Driving Sales Success through Automation empowered by Data

With great power comes great responsibility!

Hevo has seen rapid growth over the recent years. As an up-and-coming SaaS company, many moving pieces need to work together to ensure success that is both scalable and predictable. One such “gear” is the sales team.

Sales must keep pace with the increasing pull that Inbound marketing generates. One of the biggest concerns is losing out on value if the sales team, a limited and valuable resource, cannot cater to the sheer volume of leads.

What is the Solution?

To help sales tackle this issue, the sales excellence team has worked hard to develop a robust Sales Engine. Here, we’ll be exploring a part of it — the Lead Scoring Model!

There is, of course, no replacement to the human aspect of the sales executive’s interactions, especially their business intuition, which is a crucial driver to sales success.

Rather, the model was designed to be a booster shot to the sales executive’s expertise and array of tools. It saves them hours since they don’t have to look for the needle in a haystack and can focus on the priority leads.

The model summarizes gigs of lead activity data and outputs a user profile. The sales executive can then focus on the more challenging task of tailoring their interactions to this user profile:-

• High effort customization for the most interested leads
• Nurturing the leads that are stuck in their free trial journey
• Keeping in touch with the less active leads through regular check-ins

Why is this Required?

A typical day of a sales executive involves:

• Organizing their workload — which involves a lot of emails, calls, meetings, product demos, etc.
• Establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships with the prospects or leads
• Guiding the leads through every step of their journey and helping them understand the value of all that Hevo has to offer.
• Staying up-to-date with the latest technology and sales techniques through tailored training programs
• Sifting through the thousands of inbound leads coming their way.

It can get tricky for a salesperson to sift through the menial and identify the gold among all these tasks. Using data to accurately identify different user profiles without bias and using them in the sales process can go a long way in ensuring that the sales executive is as effective as possible.

How does it all work?

Many factors go into determining the user profile, which explains how likely a lead is to convert to a customer. These include geographic location, website activity, product satisfaction, and a lot more.

Things can get too complicated if the sales executive is bombarded with all of this raw data at once!

So, we employed Occam’s razor and went for a simple solution to select a few key metrics that can reliably predict conversion probability. We looked at the following categories of metrics:

• Demographics: What is the background and persona of the lead?
• Behavior: How active are they on the product and website?
• Engagement: How much do they engage with support & sales?
• Interests: How much do they interact with Hevo’s content?

The selection of key metrics and the weight of the push that a particular metric gives the overall lead score is determined by:

• Correlation: How closely is the metric related to the probability of the lead converting to a customer?
• Dispersion: How well does the metric split lead into distinct groups with varying values?

Each lead’s overall score is a simple sum of all these “pushes” from the various attributes.

The almighty Pareto Principle strikes again!

A simple dynamic report was generated on Metabase, which gave each sales executive complete visibility into the real-time status of each attribute that went into the lead score, along with a flexibility filter that prioritized their leads as needed.

This model helped us identify the top 20% of the leads that generated 80% of the value-addition through customer conversion. This, in turn, let sales focus on other crucial tasks, which led to ~2x growth in 3 months!

At Hevo, it’s all about the customer — from sales to the product!

Did this blog get you excited? Please shoot us an email at sales.talent@hevodata.com to chat more about the Sales methods at Hevo.