Advisor: Mochen Yang
Capstone: Efficiently Increase Anchor Customers by Scoring and Prioritizing Sysco Leads
Abstract: Due to the impact of the Covid-19, the food-service market became smaller, and the average customer is spending less. Therefore, Ecolab needs to resolve two issue:
•Increase in gaining new customers and
•Growing anchored customers from its existing customers, in order to hit its business goals.
However, Ecolab’s sales organization faces barriers achieving these two goals:
•Limited Capacity: The Ecolab’s sales organization size remains the same despite the need to gain new locations
•Relatively New: Over 50% of the sales representatives in the organization are new to their role.
In the traditional sales process, a large amount of leads were submitted by Sysco, one of Ecolab’s distributors, to their sales representatives. Then the sales representatives will need to perform qualification on the leads sent to them, act on qualified leads and finally turn a portion of it to their customers. This process can have the following potential obstacles:
•Large Supply of Leads: thousands o leads come in from a variety sources, and all of them need to go through qualification steps
•Lead Qualification is Time-Consuming: sales representatives are spending a lot of time gathering information to qualify leads
•No Framework for Actions: there is no framework to help sales representatives to make decisions, action is largely based on judgement
These obstacles then lead to our key question: How do we provide Ecolab’s Sysco sales team with prioritized leads based on their likelihood of purchasing, so they can increase new customers more efficiently? This lead scoring opportunity has two primary objectives:
•How do we gain new customers from the Sysco distributor partnership?
•How do we grow the anchored customer base from existing pool of non-anchored cus-tomers?
To help the sales representative make the lead identification process more efficient, the team focused on building classification machine learning models to prioritize the lead based on the likelihood of purchasing an anchor product.