Improving Sales E�ciencyThrough Predictive-DrivenLead Routing

PREDICTIVE PLAYBOOK

Companies today employ all kinds of techniques to drive growth – both by generating inbound leads and identifying new outbound accounts to target. But without a way to filter out the noise, these strategies can come with a few downsides such as spending misdirected time and e�ort on leads that aren’t a good fit for the product or service a company is selling, and thus unlikely to convert. This predictive playbook will describe how Booker, a service commerce platform for small local businesses, integrated predictive scoring into its sales and marketing workflows to drive real business value and internal alignment. Leveraging Infer’s fit model, which analyzes signals about a prospect to identify whether they are a good fit to buy Booker’s solutions, the company prioritizes its inbound and outbound lead flow around the leads that are most likely to convert to customers. Then, it successfully focus on the activities that make the biggest revenue impact.

Booker’s transaction volume grew exponentially during its first five years, inbound lead flow boomed and the sales team added reps to keep up with demand. As the business grew, it needed to develop a more scalable, structured sales process to help cut through the high volume of leads and focus on those that are most likely to convert to customers.The company turned to Infer to help implement a data-driven approach to prioritizing leads across its expanding sales team, and enable marketing to build more e�ective campaigns and prioritize spend to the highest performing lead channels. Prior to Infer, Booker used basic lead scoring in its marketing automation system to help rank leads, distributing them evenly across sales reps. This approach o�ered minimal insight for sales and often left reps spread thin working many accounts that didn’t convert to real revenue. The team solved this challenge by both adding a new group of sales development reps (SDRs), and adopting a custom Infer model in order to better prioritize leads based on statistically accurate predictions about their prospect’s fit for Booker’s products.

Depending on the needs of your

sales organization, you can choose

to expose your Infer scores or hide

them behind the scenes. Some

companies elect to hide scores in

order to remove potential distraction

(i.e. only wanting to pursue A-Leads

or “Contact Me” leads) and allow

sales to focus on what they do best --

closing deals. By circumventing a

visible score at the operational level,

reps are able to uncover gems that

might get buried amongst content

marketing leads or B-Leads.

Often overlooked, many of these

leads can be closed with the right rep

and nurture track. On the other hand,

some companies choose to expose

scores to help sales build statistical

confidence in the quality of the lead

and validate outreach prioritization.

Both are valid strategies based on

businesses' individual needs, which

help them successfully reach their

predictive goals.

Introduction

Getting Startedwith Predictive

Using pre-built connectors to Salesforce and their marketing automation platform (MAP), Infer’s fit model leverages Booker’s existing internal customer data along with new external signals from Infer, like a prospect’s web and social presence, to predict the company’s best leads. The company’s universe of leads is then bucketed into four di�erent groups, including Infer A and B-Leads (those that are the best fit for Booker’s solution), and Infer C and D-Leads (those that are less likely to convert to opportunities). After scoring, the leads are routed to the appropriate sales rep for follow up -- though, in Booker’s use case, the scores are hidden at this stage (see the “Did You Know” sidebar for more information). To ensure successful adoption of prediction into sales’ daily workflow, reps are briefed on how the scores work so they build trust in them to inform and prioritize their outreach.

Did You Know:

Booker’s transaction volume grew exponentially during its first five years, inbound lead flow boomed and the sales team added reps to keep up with demand. As the business grew, it needed to develop a more scalable, structured sales process to help cut through the high volume of leads and focus on those that are most likely to convert to customers.The company turned to Infer to help implement a data-driven approach to prioritizing leads across its expanding sales team, and enable marketing to build more e�ective campaigns and prioritize spend to the highest performing lead channels. Prior to Infer, Booker used basic lead scoring in its marketing automation system to help rank leads, distributing them evenly across sales reps. This approach o�ered minimal insight for sales and often left reps spread thin working many accounts that didn’t convert to real revenue. The team solved this challenge by both adding a new group of sales development reps (SDRs), and adopting a custom Infer model in order to better prioritize leads based on statistically accurate predictions about their prospect’s fit for Booker’s products.

Accelerating Pipeline withPrioritized Lead RoutingWith Infer predictive scoring, Booker’s sales team lifted lead conversion rates and optimized performance by routing prospects to the right nurture tracks and sales reps – something that has made a huge impact on e�ciency. Booker’s Infer A-Leads make up 9% of Lead volume and B-Leads consist of 28% of volume over a 3 month average. These Leads drive 94% of the company’s sales pipeline. With this knowledge, the sales team can clearly identify which leads to send to its SDRs for prospecting and development over time, and which to send to its account executives for more aggressive follow up.

