Product recommendations for accounts and contacts are great!
But instead of waiting for the sales reps to take the initiative to propose the products to their customers, sales predictor can also just generate leads. Having these leads has a few advantages over just using the recommendations:
- Standard lead ranking and scoring can be used to further qualify these leads before involving sales
- Leads can be traced, can be chased in an organized way. Recommendations are nothing more than tips, hints to what a sales could do. Without the initiative of a sales to act upon the recommendations, nobody would now they existed.
- Reporting on leads exists, not on product recommendations that might be interesting for accounts and contacts. Since a sales rep does not have act upon a product recommendation, we cannot report on them either.
So generating leads adds on top of just recommending products adds some extra value and control over the up-sell and cross-sell process.
In Sales Cloud you can first simulate what leads could be generated from the rule based product recommendations.
This is how it is done:
- Log on to Sales Cloud as sales analyst
- From the navigator, choose ‘Recommendations’
- From the task list, choose ‘Simulate Recommendations’
- In the recommendation options choose
- Record Type: Account or Contact
- Based on: Prediction Rules
- Choose your rule folder
- Add recommendation filters if needed
- Add accounts or contacts
- Click on the ‘Simulate’ button
Once the simulation results are satisfying, a real lead generation process can be started too. This can only be done for ‘Production’ rule folders.
This is how it is done:
- Log on to Sales Cloud as sales analyst
- From the navigator, choose ‘Recommendations’
- From the task list, choose ‘Generate Leads’
- Click on the ‘New’ icon to start a new lead generation process
- Under Settings
- Record Type: Account or Contact
- Generated By: Prediction Rules
- Choose a production rule folder
- Add Customer Criteria
- Click on the ‘Continue’ button to submit the process
This then leads to leads 🙂 that can be managed by those that need to follow them, score, rank and assess them, until they are qualified and can be converted to opportunities
And the analysts can keep track of how these generated leads are evolving on the sales predictor dashboard.
