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SalesLoop: Reinforcement Learning from Performance Feedback for Sales Lead Ranking

Machine Learning 2026-07-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval

Abstract

Lead ranking in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems faces a persistent challenge: models achieving high offline accuracy often underperform in production. We identify three fundamental gaps responsible for this disconnect: offline-online metric mismatch, pointwise-listwise objective misalignment, and temporal distribution drift. To address these gaps, we propose SalesLoop, a reinforcement learning framework that establishes a closed feedback loop between model predictions and real-world business outcomes. Our approach introduces (1) a performance-aware reward that encodes conversion outcomes weighted by ranking position and conversion velocity, and (2) Discriminative GRPO, a listwise optimization objective that adapts Group Relative Policy Optimization to discriminative ranking models. SalesLoop improves NDCG@K by +7.9\% and P@K by +15.8\% over the strongest static baseline. A 160-day production A/B test at a New Energy Vehicle manufacturer, spanning 16.5M leads and 280 sales specialists across two provincial markets, validates statistically significant cumulative lift of +4.7\% (p=0.047p=0.047) and +8.7\% (p=0.002p=0.002). In production, the ranking backbone achieves Top-10\% recall of 44.1\% and surfaces high-intent leads at 2.3×2.3\times the conversion rate of specialist baselines.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.20655,
  title  = {SalesLoop: Reinforcement Learning from Performance Feedback for Sales Lead Ranking},
  author = {Chenyu Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.20655},
  year   = {2026}
}