Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

This is a repost of Christine Crandell’s article on Forbes.com. To read the original article, click here.

Jerry Maguire is a legendary icon in the sales profession. While our hero in the movie got the cash, and the girl, there is no romance in the anguish and string of unnatural acts successful sales people do on a daily basis. Yet countless numbers of annual Sales Kick Off meetings have the theme of “Show Me the Money” to motivate their sales forces to ‘work the deal’ and do whatever it takes to bring home the cash.

The firm, Peak Sales Recruiting, has created the infographic to show why top sales people are so hard to hire. The best sales people are masters at relationships, creative problem solving, strategy, lead generation and a good dose of therapist.

To any sales people a truly qualified lead is gold. It’s a simple request of Marketing. Yet that request is often the wellspring from which great animosity and frustration is born. Absent qualified marketing leads, Sales becomes a primordial hunter of two clues: Trigger events that indicate a sales opportunity is brewing, and a way to reach the right person. Jerry Maguire built his business using brute force; identifying a trigger event has been hit or miss. The amount of heavy lifting required to find enough of these clues to fill a salesperson’s pipeline is daunting.

Social media was supposed to take the friction out of selling. Buyers openly discussing purchase decisions with their social graph. Marketing enabling buyers with the right content at the right time. Sales joining the conversation and establishing trusted relationships. But, that is not the way social selling is turning out for most companies. Brands have already caught on that Facebook and Twitter aren’t selling channels. The definition of social selling is evolving and likely will end up being something quite different from what is being imagined today.

What social has actually done is enable Sales to work smarter. Smart drives sales productivity which is the engine of profitable companies. In all the hype around social, a few social selling applications are emerging that actually help sales team hunt smarter.

salesPRISM from Lattice Engines is a cloud application that leverages social technologies to mine clues for emerging sales leads. Based on big data technology, salesPRISM analyzes internal information, external news, and trigger event indicators. It then rates the attractiveness and ease of capture of a sales opportunity. By analyzing patterns embedded in the sequence of events leading up to past sales opportunities then comparing these patterns to current account market behavior, Lattice Engines can highlight how sales professionals should prioritize their time across different opportunities.

According to Shashi Upadhyay, CEO of Lattice Engines, “Our big data analytics engine infers what prospects and customers need based on patterns seen elsewhere.” By bringing together into a single view internal data from marketing automation systems, ERP, etc. and external data from social community sites, websites, news, etc. insightful patterns are identified such as a happy customer, a new office about to be opened, or a company struggling with a failed product. Depending on what you sell, these can be sales clues.

The secret sauce is Lattice Engine’s ability to infer intent. As businesses go about doing their business they leave behind signals that indicate impending trigger events. For example, a company that is planning to open a foreign office will file for an export license, engage in foreign exchange transactions, sign a short term lease, and increase international travel. All these signals are clues that a company is growing and expanding operations. If you sell office furniture, computer servers or accounting services you might want to know about these clues.

Company clues are great but a smart sales person also wants to know the intent of buyers. By looking at the patterns of various buyers within the same organization, Sales can determine not only the inferred intent of the organization but also isolate which buyers Sales should engage with. On the flip side, if buyer behavior doesn’t match company patterns then the probability of a qualified sales opportunity is low. Lattice Engines derives buyer intent through pattern matching at the campaign level with their visiDB and playMAKER products. Using Lattice-Engines, a Fortune 50 computer hardware manufacturer recaptured $750 Million in new pipeline, reduced outbound call volume by 30 percent and increased marketing conversion rates by 45 percent within two quarters. Now, that’s smart selling.

Finding qualified sales leads is one thing; being able to engage with the right buyer is an all too frequent frustration. The ‘key’ buyer is often not in the CRM system. Buyers today are immune to voicemail messages, cold calls, direct mail and other forms of door opening tactics used by sales teams. Waving free box seat tickets to a Yankees game might help but the effort sales go through to get into an account is much like the Greek actor Sisyphus continually pushing his boulder uphill.

