Merchant Atlas Unveils Smart Leads, Sales Automation for Advertising and Promotions

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Merchant Atlas launches Smart Leads, the first patented platform-as-a-service that leverages big data and machine learning to deliver highly qualified merchant leads to content publishers. Compared with traditional lead generation methods, which are typically reactive, slow and expensive, Smart Leads delivers high-probability purchasers primed for engagement, reducing the time and costs required to close a sale.  

"Smart Leads essentially does more homework on each merchant than any research or sales team ever could," said Antonio Vitti, CEO and cofounder, Merchant Atlas. "It increases sales efficiency by reducing the time devoted to building leads lists. And because Smart Leads are customized to a publisher's ideal customer profile and derived from our high-quality merchant intelligence data, publishers can expect conversion rates of 10 to 20 percent or better, far outpacing traditional sales force conversions at a fraction of the cost."

The Smart Leads platform collects, cleanses and interprets local merchant data, assigning each lead a quality score. Filtering features enable a content publisher to zero in on the high-probability leads that best match its ideal customer profile, including:

• Merchant location and decision-maker contact information
• Merchant category/industry
• Commercial density of the merchant location
• Customer demographics, including age by gender, ethnicity and median income
• Merchant's customer spend: average bill per person, price range or high-end price
• Independent SMB versus other local business type
• Merchant's popularity
• Merchant marketing investment history on advertising and deals/offers
• Lead quality score to help a publisher assess whether to add a merchant to its call list

Smart Leads, currently in beta, is the first module of the Merchant Atlas platform, designed to enable enterprise clients to quickly scale up with high quality merchant information and real leads from across the U.S. and all market tiers.

The second Merchant Atlas module, Smart Engage, planned for release later this year, is a first-of-its-kind, virtual, sales automation platform that solves the challenges of selling digital media products and services to the sizeable local and small-business marketplace. Smart Engage drives to a transaction faster than traditional sales methods, without the overhead of an expensive sales force.

The Merchant Atlas platform oversees the end-to-end process of attracting, closing and monetizing new merchants for digital content publishers, ranging from online media publishers and major search engines, to the diverse array of online and mobile app publishers—without human intervention.

Following a series of highly successful pilot tests, Smart Leads and Smart Engage are now deployed by some of the largest Internet media companies, with a healthy schedule of deployments queued for implementation.

Go to http://www.MerchantAtlas.com for more information on Smart Leads, including pricing and availability.   

About Merchant Atlas (www.MerchantAtlas.com) 
Merchant Atlas has built, patented and rolled out the first automated digital media sales platform-as-a-service that uses machine learning to generate Smart Leads and engage local merchants without the need for human sales reps. The Merchant Atlas sales automation platform advances the sales function with a streamlined, logical process that benefits publishers and merchants.  

SOURCE Merchant Atlas