Is this company a lead customer? Estimating stages of B2B buying journey
提出用机器学习方法，通过观察企业买家的在线浏览行为来推断其购买阶段，帮助B2B卖家调整营销策略以提高成功率。
By advancement in digital marketing, business-to-business (B2B) buyers carry out over half of the buying process through digital touchpoints before they establish any significant contact with the B2B seller. Knowing the buying stage of a potential buyer can bring a substantial advantage to the B2B seller given the complexity of the transaction and the associated value. In this paper, the authors propose a machine learning approach to infer the stages of the B2B buying journey by observing the online browsing behavior of buyer companies. It is shown that observing the buyer's online behavior effectively allows us to estimate the buying stages with high accuracy by utilizing the hidden Markov models. Managers in B2B seller companies may use these techniques for adjusting their marketing efforts to improve the fit with the information demands of the B2B buyer prospects along with their buying journey, and thus, improve the hit rate of marketing and sales activities.