Prospects Database and List Matching for multiple national sales organizations

A client’s internal and external sales organizations required a single consistent source of leads to avoid duplicate sales efforts. Leads were tiered based on estimated size and allocated to different sales organizations based on tier. In many cases the same lead – obtained from multiple sources – was allocated to different sales organizations that would compete for the lead. Another problem was that in many cases a lead was assigned to a sales organization that was already an existing customer. With millions of existing customers, identifying, differentiating valid leads from existing customers was challenging.

IncuBIT was engaged to merge leads from dozens of list sources into a consistent lead database. Lists ranged from tens of millions of records (D&B, ABI) to smaller industry specific lists with only thousands of records. IncuBIT successfully solved the following complex problems: Implement a fast name matching engine that can match tens of millions of records within only a few hours. Several commercial products were unable to perform the match with an acceptable amount of time and with the complex business rules required for matching company information (as opposed to personal information).

The powerful match engine was implemented by IncuBIT and was the inspiration for the IB Match product. Implement an algorithm to merge information from multiple leads into one consistent record. The merge required that certain data elements from one list would be allowed to supersede information from other lists that were deemed inferior for the lead type or the data element. Create a data model that can keep track of all leads and the originating lists of their data elements. Create allocation algorithms that allocate leads to sales organizations and to individual sales agents, based on estimated size, industry and regional criteria and frequently changing marketing goals. The allocated leads are automatically fed into the appropriate CRM systems. Create data load procedures that can load hundreds of thousands of records into the extremely complex data model of the prospects database at any time of the day without compromising use of the database.