Predictive analytics models may produce sales leads with characteristics that are counter-intuitive! Find out how to be sure your sales reps fully benefit from leads delivered by predictive analytics scoring.

1. Caution:Leads may be hot.Handle with care.

2. Could your salespeople be disqualifying too many good leads rather than qualifying them?

3. Does it seem like the more leads you provide, the faster leads get disqualified and bounced back in the holding queue?

4. Reasons could be:Lack of data - invalid or no phone numberBias - “can’t possibly be large enough deal”Attitudes - “the more I close out, the sooner I’ll find something that works”

5. This churning of sales leads results in significant cost of acquisition. And significant processing resources – both machine and human.

6. If your sales reps’ lead closeout rate is 50%, your net cost is twice the initial cost!

7. Marketers and sales leaders often respond by finding ways to deliver a greater number of qualified leads faster.

8. But if you’re using predictive analytics with your sales processes, more leads faster may not be better.

9. What

10. How can more, and faster, not be better?

11. Predictive analytics models score and deliver ideal sales prospects.

12. Predictive analytics models increase sales productivity and ROI. They help achieve specific outcomes: getting appointments or sales, moving newly-acquired customers into repeat customers,improving cross and upsell.

13. But caution: predictive models may produce leads with characteristics that are counter-intuitive! Counter Intuitiveness Ahead

14. This is where you may be handed hot leads to handle with care.

15. By their nature, scored leads will be a lot fewer — typically 20-40% of available leads.

16. And high-scoring leads may have attributes that sales reps consider not desirable.

17. These leads may not have some fields that reps typically look for. Yet these leads have been predicted to produce a high level of performance.

18. This leads to a few lessons …

19. Lesson 1.Teach reps to look past some traditional criteria and look at the sales prospect holistically.

20. Lesson 2.For maximum sales performance, do not allow reps to pull leads from other sources unless all the scored leads have been acted upon.

21. This is because if reps continue their old practice of disqualifying scored leads, they may close out leads more likely to convert. Because high-quality scored leads are fewer in number, upon exhausting them, reps tend to scour other lead sources that perform significantly worse.* This socks a double whammy to your sales performance and productivity!* You would find this result with back-testing.

22. Lesson 3. Leads scoring highly for one outcome(like getting an appointment) are also more likely to produce a sale, at a higher average order amount, and with more add-ons. Train reps to nurture these leads to achieve such multiplicative sales value.

23. In summary, predictive analytics leads you on a fundamental shift from tactical to strategic thinking. New Paradigm Ahead

24. Predictive analytics may deliver fewer but better sales leads – be careful to not burn through them.Instead, handle carefully and profit from their sales potential.

25. Brought to you by:Predictive analytics for salesLead gen, call timing, cross and upsell, customer nurturing and much more.www.valgen.comwww.valgen.com/blog