A few years ago, tech company GTRSuite expanded beyond its original mission of helping retailers “capture customer intention” with store locators that manufacturers can put on their website to direct customers shopping online to their nearest brick-and-mortar retailer.
It developed the Lead Prediction Engine, a geo-location tool that allows retailers and manufacturers to see where and what shoppers are searching for furniture online. Working at a county level, the technology overlays sales rep territories and displays detailed information on a simple chart for easy interpretation.
Now, the company has rebranded the prediction engine as GTR Sales Intelligence and added new features.
In addition to tracking what people are looking at and the value of the sale, GTRSI now also tracks how many retailers and what the approximate revenue is of those retailers to get a penetration rate for the manufacturers.
“For the longest time what I’ve heard from vice presidents of sales is that the sales reps typically tell them what they can sell in the territory, not the other way around,” said Steve Baxter, CEO of GTRSI. “We have extremely detailed information and can drill right down to a SKU. And as you drill in, you can see exactly what’s going on and where. New map markers shine a light on inactive accounts as well as products and areas that are trending up or down.”
Baxter explained that this can be particularly useful for the seasonality of the casual industry. Because the season starts at different times in different places across the country, GTRSI can help retailers know when people are starting to look for outdoor in their area.
“Rather than offering any arbitrary data, we’re going to let the shoppers say when things are starting to pick up,” Baxter says. “We are giving the signals as soon as people start looking at products because what they’re looking at now is what they will buy over the next four or five weeks.”
Numbers talk
Baxter said that last year, the company had over 4 million shoppers interact with the tool and saw over $5 billion of shopper intention.
With one well-known $75 million furniture manufacturer that preferred to remain anonymous, Baxter says the Prediction Engine found that the amount of “intention” annualized over the next year is likely to be around $182 million and should come out to over $3 million in converted sales.
That’s 2.4 times the amount of revenue in top-of-funnel interest and a bump in revenue of 4%.
“And when we analyzed it, 2.5% of all of these product interactions generated a direct-to-dealer lead,” Baxter said. “Of the leads, 57% of them turn into closed businesses. We’re going to be looking at $5 million to $7 million in leads, at least 90-120k product interactions, 1,500-2,000 people likely to buy and at least $2.5 million to $3.5 million in sales. If you look at ROI, it’s a week.”
But just as valuable is what the industry can learn from technology like this prediction engine.
For example, it found that only 20% of retailers follow up on leads that are sent to them, and of the furniture sold via a lead, 93% was purchased in a store other than the original store of interest.
That means the lead went to Store A and they bought from Store B nine out of 10 times.
The reason? Only 20% of dealers call the customer back when they are handed a lead, and the shopper is determined to purchase the product.
“Think about it, they’ve searched online, they’ve found the product, they’ve picked a store, submitted our lead form, and all they want next is a phone call back — and it doesn’t happen,” Baxter said. “Our platform allows manufacturers to be selective with dealers, attract new dealers with actual real-time intention data and proves that if you call the shopper back, you will, 70% of the time, make a sale. And that’s just one of many pieces of data GTRSI can help with.”
