Machine learning & big data consulting to
elevate your growth
Each client is unique. That's why we start with your business objectives, existing processes, and ROI metrics. Then we work closely with your team to devise strategies and implement machine learning and big data solutions.
Our mission is to elevate your growth and transform your business. Working through an extremely agile process is always non-negotiable.
Legal Tech Unicorn for Attorneys and Law Firms
Lead Generation / CRM De-duplication / Contact Verification
About Clio
- Raised $250MM in 2019
- Ventured backed by TCV, JMI
- #1 CRM provider for lawyers
- 80% annual growth in the last 2 years
Clio is a fast-growing company that creates legal software for attorneys and law firms. Their software manages every aspect of a legal practice—from billing and case management, to client intake and time tracking. Their software is so effective Clio has seen an 80% growth rate over two years and they raised $250 million in investment capital.
The Problem
- Need for Quality, Unique Sales Leads to meet growth
- Large Number of Duplicates in CRM
- CRM Contains Invalid Contact Info
While they had the capital to fuel growth, Clio’s challenge was finding new prospects. Their sales team needed a bigger, more accurate pool of leads. But here is where they hit a wall.
The Clio sales team wanted to improve its Salesforce CRM. Their system contained lots of duplicates and outdated information—attorneys moved firms or were listed in incorrect positions. Often, the contact information was missing the key information to help them close the sale. They knew from experience that the more they knew about their prospects— their education, their practice areas, their role in the firm—the higher their rate of conversion. Every time they called the wrong person or had to track down updated information they wasted valuable time that should have been spent selling.
Buying sales leads wasn’t a simple endeavor. They were limited to channels maintaining compliance with strict privacy laws. And when they purchased lists of law firms they had trouble.
How Softmax Data Helped
- Automatic Lead Generation with integration with Salesforce
- AI-powered CRM De-duplication
- Contact Cross-validation
This is where we came in. Softmax Data worked closely with Clio’s revenue operations team to design, develop and implement powerful, scalable machine learning solutions. We did this in three phases:
First, we created a solution to generate new leads for Clio automatically. Powered by machine learning, the solution intelligently extracted lists of lawyers from public websites. These lists contained titles and corresponding contact information including emails, phone numbers, and addresses. Then the acquired and cleaned leads were directly injected into the Salesforce CRM and assigned to sales reps.
Second, we made a solution to accurately detect and merge all duplicates. For example, if someone was listed twice because they spelled their name differently (John Smith vs. J. Smith) the computer could detect and remove the duplicate records. But it did this without losing any data—the best information in each duplicates were kept so that the remaining contact had all the important information.
Third, to increase connect-through rate, our machine learning solution validated the individual contact information to make sure each one was up to date.
A Massive Amount Of Data
- 4 Million new leads
- 1.8 Million verified list
Softmax Data’s machine learning solutions handled millions of contacts. It cleaned Clio’s list, generated 4 million new leads, then cleaned and merged it all into a refined and verified list of 1.8 million.
Imagine doing this work manually—even if it just took 5 minutes to search a website, check and verify each lead—the millions of lines would take humans decades.
But in just two months Softmax Data gave Clio a massive list of leads that was verified, clean and free from duplicates.
And Softmax did all this without any downtime for the Clio sales team. We used multi-stage deployment and secure backups, the sales team at Clio received rejuvenated CRM without any pause. They kept working even as our machine learning solutions cleaned, merged and verified their CRM.
Powerful Results
- 417% increase in Sales Leads
- 97% coverage of the Total Addressable Market in the US
- Daily lead generation on-premise and directly updated on Salesforce
- 60% increase in sales call Connect-Through Rate
The result of Softmax Data’s custom solutions was profound. Clio witnessed an immediate impact on their CRM integrity, their sales leads, funnel velocity, and sales productivity. Within one week, they saw a 98% increase in the connect-through rate.
Within three months, Softmax Data’s solutions collected 417% more sales leads, seamlessly added them to Clio’s Salesforce, and assigned contacts to corresponding contact owners. Even more exciting, the team could now run the leads generation daily and continually stay ahead of the competition by capturing sales leads.
