What are predictive sales analytics?
Predictive sales analytics exercises data collected by the sales and marketing teams to discover patterns in customer behavior. Its role is to find these tendencies and use them to improve future marketing and sales strategies.
You can use predictive sales analytics to evaluate several factors that impact your sales and discover how they affect your sales. These include:
- Lead quality
- Seasonality
- Trends
- Marketing personas
- Customers’ motivations
- Sales time windows
- Churn
The benefits of predictive sales analytics
This approach to sales has a number of advantages that help you elevate your business to a higher level. All you have to do is introduce it properly – with the use of dedicated software that is available and able to analyze large amounts of data quickly and effectively. Let’s see how you can benefit from predictive sales analytics:
- Higher customer satisfaction and retention – Knowing the patterns behind customers’ behavior will help you quickly identify the moments when your clients grow dissatisfied with the products or services and counteract.
- Increase in revenue – The more you know about your target customers, the more effective your marketing efforts are. With predictive sales analytics, it is possible to create better-fitting campaigns that will result in more leads, helping you save money on strategies that would simply not work.
- Setting up goals – Your KPIs and OKRs need to be doable. Through the data analyzed in the process of predictive sales analytics, you can set your company’s and each team’s goals according to what is possible. As a result, you will be able to truly evaluate the effectiveness of your team and improve its performance further.
Potential dangers to predictive sales analytics
While this approach is excellent in general, when done incorrectly it can do more harm than good. The risk factors include:
- Bias in the training data
- Making wrong assumptions
- Choosing this strategy when it is not the most cost-effective solution for your business
- Not taking all factors into account
- Allowing machines to take full control of the decision-making process
The takeaway
Using predictive sales analytics may come with numerous benefits. However, you have to beware the most common traps, such as bias in the data or making wrong assumptions based on it. Choose this approach if it is indeed the best one for your business – sometimes, it simply does not have to be so.
