Carson Group's AI/ML Adoption for Enhanced Lead Scoring and Customer Acquisition

Carson Group Holdings LLC is a comprehensive ecosystem for advisors, designed to help them better serve their clients and unleash their firm’s full potential to drive business growth. Carson Group offers a wide range of services, including advisor coaching programs, process optimization development and investment strategies, and discovery of lead and customer acquisition opportunities. With Carson, advisors receive industry-leading support for marketing, technology, compliance, investments, succession planning, and mergers and acquisition, enabling their firms to secure better positions on the market.

Carson Group Holdings LLC, a comprehensive ecosystem for advisors, was seeking ways to enhance their marketing efforts to help their investment advisor clients acquire new customers more effectively. They decided to adopt AI/ML, starting with a machine learning model for scoring leads received from Salesforce. The goal was to narrow down their leads, focusing on customers with the highest likelihood of investing, thereby reducing time spent filtering leads that are less likely to convert. This would optimize costs and drive growth for their clients more efficiently. Carson Group had the right data for training ML models and saw the potential to streamline the entire process of evaluating and scoring leads by their sales and marketing teams. They aimed to replace their existing predictive system, which relied on complex rules and heuristics, with a self-training machine learning solution for higher accuracy and efficiency in lead scoring.

Provectus, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with competencies in Machine Learning, and Data & Analytics, partnered with Carson Group to develop the ML model. The project began with the discovery and evaluation of Carson’s data, including labeled lead records and various reports on impressions, clicks, lead conversion cost, spend, and more. The ML model was designed and built from scratch, including EDA and modeling work, development of an end-to-end model training pipeline, and implementation of an inference pipeline. The model was enhanced and fine-tuned to reach an accuracy of 96% (chance of conversion), with actual conversions predicted from new data hitting the eight-out-of-10 mark (recall of 88%, precision of 67%). The ML lead scoring model was designed to seamlessly access new data from various sources, including Salesforce, and then deliver the results to the respective teams.

• The Provectus Data and ML Engineering teams managed to deliver the lead scoring model within five weeks. Carson Group was quick to adopt the solution and take advantage of the results of the ML work in a matter of days. The delivered ML lead scoring solution took data from Salesforce, processed and analyzed it, and delivered the predictions to the sales and marketing professionals, making it easy for them to use the lead scores in their work. The ability to see the “potential to convert” score next to every lead enabled Carson to quickly look up promising clients, massively reducing the effort and time for conversion. This not only meant more efficient conversions for Carson’s clients, but also improved customer satisfaction, significant cost reduction, and better flexibility and scalability of the Carson Group business as a whole.

• Highly accurate and precise ML model delivered in 5 weeks

• Model accuracy of 96% with actual conversions predicted from new data hitting the eight-out-of-10 mark (recall of 88%, precision of 67%)

• Significant reductions in operations costs for Carson’s BUs and clients