Automatic Sales Lead Generation from Web Data

Speed to market is critical to companies that are driven by sales in a competitive market. The earlier a potential customer can be approached in the decision making process of a purchase, the higher are the chances of converting that prospect into a customer. Traditional methods to identify sales leads such as company surveys and direct marketing are manual, expensive and not scalable. Over the past decade the World Wide Web has grown into an information-mesh, with most important facts being reported through Web sites. Several news papers, press releases, trade journals, business magazines and other related sources are on-line. These sources could be used to identify prospective buyers automatically. In this paper, we present a system called ETAP (Electronic Trigger Alert Program) that extracts trigger events from Web data that help in identifying prospective buyers. Trigger events are events of corporate relevance and indicative of the propensity of companies to purchase new products associated with these events. Examples of trigger events are change in management, revenue growth and mergers & acquisitions. The unstructured nature of information makes the extraction task of trigger events difficult. We pose the problem of trigger events extraction as a classification problem and develop methods for learning trigger event classifiers using existing classification methods. We present methods to automatically generate the training data required to learn the classifiers. We also propose a method of feature abstraction that uses named entity recognition to solve the problem of data sparsity. We score and rank the trigger events extracted from ETAP for easy browsing. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the method and thus establish the feasibility of automatic sales lead generation using the Web data.