The plight of sales can reach a point of desperation. How many times have you seen a sales person send a broadcast email to the whole company to see if anyone knows Jane Doe at XYZ organization? Occasionally the plea for help is read but rarely responded to which is too bad because the sales person has a real opportunity and just needs to find a way into the buyer.

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That’s where BranchIt comes in. BranchIt is a cloud application that replaces the desperate email blast with an automated method of discovering who else everyone in the company knows. “BranchIt is a relationship discovery tool,” shares Josh Yuster, CEO and Founder of BranchIt. “It helps sales, HR and marketing get to that untouchable person.”

By mining employee business communications and tapping into corporate email, calendaring, social networks, phone systems and collaboration systems, BranchIt serves as a corporate social search engine. The strength of each relationship is measured along 36 different metrics and scored based on the context and frequency of past interactions. The organization’s corporate social graph is delivered to Sales through their Salesforce.com and Chatter apps, or through a stand-alone social search engine.

The BranchIt corporate social graph is kept current through the continual indexing of new emails, calendar requests, phone calls, etc. Founded in 2004 and grown organically to 25,000 users across almost a hundred organizations, Yuster stressed repeatedly that no personal data is captured or used in the mining process.

Using social technologies to “connect the dots”, as Upadhyay refers to it, is key to selling smarter. But technology is not a cure-all; sales and marketing needs to evolve their processes and mindsets in order to reap the benefits of social. Upadhyay shares his advice for how Sales can work smarter:

1. Consider data as an untapped asset that can drive better customer interactions.
2. Use the Buyers’ Journey to define when the right time is to engage and what the right content is.
3. Improve productivity by “closing the gap” between buyer and sales’ knowledge.
4. Coordinate buyer interactions across functions by aligning teams to the Buyers’ Journey.
5. Retrain sales on how to use signals to find an engagement opportunity.
6. Focus on the individual buyer, not just the company.
7. Assign a Data Tsar to tear down organizational silos and drive cross-functional data usage.

Sales may look deceptively easy from the outside but it can be one of the toughest yet most rewarding careers. In the eyes of your employer you’re only as good as last quarter’s performance and the margin on your last deal. Your customers measure your value by how well, cheaply and quickly what you sold them actually delivers to their expectations.

To survive Sales needs to sell smarter; social tools can be today’s “Help me help you”.

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Several studies aggregating information about employability, salary, and job satisfaction have ranked Software Engineer as the best job out there.  At Lattice Engines, the software team has been working on salesPRISM sales intelligence software for some time now, and we’ve certainly been making a grand old time of it.  I wanted to write a bit about what we do and what makes us so happy.

salesPRISM as a product combines a very interesting set of features:

• Sales Representatives make heavy use of salesPRISM on a daily basis, so the overall system must be robust, scalable, and perform well.
• Our customers tie salesPRISM into a variety of business processes and workflows.  Correspondingly, salesPRISM provides a very deep level of configuration, allowing us to easily meet customer needs simply by changing configuration settings rather than through custom software.
• As a SAAS application, salesPRISM is easily managed and inspected on an ongoing basis.
• We support a wide variety of integration standards and aggregate data from many different sources.
• We leverage this data for some very interesting data mining and analytic operations, which we then feed back into the running systems.

Many sales intelligence software applications support a subset of the above features, but supporting the entire collection is very challenging and lots of fun.

So how do we go about building the underlying software? Some of the most crucial decisions are simple things that apply to any software shop:

• We’ve hired a team of very smart people, and we let them do their jobs well.
• We follow solid software engineering principles, with an emphasis upon building for testability, quality coding, and automated deployment tools.
• Our overall system was designed with nice layered architecture and standard frameworks that simplify ongoing development.

This general approach has been augmented with some very specific ideas:

• In order to decrease implementation time and standardize application behavior, our software is heavily metadata driven.  We make extensive use of attributed code, and use this to integrate software components as well as to generate SQL.
• Our deployment architecture was designed so that we can scale with hardware.  Going further, at runtime we can move components around so as to best meet the specific latency targets for very different categories of operations.  For example, we can host components to support low latency end user requests on different servers than those used to service long-running data mining or CRM synchronization operations.
• We have systems in place to record performance readings across the entire operation pipeline.  In particular, we measured end user visibility, observed web service latency from the UI, server-side service latency, database latency, and Salesforce latency.
• Our database schema is also modular and allows us to separate modules based upon usage and performance constraints.
• We have some really nice data mining algorithms.