The clean-up not only introduced higher sales productivity and eliminated the constant frustration, but also gave Clio’s financial executives a highly accurate view of their sales funnel.
In only four months Clio saw a $6 million increase in revenue directly attributed to Softmax Data’s work.
Technology Backbone for Auto Dealers
Sales Funnel Optimization / Recommendation Engine
About Absolute Results
- Global Leader in Driving Private Sale Event for Auto Dealers
- Helped dealers close more than 210K sales
- Helped dealers achieve 54% closing rate
In 2019 Absolute Results (AR) helped car dealers sell over 93,000 cars. They did this by shifting dealerships from a reactive culture to a proactive “appointment culture.” Instead of salespeople waiting for customers to walk into the showroom, AR gives dealerships training and technology to actively schedule appointments with clients.
This growing category of sales is called Appointment Driven Private Sale Events—and AR is the global leader. It’s all driven by data. AR uses creative messaging and targeted data to sends millions of personalized event invitations to potential car buyers.
The Problem
- Conversion Rate needs a lift
- Limited data quantity
- Customer data gap
While AR was the leader in Appointment Driven Sales the landscape of their industry was rapidly changing. To maintain their position they had to keep improving the accuracy of their personalized messages.
They specifically wanted to improve which vehicles they would recommend as upgrade options. They needed data to help them predict which car John Smith would want when it was time to upgrade. That kind of accurate recommendation would drastically increase the conversion rate.
But how could they accurately predict that information for thousands of potential clients? People don’t buy new cars everyday. That limited how much AR knew about the buyers and their preferences. Even the number of transactions for most of the vehicle models was quite limited. Traditional methods rely on having huge amount of data for each car model and customer to make accurate predictions for the customer’s next purchase; this made it impossible to use traditional recommendation algorithms. To make things even more complex, any solution would have to accommodate a wide range of data qualities, siloed data sources, and CRM systems that weren’t used to talking to each other.
How Softmax Data Helped
- Custom Recommendation Engine to Accurately Predict Upgrade Vehicles
- Statistical Models to Recognize Consumer Trends
The CTO of AR, Josh Heppner heard about the powerful potential of Softmax Data’s machine learning and data science solutions. Could we teach computers to amass thousands of data points and interpret it so AR could sell more cars?
SoftMax worked closely with the IT team at AR and executive team to design, develop, and implement a highly scalable custom-built recommendation engine. The engine leveraged both deep learning models and statistical models to predict individual consumer’s buying habits and the exact upgrade vehicles they would want.
It looked like magic but the powerfully accurate predictions were all based on our powerful data processing solutions. We looked at consumers’ past purchase history, demographics, and geographic information as well as external market trend data.
If John Smith had owned a Toyota Camry, then a Honda Accord, had a college degree, made over $75,000 a year and lived in Toronto, we could predict with scary accuracy the car he would want to upgrade to next (it was a Lexus, by the way).
The algorithms were designed to be flexible. They allowed for dealerships to input their first-hand relationship with their client base. This customization around their sales process and expertise made the algorithms even more accurate.
The Result
- 27% increase in Projected 2019 Revenue
- 320% jump in Customer Conversion Rate
The impact was immediate. SoftMax Data’s machine learning solution increased revenue, conversation rate, sales funnel velocity and sales team performance. Within one month of the start of the project, AR’s recommendation conversion jumped by an eye-popping 320%.
And it just kept getting better. As SoftMax’s machine learning solution received more and better data, the predictions kept improving.
People often say that “data is the new gold.” And it’s true. But for a business to benefit from the “gold” of data you have to know how to mine it and refine it. SoftMax Data did just that for AR. We used 100% of AR customer data to make the predictions. The result was that each dealership sent messages to clients that were more personal, more accurate, and more effective. And this meant that more cars sold. AR’s revenue increased by an estimated 27% as a direct result of SoftMax Data’s work.