Before You Drop 5 Figures on that AI Consultant…

I recall a funny modern day story of a mother with a load of groceries in one arm and brood of kids in the other hurrying up to an employee in the parking lot with a fervent request:

“I’ve lost my keychain door thingy and I can’t get into my car. Can I leave my groceries here with you? The dealership is just half a block down the road and I can get a quick replacement there.”

The woman had the key to start the car but the door remote had fallen off the keychain somewhere. The employee was no schmuck. He took her keys, opened her car the old fashioned way and said:

“That would be a long walk for the kids, better just drive yourself down there.”

The relevance for today’s article: before you adopt the new-fangled approaches of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence you may want to try some old-school tactics first.

An example: you want to improve your sales funnel so you drop 5 figures for a consultant to apply some random forest modeling or an unsupervised learning cluster to help score your inbound leads on the fly. The models tell you that lead source and age of the lead are really important factors in closing sales.

Duh.

The tactics you employ for your acquisition funnel are vital to the success of your…