Computing the 10 Best Prospects

Suppose that you are a business-to-business manufacturer with a sales force, each member of which has an assigned territory. Some of the salespeople are doing well, and some are not doing so well. The sales force may be company-owned, or it may consist of independent agents. In either case, you want to equip your salespeople with the most productive data to help them in their efforts. One vital sales assist is the NBP described previously.

Even more powerful can be a top 10 prospects list developed for each unique sales territory. Here is how such a list is developed. A part of the next best product determination was the creation of SIC categories, broken down by small, medium, and large companies. Using that analysis, you can rank each of your existing customers by annual sales. This might produce a ranking for a single territory that looks like Table 9-5.

Table 9-5 : Ranking of Sales within a Territory

Company	Sales
G	$1,992,001
B	$ 889,445
C	$ 102,004
D	$ 56,002
E	$ 1,245
A	$ 317
F	$ 77
Total	$3,041,091

For the top 10 analysis, we may arbitrarily confine our attention to companies that have annual sales of over $100,000. There are three such companies in Table 9-5. Because of the NBP analysis, we know the product that we sell the most of to each of these three companies and the companies’ total annual purchases from us, and we have categorized them as being large, medium, or small companies. We also know what categories of products the top three companies in this territory buy (see Table 9-6).

Table 9-6 : What the Top Three Customers Buy

	Total sales	Total buyers	Average per buyer	Company G	Company B	Company C
Hoses	$ 6,001,000	220	$27,277	$ 889,554	$227,665	$ 19,882
Fasteners	$ 778,001	198	$ 3,929	$ 19,646	$ 3,929	$ 1,965
Valves	$ 1,002,000	18	$55,667	$ 478,003	$ 55,667	$ 27,833
Pipe	$ 9,001,000	144	$62,507	$ 312,535	$ 62,507	$ 37,253
Wire	$ 339,000	201	$ 1,687	$ 8,433	$ 1,687	$ 843
Switches	$ 603,000	22	$27,409	$ 276,881	$545,667	$ 13,705
Connectors	$ 46,001	32	$ 1,438	$ 7,188	$ 2,434	$ 719
Total	$17,770,002	415	$42,819	$1,992,240	$899,555	$102,200

Now let’s go to D&B to find all the companies (that are not current customers) in this particular sales territory that match the profiles of companies G, B, and C (the companies with over $100,000 in annual purchases from us). We may find that there are 34 such companies. Table 9-7 indicates what the analysis will show us.

Table 9-7 : Top Products of Prospect Companies

Company	Sales	Similar companies	Best-selling product	Average annual buys
G	$1,992,001	6	Hoses	$889,554
B	$ 889,445	8	Switches	$545,667
C	$ 102,004	20	Pipe	$ 37,253
Total		34

Prospects that resemble company G are clearly the best prospects for future sales. And we know what to offer them: hoses. That is a no-brainer. Where do we come up with the next four to round out our top ten? We have to pick, arbitrarily, four of the eight companies that are similar to company B. We can offer them switches.

The way top 10 prospects works, however, we are not yet through with our analysis. In a typical process, each agent is linked to the central database by a Web interface. When an agent logs on to the database, he sees a list of all his customers, together with the next best product for each company. He also sees a list of the 10 best prospects, along with the product that he should sell to them. By clicking on each prospect, he gets the name and address of the company, the contact information, company data, and so on.

Let us suppose that this particular agent has already canvassed some of these prospects and knows that he cannot win them over. They are already locked into the competition for some solid reason. The agent needs more prospects. No problem; he clicks on a “Do Not List” column opposite each of these prospects, and then clicks on a “Refresh” button. The top 10 prospect software goes back to the prospect pool and redoes the analysis, dropping the “Do Not List” companies and adding new companies from the pool. Within a few minutes, the agent has a refreshed list of top 10 prospects. He can do this as often as he wishes, working his way down all the prospects reported by D&B within his territory.

This is an example of the way modern database analysis supports business-to-business marketing and sales. The information shown in these tables could not have been developed without a customer marketing database. Once you have that database, the software to produce next best product and top 10 prospects is complex, but achievable.