An essential component of a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is determining which leads are most responsive to the initial sales call (contact), and assessing their likelihood of accepting the sales offers (conversion), namely, identifying successful leads. For example, in the Pharmaceutical Industry where lead generation is an ongoing plan, one wants to identify which physicians are most receptive to their salespeople and decisively become customers. Once an efficient lead generation system is in place, then a marketing strategy is developed to customize the physician-salespeople interaction for preventing the loss of the successful leads.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the new Genetic Contact-Conversion (GCC) Model as a lead generation system. The GCC Model simultaneously addresses two important objectives facing database marketers: maximizing contact and maximizing conversion. The GCC Model, which is based on the assumption-free, nonparametric genetic paradigm inspired by Darwin's Principle of Survival of the Fittest, balances the two objectives yielding a single score that identifies successful leads. The GCC Model is theoretically optimal, and easy to build and validate. I discuss two real CRM case studies to highlight the features of the new model.