Utilizing Predictive Insights: Understanding Customers' Propensity to Buy
Written By: Dan Cooper
Understanding customer intent and preferences in the modern economy is critical to sustainable success. Effective access to and analysis of relevant data can pave the way to insights that position your business for growth and development. Conversely, a lack of the proper tools and solutions can leave companies lagging behind competitors — and make catching up to them even more difficult.
The wide-reaching value of Predictive Insights
Sales strategies require a significant amount of time and effort to execute effectively. Even the most agile companies can’t turn on a dime to immediately implement and realize a drastically different approach to this core business activity. In essence, tomorrow’s revenue is built from the sales strategy your company defines today.
That means identifying a sales planning strategy that can draw on the immense value of predictive insights to guide decision-making and provide vital context.
What is Predictive Insights, exactly?
Anaplan provides insights through an intelligent and predictive learning platform that is expressly designed to connect internal and external data. The result is a rich analysis that provides valuable support for setting strategy. This is the core of Predictive Insights: bringing together internal and external data for deep predictive modeling that helps your organization identify possibilities and actions that would have remained hidden or unclear otherwise.
Effective combination of first- and third-party data is foundational for useful predictive insights. First-party data includes elements like company size, industry, purchase history and spend, among others. Modeling that leverages this type of data provides valuable context, but it’s ultimately limited to your own company’s operations. The addition of third-party data, such as hiring trends, business partnerships, growth, intent for solutions, intent for use cases and similar factors, helps your business better understand customers and the broader economy.
These two sources of data are combined with artificial intelligence that offers predictive capabilities, generating insights about the future as opposed to the present. By acting on information relevant to the future instead of the present, businesses have time to make effective changes. Optimizing sales team performance and effective prioritization of accounts are two common and especially positive outcomes.
Questions every business needs to answer
Resources are limited when it comes to sales, just as they are for every aspect of a company’s operations. Determining the most productive and rewarding way to apply those resources positions your business for success. Core questions related to resource allocation and which can be positively influenced by predictive insights include:
Which customers should my company prioritize?
High-value customers with a strong propensity to buy and needs that align with your company’s offerings may offer the best potential returns. With powerful and dependable solutions in place to provide predictive insights based on first- and third-party data, it’s possible to identify the prospects and current customers that best align with your products and services.
Anaplan customers have shared data that demonstrate intelligent prioritization — the combination of first- and third-party data with AI — is vital to sustainable growth. Survey respondents that didn’t utilize prioritization at all saw a decrease in conversions over time.
Businesses that used first-party prioritization — drawing only on internal data to benchmark customer accounts and prospects — saw conversions increase by a rate of 1.5. Companies that utilized AI-driven prioritization, combining first- and third-party data with AI, realized conversion growth by a rate of 4. Optimized targeting provides the detailed context necessary for the most productive categorization of prospects.
What product or products should we offer?
Product mix is an enduring question for a wide range of businesses. Even companies that have a gold-standard offering in their specific fields need to offer additional support and options. Without change, they risk eventually failing to align with customer preferences and intent. Taking the changing nature of the economy in general and of individual sectors into account is critical in this respect.
Predictive insights help your organization understand what your ideal customer looks like. Similarly, they assist in documenting the most important needs of potential buyers through analysis of intent data. With crucial analysis directly related to product offerings also in the mix, your company can make data-driven decisions about products that take both your company and your market into account.
Why and when should we engage with clients and prospects?
Effective engagement with the most valuable clients and prospects at the right times helps them move through the sales funnel and encourages action throughout the process. A scattershot approach to this same tactic can do little besides waste valuable resources. AI-driven predictive insights are exceptionally valuable in terms of identifying ideal customers and understanding their needs. This type of analysis can help your sales and marketing teams make the best possible decisions related to why, when and how to engage with current and potential customers.
What Anaplan has to offer…
Anaplan provides four distinct options for utilizing its Predictive Sales Planning technology:
Predictive Account Segmentation and Scoring, which focuses on augmenting internal data with predictive attributes, leading to more effective account prioritization.
Predictive Territory Planning, which helps create equitable and balanced sales territories that support sales staff and encourage retention.
Predictive Sales Capacity Planning, which focuses on reaching revenue targets via optimizing coverage models.
Predictive Quota Planning, which helps company leaders set strong and realistic goals via predictive insights and analysis.
…And how Allitix can help
Allitix is an Anaplan Gold Partner, meaning we have unparalleled Anaplan knowledge and experience. Our teams are ready to provide critical assistance in implementing Anaplan solutions as well as building deep organizational knowledge and a successful culture around them. We focus on supporting positive change and helping our clients build strong and sustainable solutions.
To learn more about how Anaplan’s Predictive Insights can help your operations become more efficient and effective, get in touch with us today.