Sales Process Text Analytics

Grow and retain customer base; maximize profitability.

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Challenge

Key account executives are looking to arm their sales reps with timely, relevant lead intelligence on a broad area of topics related to their customers—business trends; company reputation; competitive intelligence; product launches; market insights; deals; financial and legal news; and so on. This information helps reps to determine why, when, and how to approach companies for ad placement.

Executives may task a strategic insights group or another department with gathering and distributing this information. In either case, the process is ad-hoc and manual. They often perform research using Google Alerts, web searches, and social media, and record and track this information in MS Word documents or spreadsheets.

It is difficult to cut through the noise in order to identify trends.

In addition, executives have no systematic way of measuring and scoring this information for overall sentiment (how positive or negative was the story) and impactfulness (is it a big or small story). A news story about the recall of a client’s product is a critical event—one that the sales rep should jump on—as opposed to a story about the client winning an award.

Solution

A cloud-based, NLP solution can be used to track specific names and sectors; scan the news, major publications, social media, and wire services for relevant insights; and surface those articles through an interactive dashboard.

Based on the information provided by the media company, the NLP vendor creates a specific taxonomy that allows company to watch for commentary from trusted online sources that talks in a very specific way about their clients and their products. The NLP then compares the quantity of these highlights along with the sentiment over time. It can also compare the performance of its clients to the clients’ competitors and to the industry sector average.

The NLP technology integrates with customer applications like Salesforce so that sales teams have a holistic view of client intelligence where they are accessing and tracking customer data.

Users can also access this information directly from a web-based platform. The platform is interactive and allows for filtering by company, sector, and topic. It can also send emails that are customized to the users.

Sales reps are able to understand fairly quickly how their clients are being discussed or perceived in the media. They can provide recommendations on campaigns, including which media areas to consider for ad placement, so that they can enhance or counteract media mentions.

Reps can even be specific with the product or service being advertised, given the topics in the news. For example, there may be an article about the efficacy of a face cream in a high-profile publication that is fairly positive about that brand’s face cream.

The sales rep could reach out to this advertiser client to inform that they have media with the outlet that had published the article and to pitch ad placements there—since the placements would be contextually relevant and land favorably relative to the content.

Outcome

• Creating consistency in terms of the expectations that management, strategic, and research teams have of sales.
• Giving all departments a tool with which to be consistent.
• More actionable and accurate business intelligence.
• Drive corporate strategy with data points that are the closest (and hardest to capture) to customers and end users.