How Predictive Analytics Is Changing Sales Forever
Sales teams aren’t always the first to take advantage of exciting, new technologies. They’re usually too busy hustling to hit quota to play around with shiny objects.
So, it should come as no surprise, really, that the sales industry is one of the last groups to embrace the power of predictive analytics.
In the past decade, data science has made a significant impact on political campaigns, professional sports, consumer credit, health care and fraud detection.
Marketing organizations also rely on predictive analytics to sort and score massive amounts of leads.
Sales is the next frontier of this proven science, which uses statistics, machine learning, data mining and modeling to analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events.
Predictive analytics is now being applied to sales leads, prospects and opportunities to pinpoint which ones are the most likely to be contacted and most likely to close.
A whopping 73 percent of B2B leads are not sales-ready, according to MarketingSherpa’s B2B Benchmark Report.
When you consider that sales teams waste that much effort chasing terrible leads that have little to no chance of ever buying, it’s pretty obvious that predictive analytics will completely transform the industry.
Predictive 2.0
Some sales leaders confuse the new breed of predictive analytics with old-school predictive dialers, which have been around for 30 years.
Predictive dialers were designed for telemarketers who wanted to quickly churn through huge lists in hopes of making a few live connections. The only thing these dialers really predicted was how many lines they had to call to get somebody to answer.
Sales acceleration technology takes prediction out of the hardware and puts it into the data, where it belongs. Predictive 2.0 represents the transition from outdated predictive dialers to new and innovative solutions built on predictive analytics.
This new technology leverages data science to not only predict who to call and when to call them, but also to prescribe the best way to reach them and the most effective messaging.
Predictive analytics improves every aspect of the sales process from lead generation, sorting, scoring and prioritization, to dialing and emailing, to pipeline management and forecasting, to hiring and rep motivation. You can easily manage all of these activities right inside your cloud-based CRM.
Gone are the days when sales reps were left to guess which leads and prospects to call or which emails to send. Also behind us is that murky time when sales managers were left in the dark about what their reps were doing or how best to coach them.
Predictive analytics, through the application of advanced data science, is accelerating the sales process for the world’s most successful sales teams. Companies like Microsoft, ADP, Groupon and Marketo have all embraced sales acceleration technology with great success.
What can predictive analytics do for you? Find out in the free ebook below.