Machine Learning Helps Intel Rediscover Their Customer Demographic

Intel’s sales and marketing organization strives to increase communications with resellers relating to new industry segments as they evolve and to encourage resellers to join webinars or conferences to gain a better understanding of Intel’s offerings for these new markets. Because sales and marketing teams must focus their resources on those resellers with the highest probability of generating sales, sending the right message to the right reseller helps drive value for the sales pipeline. We needed a machine-learning system to help our sales and marketing teams identify the best prospects within Intel’s large pool of resellers.

At Intel, we are quickly moving machine learning from an academic pursuit to a driver of innovation and competitive advantage for our business. To that end, Intel IT developed a machine-learning tool that helps Intel’s sales and marketing organization identify which resellers will best connect with customers in specific vertical industries.

The machine-learning algorithm helps us learn more about our

resellers by classifying them and then supplementing this information with another algorithm that mines resellers’ website content. 

• Intel IT developed a tool named “Reseller Knowledge Base” to help Intel sales and marketing teams tap into Intel’s customer base and identify the resellers that offer the highest probability for sales. To offer a general- purpose knowledge base system, we created a multilayered approach composed of three parts.  

  Part 1:

  Web Insights.  This web mining tool allows users to train a semantic model using a search query and subsequently label pages from any reseller
  or potential reseller’s website. By evaluating reseller website content, WebInsights tells us what resellers tell their customers.

• Part 2.

  Reseller Insights.  This predictive system uses Intel’s CRM information and learns from the output of the WebInsights tool to find patterns in the data that can predict which resellers are most likely to respond to marketing campaigns. ResellerInsights also reveals reseller focus by evaluating the Intel training that the resellers take and the questionnaires they complete.

• Part 3.

  SMART Target. This reverse recommendation system finds the resellers most likely to buy and sell Intel® products by unveiling resellers’ buying patterns.