Method and system for automatic assignment of sales opportunities to human agents

Abstract

A method (and system) of assigning a sales opportunity, includes creating an assignment model based on clustering historical sales opportunities, and providing a scoring mechanism on a plurality of sales agents for automatically optimizing an assignment of at least one sales opportunity to at least one of the plurality of sales agents.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention generally relates to an enterprise or organization self-management tool, and more particularly to a method and system for automatically assigning a sales opportunity to a human agent by determining the success probability of a candidate sales agent for a sales opportunity. [0003] 2. Description of the Related Art [0004] Conventional management tools have been developed for aiding enterprise managers in assigning agents to specific activities or opportunities. Specifically, management tools have been developed for assigning a sales opportunity to one of a plurality of available sales agents. [0005] The conventional processes that are usually used to assign a sales opportunity to a sales agent are manual and ad-hoc processes that require human evaluations and follow-up, which is highly inefficient. The conventional processes are manual and ad-hoc in that the processes do not provide decision aid ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0010] It is another exemplary feature to provide a method and system that allows a user to carry-over or transfer previous expertise and knowledge when assigning sales opportunities to sales agents.

[0011] It is another exemplary feature to provide a method and system that is self-adaptive so that if the data inputted into the method and system changes, the model created by the method and system does not need to be changed.

[0022] The present method addresses the shortcomings of the conventional methods by formalizing and automating the assignment of a sales opportunity to a sales agent. The present method improves the efficiency of an organization or enterprise, which can potentially increase the benefit from sales opportunities that an enterprise can gain.

Problems solved by technology

The conventional processes that are usually used to assign a sales opportunity to a sales agent are manual and ad-hoc processes that require human evaluations and follow-up, which is highly inefficient.

The conventional processes are manual and ad-hoc in that the processes do not provide decision aid tools.

The conventional processes do not provide a systematic analysis of assignment data.

Furthermore, the conventional methods do not provide a means for utilizing historical data to determine the most efficient assignment of sales opportunities to sales agents.

Furthermore, the most commonly used ad-hoc and inefficient assignment processes can result in assignment of sales opportunities to the wrong human agents.

A wrong human agent can lose a good opportunity while a good human agent can win a mediocre sales opportunity.

The conventional methods and systems do not provide a means for optimizing the assignment of the sales opportunities to sales agents so that the most important sales opportunities are assigned to the most qualified, available agents.

Furthermore, the conventional methods and systems can also result in assigning a less valuable task to an over-qualified agent so that the agent cannot be assigned to handle more valuable sales opportunities later on.

Identifying the requirement of a sales opportunity and then matching it with the appropriate salesman or salesman characteristic are very challenging tasks.

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