Predictive Analytics-The Future of Sales
The movie Glengary Glen Ross came out in 1992 and has a classic scene for all sales people to get excited about. That was over twenty years ago and to this day the B2B salesperson is still striving to attain those “Glengary Leads.” Now everywhere you go on the Internet the buzzwords, “Big Data”,are being thrown around. This relatively new industry seems to be solving the most complex problems in the world today by companies like IBM, Google, Amazon, Cloudera and this list is actually really long, see the picture to get an idea. But is this technology solving the one problem that truly matters, which leads are most likely to convert to a customer? OK, so this isn't humanity’s biggest problem. I was being a little sarcastic but it certainly is worth solving for B2B companies trying to make a profit.
Predictive Analytics has emerged to help us sales people conquer the age old question of which leads, prospects and clients are most likely to buy. Machine learning, using advanced algorithms by data scientists, has created some of the greatest companies in the world and we have only begun to scratch the surface. So why do I find the correlation between sales and predictive analytics so interesting enough to write about it? Because I think this fundamentally changes the landscape for sales people in the near future.
Before I explain why this changes things for the average salesperson, the company I am referring too which I think will start this revolution is Infer. This new tech startup takes your existing data from your CRM or marketing system and combines that with hundreds of other attributes found from all over the web. Statistical models are then used to essentially recreate your ideal customer and predict using a scoring method which of your existing prospects are likely to close. All of this would be integrated into your CRM like Salesforce, Eloqua, or Marketo and you won't need to hire your own data scientist to test the latest Hadoop technology.
Now why is this going to change the future for salespeople? Well everyone in sales has heard the phrase, “it’s a numbers game,” and realized they better put their work in. Predictive Analytics essentially creates the holy grail for a sales person, and that is those coveted “Glengary Leads” I mentioned before. No longer will the phrase hold true for the individual salesperson. The numbers and data points the old ideology was referring too, is now being computed with highly sophisticated algorithms from the same people that started Google. Average salespeople need to be aware, the future of sales is here.
So put that coffee down, the Glengary Leads are for closers.
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