utilize the related Neuralytics Trust Reports to analyze the detailed inner workings of Neuralytics and NeuralView of your specific business. Find out the number of calls required to reach the high scoring leads, how much revenue to expect from each score range and what specific makeup of customer your company serves best. 40% 30% 20% Q: How does NeuralView differ from marketing automation applications like Marketo or Eloqua? 10% 0% 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th Throughout this ebook you have learned some of the ways that NeuralView differs from marketing applications, but because this is one of the most common questions surrounding the revolutionary capability of NeuralView, a more specific analysis comparing the features of Neuralview s lead scoring capabilities and those of marketing automation scoring systems is warranted. A comparison of each application is listed in the table on the next page. Your Secret Weapon to Closing More Deals

22 Page 22 Frequently Asked Questions Feature Marketing Automation Lead Scoring NeuralView Scoring Rubric Subjective model created by marketing manager Objective scoring model created by your data, not influenced by human bias The application s scoring objective To determine when a prospect is ready to talk to sales. To determine which prospects are most likely to close and be contacted. The buying stages the application can score Access to sales interactions that inform data analysis Multivariate analysis Ability to rework the scoring model MQL based systems score leads by qualifying them to talk to sales, not by if they are likely to buy Can only access data that is native to the CRM in use and to the singular organization. Marketing automation applications are generally not sophisticated enough to do this, nor can their human influence possibly exhaust all statistical outcomes available. Marketing automation applications require manual input to establish their scoring rules. This requires human analysis of data of a regular basis to update the model in order to keep it informed about any industry and business trends that naturally occur on a regular basis. Without these manual efforts to rework the scoring system as needed, you will be scoring leads off of an outdated model within the first year of application. Neuralview scores your records on Likelihood to: qualify, close, contact and repurchase Accesses data available in your CRM, the 80 billion data point analytics engine, any data in a marketing automation application you may be using and all of your company sales interactions carried out by phone or . Neuralview relies on machine-learning to instantly complete multivariate analysis, which leads to more accurate predictions. NeuralView is a self-learning application. Any scoring model particular to your organization is updated automatically as the engine learns from the sales transactions completed not only by your organization, but by the all the other transactions captured in the larger database. The system refreshes and updates hourly. You are never behind.

23 Summary & Credits Page 23 Summary & Credits Now that you know how you can use an analytics engine to identify the sales leads and prospects most likely to contact and close, it s time to start implementing what you ve learned. NeuralView offers unparalleled insight into your buyer s availability and buying behavior, helping your reps create actionable strategies to close more deals more quickly. NeuralView shows your reps who to call and when and helps them identify what is relevant to your customers so they know what to focus on in their sales conversations. NeuralView by accelerates the sales cycle and drives revenue growth in ways no other lead scoring application can. To see how NeuralView informs the daily sales prospecting activities of a top preforming rep click the banner below: CONTENT Andrew Parry Steve Durham WRITER Chelsi Linderman EDITOR Leo Dirr DESIGNER Scott Humphries