Using Predictive To ImproveFree Trial Conversion

Predictive Playbook

Once companies achieve success from leveraging predictive scores in their sales and marketing programs, they find even more innovative ways for predictive to unlock value across the business. One direction to consider is to pull this customer insight into new areas like customer support and even product management.

This predictive playbook will describe how Segment, a leading customer data API provider, leveraged its Infer predictive scores within Zendesk to optimize support for its free trial users. By helping the company prioritize tickets and ensure alignment between support-engineering and sales teams, this strategy ensures more coordinated, timely and compelling communications with the company’s highest potential customers.

Segment’s mission is to make customer data simple, and it’s achieving this for thousands of companies that are using its API today. Segment provides a hub to collect your data, translate it and send it to tools for analytics, marketing and data warehousing. Like Infer, Segment firmly believes that all businesses should use data as a competitive advantage. This is exactly what the company’s sales development team did by adopting predictive to accelerate its lead management process. Previously, Segment’s sales development representatives (SDRs) were overwhelmed with the task of tediously researching hundreds of inbound leads each day, so they turned to Infer to automatically find the diamonds in the rough.

Introduction

Add Slack Alerts to Notify Sales

Dealing with 600+ inbound leads/week with a small and agile sales team, we realized the 'old way of doing business' just wasn't working for us. We adopted Infer's Predictive Signals to replace manual prospect research, and immediately cut SDR response time from 48 hours to within 30 minutes of a new lead signing up.

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Zeb Hermann

Sales Operations

Infer’s custom-built predictive model pulls in external data sources – such as employee count, job openings, web presence, social presence, technology vendors, patents, trademarks and more – and identifies which inbound leads are the best fit for Segment’s premium products. Infer feeds its predictive scores into Salesforce, which alerts the team through Slack every time a new lead comes in with an Infer score above 80 (an Infer A-Lead). To set up these alerts, Segment used a service called Zapier which allows businesses to easily connect various web applications and automate tasks.

Connecting Infer Scores from Salesforce to Slack using Zapier

Prioritize Zendesk Support TicketsUsing Predictive ScoresSegment customers range from individual developers on free plans to large enterprises that pay for high-end services with unlimited data storage and security. All of the company’s plans start with a free 14-day trial and access to Segment’s expert support-engineers. In fact, every new customers who signs up is first emailed by a member of the support team, who engages with them to ensure a smooth technical implementation.

Segment made a smart move by not just pushing its Infer scores into Salesforce, but also leveraging the Salesforce/Zendesk sync to get those scores in front of support reps as well. Now, support-engineers can pinpoint which of the many new sign ups are likely a fit for the company’s premium plans, prioritize those accounts for faster outreach, and engage sales reps earlier in their conversations with these key customers.

In addition, Segment tags all Infer A-Lead free trial users so they can be tracked in a special Zendesk audit view just for business prospects. The company’s SDRs review these high priority tickets daily and monitor the associated technical support conversations. As a result, they can spot key points of time when it is most e�ective for sales to engage and facilitate the buying process.

By pulling predictive lead scores into your customer support application, you can better align support e�ort to revenue impact at all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Segment's Stack

Web

Using Predictive Insightsto Shape the Product RoadmapAs a data-aware company, more teams beyond sales and support value predictive scoring at Segment. Every group is hungry for useful data that can inform decision-making and enhance the overall customer experience. The company’s product team uses the signals from Infer’s predictive model to prioritize the product roadmap and determine what new capabilities they should build next. For example, Infer o�ers visibility into which industries convert at the highest rates, as well as which technology applications Segment’s highest potential customers use. This enables the company to pursue a more data-driven product direction and focus on those features that most benefit customers.

While predictive scoring is most often used to prioritize new leads, it o�ers clear benefits beyond inbound sales and marketing. By making these scores and signals part of the organization’s common vocabulary, Infer customers like Segment are increasing data sophistication across key functions like customer support and product management as well. Want to learn more about how your business can adopt predictive to drive success? Get in touch with Infer today.

Regularly review which signals in your model are most predictive, and share those insights to help fuel a better customer experience across the business.

http://www.infer.com/contact-us

http://www.infer.com/contact-us

About InferInfer delivers predictive business applications that help companies win more customers. It leverages proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with thousands of external signals from the web. Customers include high growth companies like AdRoll, Cloudera, Concur, New Relic, Nitro, Tableau, Xactly and Zendesk. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Infer is funded by leading investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

Mountain View, CAwww.infer.com

http://www.infer.com/contact-us