Alteryx Using Alteryx: Sales Prospecting

[jsimpson]

Name: Joe Simpson

Title: Sales

Company: Alteryx

Overview of Use Case

The majority of my day is spent cold calling/messaging data professionals at the largest companies not yet using Alteryx. Mining titles, roles, responsibilities, locations, etc. is one way that I decide who I do and don’t contact. With Alteryx Designer I can pull data from Salesforce and easily identify key targets for sales prospecting. In addition, I can create spatial analysis using customer address to find out which ones that are most likely to convert are near me. 

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

There are a few primary challenges that have been solved by Alteryx Designer:

1) Identifying prospects that work within driving distance to any field events

2) Identifying prospects that have titles that are most relevant to working with data

3) Combining Salesforce Leads and Contacts to ensure proper outreach

Describe your working solution

1) Using Alteryx Designer, I connected directly to Salesforce.com to pull out a list of all accounts that I owned. Since we capture both Billing and Physical addresses for these companies, and sometimes they are not the same, I had to make sure to use the most accurate address for my spatial analysis. Many of the addresses contained PO Boxes as the primary, which wouldn't make sense. I created a macro to filter out any PO Box address and replace it with the other address. Once I was confident I had an accurate address, I used the spatial tools to create a 60 minute drive time radius around the field event's location. Would you want to spend more than 60 minutes driving to an event? From there, I took the account list and sorted by number of employees according to D&B data and targeted the top 10 accounts for outreach.

2) I will often have a list of potentially thousands of contact names and titles ranging from General Counsel and CEO to Tax Intern and [Not Provided].  While everybody in an organization has a potential use case for Alteryx, as a sales representative I need to focus on those most likely to convert. I would first group by title/function/dept and sort by a count of each to identify how many personas I was dealing with and where they were clustered. From there, I would use a filter tool to filter out undesirable titles that contain words like "Intern", "Chief", "Legal", etc. that are less likely to convert to a sales cycle. Or, if I was promoting a webinar or other event, I would filter out any titles that didn't match the content of that event. I.e. I would remove Supply Chain Operations Specialist from a list targeting Finance personas.

3) In Salesforce.com we have Leads and Contacts, and when I'm doing a campaign to target a specific company, it's not simple to merge those two together, especially as the formatting is usually off when I put the list into Excel. I use Alteryx Designer to connect directly to Salesforce.com’s Leads, Contacts, and Account tables to smash together the two types, filtering to only my account(s), cleaning up the email field and ensure that there are no duplicates. From there, I add them into the campaign as desired, often repeating scenario #2 from above to make sure I'm only targeting relevant titles at that account (publishing to a .yxdb file for optimized performance).

Describe the benefits you have achieved

I'm not an Excel guru, so using Alteryx has made it very easy for me to perform these functions multiple times per week, as campaigns and other opportunities arise. I use Designer instead of Excel or SFDC reporting tools because it’s a more fun way to work. The best part is that I get to show off my personal experiences in using the product when I am on the phone with prospects!  “It’s so easy, a sales guy can do it!” is