Best Prospects Scoring Model (B2B Sales Targeting)
Built a weekly top-K best prospects scoring system aligned to rep capacity (125 calls/week) using industry hierarchy, penetration signals, and proximity features—validated with time-based evaluation and productionized for repeatable scoring.
Which prospects should sales reps call this week?
What types of data and labels were used?
Success Metrics
Precision@125
The business is targeting having a 3% conversion rate for sales reps.
Lift@125
How many times was the prospect conversion rate greater than the base conversion rate for the entire sample for the week.
PR-AUC
A metric used when the target is imbalanced, where it measures the area under the precision/recall curve.
Model Choice
XGBoost classifier was chosen based on the imbalanced target, better explainability to the business, and its performance exceeded that of other models.
Feature Engineering
Market penetration
What percentage of the market Cintas penetrated by global/region/market by naics level 2, 4, or 6 depending on whether the business count met the required threshold.
Current Customer Proximity to Prospects
The haversine distance to the nearest customer. Also, the counts of customers within a distance radius to a prospect.
Guardrails
Evaluation
Trained on data through 10/15/2023; evaluated via a rolling quarterly backtest across 2024, starting 1/15/2024, shifting the evaluation window forward every 75 days, and aggregating performance metrics across all windows for territories that had at least 185 prospects in the sample.