27 Oct

salepredict1: the Sale Predict project

Around April of this year, I had an idea that I wanted to pursue. I felt it would make an important difference to our business (FieldMotion). The itch was so strong that one weekend, I set up a server and wrote a prototype of the idea in my own time. It worked perfectly. But, it solved a problem that we weren’t interested in anymore, so the work I did on it was mostly wasted. A by-product of it become some useful information, but not the main part of it.

Okay – let’s look at the problem.

Let’s say you’re a business that is trying to expand. You get your work by contacting other businesses that you think may need your product, and trying to get them to work with you. Cold-calling, or trying to arrange a meeting through mutual friends, etc.

The old way to do this would be to get a phone directory, find a list of companies in an industry that you think is right, and just start calling, working each number one by one until you find one that sticks.

But this is usually a waste of time. Either the prospects already have a solution, have no interest, or are too dissimilar to those you’ve sold to before so you can’t establish a common ground.

The problem, shortened, is this: How can you take a long list of potential clients, and order them so that those most likely to buy from you are first in the list?

A solution to this came to me earlier this year. You need to find companies that are similar to those that you have already signed with, but that are not similar to companies you failed to sign with. This is a top-level description, obviously. The technical details of how to measure similarity are beyond this article.

To do this, I wrote a program that takes three lists of domain names:

  1. domain names of companies that you have done business with.
  2. domain names of companies that you cannot do business with (either they’re too unsuitable for your work, or they just said No for any reason).
  3. a long list of domain names of companies that you want to figure out what order in which to call them.

The program reads the front page and all pages linked to the front page of all mentioned domain names, extracts words and “n-grams” (groups of words), and figures out using a neural network what kind of language is used by companies that you usually sell to.

After this, it can then come up with individual numerical scores of how suitable each prospective company is.

I ran this on a list of about 50,000 companies as a test back in April, to see what it would say about my own company’s chances with those prospects. In the top 10, it named a company that we had actually talked to a few years before and that had said they would go with us except we were too young at the time. In the bottom 10, it listed a charity shop, which is totally not our target audience. The thing worked!

But, we don’t work in that way anymore, so it turns out that the list generated by the machine was never used. Oh well.

This week, I’ve decided to revive it and make it generally available. So this weekend, I will work on a simple website to make it possible to generate your own domain lists. It will allow a list of, say, 50 domains free, but anything beyond that will cost. Hosting costs money, and this uses a lot of heavy computation.

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