Financing lead triggers: empowering sales reps through knowledge discovery and fusion

Abstract

Sales representatives must have access to meaningful and actionable intelligence about potential customers to be effective in their roles. Historically, GE Capital Americas sales reps identified leads by manually searching through news reports and financial statements either in print or online. Here we describe a system built to automate the collection and aggregation of information on companies, which is then mined to identify actionable sales leads. The Financing Lead Triggers system is comprised of three core components that perform information fusion, knowledge discovery and information visualization. Together these components extract raw data from disparate sources, fuse that data into information, and then automatically mine that information for actionable sales leads driven by a combination of expert-defined and statistically derived triggers. A web-based interface provides sales reps access to the company information and sales leads in a single location. The use of the Lead Triggers system has significantly improved the performance of the sales reps, providing them with actionable intelligence that has improved their productivity by 30-50%. In 2010, Lead Triggers provided leads on opportunities that represented over $44B in new deal commitments for GE Capital.