Using pre-built connectors to Salesforce and their marketing automation platform (MAP), Infer’s fit model leverages Booker’s existing internal customer data along with new external signals from Infer, like a prospect’s web and social presence, to predict the company’s best leads. The company’s universe of leads is then bucketed into four di�erent groups, including Infer A and B-Leads (those that are the best fit for Booker’s solution), and Infer C and D-Leads (those that are less likely to convert to opportunities). After scoring, the leads are routed to the appropriate sales rep for follow up -- though, in Booker’s use case, the scores are hidden at this stage (see the “Did You Know” sidebar for more information). To ensure successful adoption of prediction into sales’ daily workflow, reps are briefed on how the scores work so they build trust in them to inform and prioritize their outreach.

Share ofLeads

Share ofTarget

Share ofAmount

0% 40% 80%20% 60% 100%

Lead Quality

A B C D

28%9%

36%

42%

58%

55%

16%

4%

2%

47%

By minimizing wasted energy on low scoring leads, and focusing the most experienced closers on the best-fit opportunities, Booker can have more productive conversations with prospects and a faster sales cycle. In fact, the company dramatically increased the number of deals it closed in just its first month with Infer.

Infer’s accurate predictive models help us direct our e�orts towards opportunities that have the biggest impact on our company’s growth. In a matter of weeks after implementing Infer, we saw a 60% increase in the number of contracts we closed within the same month the lead was created.

“

Nick Bhutani

Director of Acquisition Marketing

Evaluating MarketingEffectivenessAfter successfully adopting predictive into sales’ daily workflow, Booker took its predictive play a step further by leveraging Infer’s insight to employ a “test-and-invest” strategy for its marketing workflows. Infer scores provide Booker’s marketing organization with a litmus test to help measure the e�ectiveness of campaigns and the quality of lead sources. Now, the team can identify which lead sources supply the best-fit leads for the business, and direct marketing spend to the right channels (i.e. paid search vs. social media). Booker is also working with sales performance analytics provider InsightSquared (an Infer partner) to better understand key predictive insights through at-a-glance visual dashboards. Booker’s lead quality dashboards and reports o�er actionable insight into lead generation and marketing campaign impact, and help the company to better forecast and manage its sales pipeline.

*Sample data shown above

Employ a quality vs. quantity mindset. Test and invest in new sources of pipeline to understand the

quality of each campaign and invest spend to the highest performing channels.

Building Marketing andSales AlignmentA successful predictive strategy goes far beyond simply appending a score to a record. Like Booker, businesses experience the true impact of predictive when it becomes part of marketing and sales' everyday workflows. By implementing an objective, data-driven method for determining if a prospect is a good fit to buy a product, Booker has strengthened the alignment between its sales and marketing teams, and fostered confidence from reps in marketing’s approach. Adopting predictive helps sales and marketing to quickly identify the best customers with pinpoint precision, and then deploy resources where revenue opportunity is the highest. This has helped Booker reach its growth targets more quickly, while simultaneously providing an overall better experience for its customers.

Infer has enabled us to fully embed predictive into our sales and marketing workflows, giving us newfound visibility into our data that enables us to fine tune outreach and quickly adjust our campaigns for maximum outcome.

Accurate predictive scores help us measure how we’re doing and build confidence amongst important internal stakeholders – like our executive team and board – that we’re spending money on programs that drive real revenue and results.

“

Nick Bhutani

Director of Acquisition Marketing

Booker Playbook At-a-Glance

Infer Predictive Scoring

Product:

Filtering, Sales Prioritization

Use Cases:

Create a data-driven approach to prioritizing leads across its sales team to align e�ort to impact.

Objectives:

Improved lead and campaign quality, marketing & sales alignment, increased speed of closed deals.

Top Benefits:

60% increase in the number of contracts closed within the same month the lead was created.

Success Metrics:

https://www.infer.com/contact-us/

While predictive scoring is most often used to prioritize incoming leads, there is clearly a ton of benefit to be had by leveraging it for outbound campaigns as well. Infer customers like Belly are proving that predictive can deliver quality net-new leads and supercharge Account-Based Marketing e�orts, no matter who your target customer is. Want to learn more about how your business can adopt predictive to drive success? Get in touch with Infer today.

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About InferInfer delivers predictive business applications that help companies win more

customers. It leverages proven data science to rapidly model the untapped

data sitting in enterprises, along with thousands of external signals from

the web. Customers include high growth companies like AdRoll, Cloudera,

Concur, New Relic, Nitro, Tableau, Xactly and Zendesk. Headquartered in

Palo Alto, California, Infer is funded by leading investors, including Redpoint

Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill

Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.