Sales analytics include descriptive sales, diagnostic sales, predictive sales, and prescriptive sales. With sales analytics, you can find answers to such questions as: What products were best-selling last month? What products didn’t sell well? What are the best ways to approach leads? How should you establish viable goals for your sales team?
These insights are essential to unlock new markets, outline a sales cycle, build sales pipelines, make data-driven decisions, improve your sales team performance, and more.
Today, let’s talk about predictive sales analytics — a powerful analysis tool to mine historical data to produce future forecasts. With the recent economic uncertainty and market volatility, predictive sales analytics should be an essential part of your sales strategy.
What is Predictive Sales Analytics?
Predictive sales analytics uses sales data to identify patterns in customers’ and leads’ behaviors to make future sales predictions. Hence, you can better understand your business’s financial health for the months or years to come.
Predictive Sales Analytics Example
A typical example of predictive sales analytics is lead scoring. In most sales situations, there is a long list of leads in the databases. Sales reps’ day-to-day job is to plan follow-ups on those leads, make phone calls, send emails, use their own subjective judgments to qualify leads, and so on.
All of those tasks will take a significant amount of time, making it hard for sales reps to prioritize resources and focus on closing deals. Whenever you spend too much time on a lead that has a low probability of becoming your customer, you may lose the opportunity to convert a “better” lead who is more interested in your products.
But that’s not the case if you use a predictive sales analytic tool. A predictive analytic tool for sales uses predictive modeling to predict future behavior based on past behaviors. It combines historical and current data to help you understand why a lead takes too long to convert or who you should focus your efforts on.
Because a predictive analytics tool applies data science and machine learning, it’ll help reduce errors in analysis and increase the accuracy of identifying quality leads.
Which Companies Use Predictive Analytics?
Predictive analytics isn’t just beneficial for retail and ecommerce. Any industry can use predictive analytics to forecast sales, detect risks, and optimize sales operations.
For example, if you’re running a financial institution, you can use predictive analytics to detect fraud, measure credit risk, or identify new investment opportunities. For manufacturers, predictive analytics help discover factors leading to reduced quality, production failures, and distribution risks.
Why Is Predictive Sales Analytics Important?
To understand the importance of predictive sales analytics, let’s take a look at its benefits for your business.
1. Increase the Accuracy Level of Sales Forecasts
A comprehensive sales forecast considers competitors, historical sales, industry trends, economic shifts, and other data sources to project accurate future sales. Predictive analytics provide you with all of these data, plus actionable insights to create S.M.A.R.T (i.e., specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals for your sales team.
By anticipating sales using predictive analytics, you can better prepare for demand, inventory, and production. You’ll also know when to launch promotions and how to do that if sales are expected to be too weak. The more accurate the sales forecast, the more effective your sales planning, demand planning, inventory controls, and financial planning.
2. Improve Lead Generation
As said earlier, predictive analytics helps you quickly score leads and identify the right customers at the right time. With rich data sets, you can develop a detailed view of your prospects, improve outreach strategies, and build an effective funnel to turn those prospects into customers.
But the value of predictive analytics goes well beyond lead targeting. Some predictive analytics tools allow you to automate sales processes, helping your sales reps reduce repetitive tasks and have more time to talk with leads. These tools can even give your sales reps the most probable questions that prospects may ask and pinpoint the most opportune time to target them.
3. Maximize Customer Lifetime Value
Predictive sales analytics enable you to understand your customers better. You’ll learn what makes them tick, what drives loyalty, and why they have certain behaviors. These insights are invaluable when developing your customer loyalty programs.
Predictive sales analytics help you create more targeted upselling and cross-selling strategies. For example, if you know that 30% of customers who buy product A come back to buy product B within one month, you can then create a bundle of products A and B to speed up the buying process and increase the average order value for each transaction.
How Much Does Predictive Analytics Cost?
Predictive analytics tools are generally priced per user, per month. In other words, you have to multiply the base cost of your predictive sales analytics tool by the number of your sales reps who will be using it to calculate your total investment.
To choose the right tool for your business, consider your objectives, budget, sales team, customer base, and features you actually need. In case you’re looking for an affordable but powerful predictive analytics tool, then here is a solution for you.
The Best Predictive Analytics Tool for Your Sales Team
To make your sales analytics actionable, you can use an in-depth tool like Revenue Grid. This advanced analytical solution is designed to help your sales team centralize data from your CRM into a single dashboard, predict sales forecasts, manage pipelines, create automated outreach sequences, plan the selling, and more.
For predictive analytics, Revenue Grid will bring value to your sales time in the following ways:
- Advanced and reliable AI-forecasting: Support your sales forecasts with real-time data, compare forecast periods, evaluate risks in the process, and provide actionable insights to coach your team. Hence, you can make decisions based on data, not assumptions and guesses.
- Interactive deal guidance: Identify silent deals and provide your sales reps with recommendations on how to get them back on track. You’ll gain actionable insights on actual factors underlying wins and the best next steps for each deal, which gives you a higher chance of closing.
- Full pipeline visibility: Visualize your pipeline at every point in time, track sales metrics, get alerts on any changes, and receive recommendations on what next steps are scheduled for key deals.
Revenue Grid is a powerful predictive sales analytics solution for businesses of any size.