All in all, great buckets of fun for everyone.

Interested in salesPRISM sales intelligence software? Learn more.
Want to join the Lattice Engines software development team? Visit our careers page.

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Recently, we hosted a webinar with the Aberdeen Group and Dell, on why B2B sales organizations are turning to sales intelligence solutions to accelerate growth. For those who missed the live session, you can now access the recorded version online.

The session began by defining what sales intelligence means.  Sales intelligence is defined as insight about customer business goals, problems and needs that enable reps to prioritize and target accounts at the right time with a contextually-relevant approach and messaging.

The Imperative for Sales Intelligence

Peter Ostrow, Research Director of Sales Effectiveness at the Aberdeen Group shared his findings on what is driving the imperative for B2B sales organizations to use sales intelligence:

• In a recent survey conducted by Aberdeen, respondents indicated the key business issues driving the need for sales intelligence including: 54% of sales reps are not meeting quota and 24% of a sales person’s day is spent on research.
• 42% of respondents list “Insufficient knowledge of the business needs of prospective buyers as a top business pressure, while 40% said it was the inability to identify the most likely buyers of their products and services.
• 70% of respondents find value in social media based sales intelligence. 13% say it’s absolutely vital.
• Benefits of deploying sales intelligence include increase in average deal size, reduction in sales rep search time and reduction in sales cycle.

As Peter indicated, “It is important to have the right message, delivered to the right person, at the right time. Being able to do that requires the development and nurturing of a relationship with your prospect, and with your customer. You can only do that by having conversations and insights — into their needs, their business and their market– that are heavily influenced by the kind of sales intelligence deliverables that we discussed.”

Sales Intelligence: The Impact for Dell

Jennifer Webb, Marketing Programs Manager at Dell Large Enterprise, shared how Dell reps rely on sales intelligence to increase sales team efficiency and effectiveness, “What we did as a business was agree that we wanted to drive growth and revenue and expand our customer reach, but we also wanted to increase our customer participation and improve our customer experience. So we brought in Lattice Engines to help drive that ‘more effective solutions’ conversation to increase productivity.”

There were 3 reasons why Dell decided to deploy a sales intelligence solution:

• Predictive intent: Dell has a growing volume of data about customers and prospects and wanted to leverage that to identify patterns that reveal insight about customer intent to purchase
• Contextual Conversations: It’s tough to be the expert in every customer situation.  Dell wanted to give sales reps dynamically updated and relevant talking points to enable them to sound credible and compelling with different types of customers and products
• Efficiency: With Dell’s increasing portfolio of products and the increasing availability of internal and external data about customers and prospects, their sales teams needed to have the most relevant information at the right time, all in one place.

Dell decided to implement salesPRISM sales intelligence software from Lattice Engines.   Since implementing, their sales productivity has increased:

• Reps are aligned against their top account opportunities
• They engage decision-makers with more compelling messaging
• Time savings: the account intelligence is available in one place

Watch the webinar now to learn more about how sales intelligence software enables sales teams to maximize productivity.

To follow this conversation on twitter, please use the hashtag: #b2bsalesimperative

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A few weeks ago, we announced the close of our Series B round with Sequoia Capital. This was an important milestone for Lattice Engines. Up to this point, we had managed to achieve stellar growth with minimal outside capital. In fact, several customers and partners asked us why we had decided to seek capital in light of our existing growth and success. I thought I would take the opportunity to explain our thought process.

