The Influence of Predictive Analytics on Pipeline and Revenue

Increase revenue and optimize your sales pipeline with predictive analytics.

Table of contents
1. Inability to Engage the Right People
2. When to Engage and When Not to
3. Identify In-Market Accounts
4. There is money in time; there is even more money in timing
Conclusion

If you were able to look into a crystal ball and see exactly when customers were going to buy, what would you do? What would be the impact on your business if you knew which B2B buyers would buy immediately and at what exact time? Undoubtedly, that is priceless. 

The fact that your marketing and sales teams are not searching for ideal prospects but solely for prospects who are genuinely interested in your products, makes it possible to shift focus from prospecting to making the sales organization better and more effective. This is only made possible when prospects are hinting at their buying intention, and predictive analytics will definitely help you with that. 

1. Inability to Engage the Right People

It would be like randomly casting your net into a huge sea and hoping to catch a couple of fish. But without the insight and knowledge of what accounts are most likely to convert your efforts can become widely disparate and disorganized. This scattergun approach not only ensures time and money are wasted but can actually alienate prospects with largely irrelevant sales pitches.

Predictive analytics solves this conundrum by examining volumes of data to highlight the accounts with the highest value. By leveraging historical data, market trends, and analyzing behavior patterns your business can accurately identify the most promising prospects. Inefficient maintenance of a POS system can lead to incidents of error, poor customer personalization and inaccurate stock count. 

2. When to Engage and When Not to

Timing is crucial in the sales world. What could have been a killer pitch can fail when presented too soon or too late in the buyer’s journey. And without visibility into when prospects are most likely to buy, companies risk passing up their window of interest or losing deals to faster competitors. Where predictive analytics come in is predicting the likelihood a prospect is ready to make a purchase. By analyzing thousands of signals from a prospect’s web traffic, content consumption, social media activity, and historical data to understand when a customer will buy and then prioritizing sales outreach for those prospects, predictive sales analytics increase the probability of revenue generation. 

3. Identify In-Market Account

Uncovering in-market accounts is fundamental to every effective sales strategy. Using predictive analytics, businesses can analyze a wide array of data to determine which accounts are currently displaying strong buying signals. By tracking online searches, content consumption, and social media activity, companies can find accounts that are currently in the process of finding a solution to a challenge or need in their industry. 

Once these accounts are identified, the business can launch personalized marketing campaigns and sales efforts that will be much more likely to result in conversions. Each campaign and sales outreach effort will target specific accounts, and the business will be able to align its message and offers with the specific needs of the account. By speaking directly to these needs, the business will engage the account and be much more likely to drive the account to conversion. 

4. There is money in time; there is even more money in timing

In sales, every second counts. Predictive analytics isn’t just about identifying which accounts are the right ones, it’s even more about the right time to reach out to those accounts. With live data, sales can know immediately when a customer goes from being a “good” customer to a great customer. As that behavior changes, sales is immediately alerted to follow up with personalized outreach. 

That could be a personalized email following a certain website visit for a prospect, or a follow up social media outreach taking into consideration an uptick in engagement. It allows sales to not only retreat 5 yards and punt, but to jump right on to any opportunity that arises in the first place – it’s a proactive approach to the sales cycle. This proactive thinking can help to streamline the sales cycle, offering a more personalized customer experience. This sort of intelligence adds additional value to the customer experience, and can bring customers closer to your business, and is more likely to result in more loyal, longer-term customers. 

5. Conclusion

In the age of the modern buyer, businesses must differentiate or they will die. Predictive analytics is one of the most effective ways to increase pipeline and revenue through a simple equation of who to engage and when. Companies that are able to leverage data through predictive solutions can pinpoint the high-value accounts in their funnel, take actions at the right time, and accelerate opportunities. With the resulting growth in pipeline and revenue comes another unexpected surprise: stronger, more profitable relationships with your customers.

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