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Remember those old black and white horror movies where a woman would sit in front of a crystal ball and predict the future? What if your business could have its very own crystal ball that would allow you to spot opportunities and avoid potential pitfalls? That would be pretty amazing, right?
Well, unfortunately no one’s invented a crystal ball that can divine the future (no matter what the carnival prognosticators claim…), but you can predict the future of your business.
How? With predictive analytics.
Today we’re going to discuss what predictive analytics are, how they can benefit you, and how to start using predictive sales analytics tools to guide your sales team over the road ahead.
As the title implies, predictive analytics examines huge amounts of data in order to predict trends and patterns.
Software utilizes complex Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms to break down mountains of information in order to help us better predict outcomes in a wide variety of situations.
Predictive analytics has many, many uses – but it’s particularly valuable in the sales world, where it can help teams better prioritize opportunities, convert more leads into customers, and understand why deals sometimes fail despite our best efforts.
With technology advancing almost daily, it seems safe to say that predictive analytics are here to stay. If you’re not taking advantage of these tools in your business, you run the risk of being left behind.
It’s hard to be successful in B2B sales without the competitive leverage of predictive analytics. Yet, most teams don’t have the healthy, clean customer data they need to get started. Even sales enablement platforms with perfect adoption can only offer about 15% of the buyer/seller activity you need. Why? Because they only track what happens in their specific system.
Accent’s AI-driven solutions go beyond traditional sales enablement by providing insight into buyer/seller activities taking place outside the sales enablement platform (or inside the black box).
By backfilling the historical data you’re missing, you can confidently get started with predictive analytics immediately. No more months of rigorous data entry exercises to ensure you get data you can trust.
If you’re still not entirely sold on the value of predictive sales analytics, let’s take a moment and discuss a few of the things it can bring to your business.
Are your sales professionals still spending huge chunks of their days wading through leads? Are many of those leads terrible? Would you rather your sales team spend their days selling?
If you answered yes to these questions, then predictive sales analytics can help you make this dream a reality.
Almost all of your lead scoring can be handled automatically, by sales enablement software, at this point. Artificial Intelligence can take all of your leads, break them down in a variety of different ways, and then prioritize them based on which are the best, the most likely to buy, the most likely to spend X amount of dollars, and more.
Great predictive sales analytics software can even take all of your new leads and prospects and measure them against your current customer base, comparing demographic info in order to help you find more customers like your current customers.
All of this allows your sales team to spend less time qualifying leads and more time selling. Beyond that, predictive analytics can even break down leads by where they are in the pipeline – helping you and your team to keep the pipeline moving and eliminating points where potential customers drop out or bottleneck.
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The next way predictive sales analysis tools can help your team is by shortening your sales cycle.
Sales enablement software with predictive analytics tools can do a lot of the early grunt work for your sales team.
As we’ve already seen, it can qualify leads early on in the process – but it can also help those leads move through the early stages of your pipeline as well.
Predictive software can determine what content potential buyers need at each stage of the process. It can help direct leads along your sales funnel in the most optimal way based on insights gained from the lead qualification process.
This curated experience will help you increase your sales velocity and shorten the amount of time leads spend in your pipeline before becoming customers.
Then, after the software has guided the lead through the early stages of the process, it can then hand them off to the appropriate member of your sales team to close the deal.
This again means your sales people aren’t spending time on the early administrative busywork of the sales process, but are instead focused on what matters most: closing deals.
A shorter sales cycle that allows your sales pros to do what they do best is a win for everyone involved. Predictive sales analytics tools can make this a reality.
Businesses spend a mountain of money each year trying to lure in new business, but don’t forget about your existing customers. Predictive sales analytics can help you increase the average lifetime value of the customers you already have by finding new ways to sell them additional products.
Predictive analytics can look at all of your customer demographic data and compare your most recent customers to your older clients and make connections. The software can monitor what kind of content helps spur buyers into action – allowing you to then reach out and offer that same content to pre-qualified previous customers.
The best part of this is that it’s a low cost activity. You’re not spending money to bring in new leads, you’re not creating new content – you’re simply leveraging things based on what you already have to target an audience that’s already demonstrated they want to do business with you.
Without predictive analytics software, your sales people often rely on their guts. They read clients and make decisions based on feelings – and that can work if you have a team of seasoned pros.
But what if your sales team is less experienced?
Luckily, software utilizing predictive analytics can remove a lot of guesswork on how to proceed when customers are in the pipeline.
Great sales analytics software will be able to offer up insights backed by data – meaning your sales team won’t have to guess when it comes to the next step: they’ll have a suggestion (or suggestions) determined by data analysis in similar deals.
Customers have more options than ever – so when you’ve got their interest, you’ll want to close the deal as quickly as possible. Giving them the right resources and making the right offers at the right time can make this a whole lot easier.
Another way predictive sales analytics can help your company is by turning the art of sales forecasting into a science.
In the days before Artificial Intelligence and predictive analytics were a thing, most sales forecasts were forged by looking at old data, going with gut feelings, and hoping for the favorable results. Needless to say, this was not the best approach.
With today’s analytic tools, predicting your upcoming sales is a lot easier – and more accurate – than ever before.
Sales enablement tools with predictive analytics provide a more detailed picture of what lies ahead because they can analyze not just previous sales data, but all of your currently in process deals, pipeline customers, and more. Armed with this knowledge, the complex algorithms behind these programs breaks down the data and gives you forecasts based on real information and not gut feelings.
Predictive analytics programs are great for multivariable forecasting – meaning your projections are based on a wide range of factors beyond just how your sales team performed last year.
By using more detailed forecasts, you can better prepare for success in the upcoming year – or spot potential problems before they affect your bottom line.
As you can see, predictive sales analytics can have a major impact on your business.
From helping your sales people close more deals, to qualifying more leads with less effort, to providing a picture of your company’s future, predictive sales analytics tools can give you insights into a lot of different facets of your sales and marketing departments.
If you’re not already using software with predictive analytics built in, you’re falling behind.
With almost daily technological advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, predictive tools are getting more and more accurate. This isn’t a passing fad or more clever marketing – predictive analytics are the future of sales.
If you haven’t taken the plunge yet, the good news is there are a lot of options out there. It’s safe to say there’s a product on the market that will meet your specific needs – and maybe even needs you weren’t aware you had yet.
The key is to sit down and decide what you need in a predictive analytics package for your company, what would be nice to have, and what you’re willing to spend.
Then it’s simply a matter of scheduling demos of products that align with your needs.
Don’t be shy – ask questions, utilize the free trials, and take your time making a decision. While any predictive analytics solution is better than nothing at all, there’s no need to settle for less than the perfect software for your company’s needs.
If you’re not sure how to proceed, we’re here to help.
Want to learn more about predictive analytics, sales enablement software, and marketing tools to take you business to the next level? Then be sure to subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss our latest posts.
Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true Revenue Enablement Platform. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams. This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios and provides the data for rich analytics that power better coaching, forecasting, and long-term customer support. Learn more about our solutions or request a live demo to see it in action.