When Kent McCormick, Andrew Schwartz and I founded Lattice Engines in 2006, we started with a broad observation that B2B Sales & Marketing was years behind the B2C world in analytical sophistication. Solutions borrowed from B2C did not meet the emerging challenges confronting B2B sales professionals. Even companies that had built strong internal analytical teams had largely borrowed the vocabulary and techniques from the B2C world. As we found out over an extended period of Customer development, these methods were both inadequate and led to suboptimal results. We realized that we had to start from scratch and redesign a system that was built specifically for B2B, and that addressed the real-world imperatives for front-line sales. These lessons were incorporated into our flagship product, salesPRISM – which we introduced in 2008 and is now used by thousands of reps at some of the most sophisticated sales organizations worldwide.

As we continued to grow our salesPRISM footprint, customers and prospects expressed growing interest in several areas of product development including Mobile, Marketing Intelligence and Proprietary Data. We reached an inflection point:  although our customers were already achieving significant productivity gains with salesPRISM, we would need to make simultaneous investments to satisfy customer demand and support the next wave of product innovation.

In early February, we realized that Lattice Engines would require external capital to fuel its growth trajectory. Through our extended network, we reached out to 20 or so VCs across Silicon Valley, Boston and New York. Engaging with so many talented VC professionals was a phenomenal learning experience. Ultimately, we chose Sequoia Capital as our funding partner because we felt they brought the ideal assets we needed during the next phase of our company. They share our vision of the immense market opportunity, and most importantly, bear invaluable experience backing other trailblazing companies like LinkedIn, Google, Cisco, and Oracle. They understood that investing in the product (vs. just Sales and Marketing) was the way to build to a happy customer base and an enduring company.

During their due-diligence interviews, the Sequoia team heard a consistent message from every one of our customers:

1) They believe in our vision,

2) They believe that Lattice Engines has the potential to be a great company because we have built a phenomenal product and established a culture of putting the customers first, and

3) They are glad that we are raising capital because they would like us to implement our vision faster.

The capital will help us cement our leadership position in the Sales Intelligence market through simultaneous investments in product development, customer service automation, proprietary data, science, and sales & marketing. Our focus will continue to be B2B sales and marketing.

This is a new beginning for all of us at Lattice Engines. We are excited about the next phase of our journey and look forward to continuing our work with the B2B community and enabling your success.

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Dell serves the technology needs of millions of customers with a portfolio of solutions, hardware, software and professional services.   In the ongoing quest to drive sales productivity, Dell deployed salesPRISM sales intelligence software to thousands of front-line sales people across all major B2B operating divisions.

We recently spoke with Jennifer Webb (Datacenter Solutions Marketing, Large Enterprise) about Dell’s experience with salesPRISM. In this excerpt from our interview Jennifer discusses:

• Why Dell chose salesPRISM sales intelligence software from Lattice Engines
• salesPRISM’s impact on Dell’s sales productivity and customer experience
• Why deploying salesPRISM was quick and easy

To read more about Dell’s success in using sales intelligence, please download the full Success Story here.

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We were delighted when our sponsors at ADP asked us to participate as a featured partner at its Global Sales Operations Conference earlier this week. The conference brought together Sales and Sales Operations leaders from all ADP Business Units, encompassing a variety of roles including CRM development, data management, and sales training. As a featured partner, Lattice Engines was asked to present to attendees in the Partner Pavilion.  Our presentation, entitled “Turbo-charging Sales Operations with Data and Predictive Analytics”, discussed how Sales Operations becomes the Hero when their sales teams are empowered to target the most attractive account opportunities, at the right time, with contextual messaging that resonates with decision-makers. The presentation focused on describing actual sales use-cases, and the ease with which sales operations can deploy and maintain our sales intelligence software.  Here’s our own Greg Leibman, in-action, having a great discussion with some ADP colleagues at the Lattice Engines booth.

Of course our booth would not be complete without our Lattice Engines Rubiks Cubes – a favorite among parents with young kids.  Want a Lattice Engines Rubiks Cube?  Comment on this blog post and we’ll send you one. 

Overall it was a great day of sharing and learning as well as to see and hear ADP discuss their experience with our sales intelligence software.  What was especially rewarding was seeing a number of sales reps who had recently become sales operations managers.  Some fo them were pilot users of our software, and they also came forward to share their experience and thoughtful feedback.  Thanks to ADP for bringing together all their Sales Ops teams from around the world.

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