Lattice may find your next big sales deal

More companies are realizing that making cold calls doesn’t always pay off. They’re trying out ways to predict which sales leads will pay off in order maximize the time of busy salespeople.

Lattice, a startup with predictive sales software, today added new capabilities to help salespeople win money from existing customers, not just people they’ve never worked with before. Now people can tap Lattice to predict the best approach to cross-selling (selling into additional divisions of a company) and upselling (getting a company to buy additional products). It’s the latest startup to attempt to incorporate smart data analysis into sales and marketing.

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“Organizations can use predictive analytics and data science to predict who’s not going to renew and who’s going to renew and the products you can sell to people,” Lattice chief marketing officer Brian Kardon said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Other companies have had related ideas. RelateIQ is automating the process of collecting key bits of information. Context Relevant, which announced new funding earlier this week, prioritizes the sales leads that it thinks will lead to the largest profits. Infer predicts which leads will result in sales. And API management and analytics company Apigee bought predictive analytics startup InsightsOne earlier this year.

Lattice, for its part, has picked up customers like Adobe, EMC, HP, Juniper, Microsoft, RingCentral, Staples, and VMware.

Founded in 2006, Lattice can accept software-use logs from its customers and from marketing and sales software like Oracle’s Eloqua or Salesforce.com.

But application and website use isn’t necessarily the most telling indicator of who isn’t planning to renew, say, a license.

“There are other things, too,” Kardon said.

So Lattice also takes lots of other data into consideration as it figures out who salespeople should focus their attention on.

“We’re crawling through 150 million different websites a day,” Kardon said. The software extracts attributes like the backgrounds of company executives, the technologies companies use in their websites, the language in which text appears on websites, how many people companies want to hire, and so on.

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Lattice also taps data sources like Lexis Nexis and Experian to round out its data selection.

Lattice’s new features have been working wonders for e-signature company DocuSign. In two months, the company’s salespeople increased their win rate by 38 percent, and they boosted their return on investment in Lattice’s software by a multiple of 131, Kardon said.

Meanwhile the new features have helped Lattice’s own salespeople. Kardon couldn’t provide figures, but he did say “it’s been very good to us.”

Lattice announced a $20 million round of venture funding in November 2012.

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