Articles About Predictive Analytics

We believe in the power of what we do at Valgen to improve the results of sales teams. As the articles below show, many agree that predictive analytics can be a game changer. For example,  Aberdeen research into the use of predictive analytics to improve sales and marketing effectiveness showed that Best-in-Class companies grew incremental sales by 24% once they adopted predictive analytics.

At Valgen, we’ve developed a way to deliver the benefits of predictive analytics to sales and marketing teams quickly, easily and cost-effectively.

Learn more about predictive analytics:

Why Predictive Analytics is a Game-Changer – Forbes.com, April 2010

Excerpt:  In a tough global economy, sloppy decision making and “going with your gut” can get you punished–swiftly. That’s why leading companies are increasingly turning to a new management discipline called predictive analytics to compete and thrive. Rather than relying on intuition when pricing products, maintaining inventory or hiring talent, managers are using data, analysis and systematic reasoning to improve efficiency, reduce risk and increase profits. …

A Different Game: Information is transforming traditional businesses – The Economist, February 2010

Excerpt:  … A few years ago such technologies, called “business intelligence”, were available only to the world’s biggest companies. But as the price of computing and storage has fallen and the software systems have got better and cheaper, the technology has moved into the mainstream. Companies are collecting more data than ever before. In the past they were kept in different systems that were unable to talk to each other, such as finance, human resources or customer management. Now the systems are being linked, and companies are using data-mining techniques to get a complete picture of their operations—“a single version of the truth”, as the industry likes to call it. That allows firms to operate more efficiently, pick out trends and improve their forecasting. …

Predictive Analytics’ Killer App: Retaining New Customers – Information Management Magazine, February 2007

Excerpt:  … The challenge is in the predictive targeting. Without knowing ahead of time which new customers will turn out to be hit-and-run customers, a costly retention campaign sacrifices too much revenue from the customers who were going to return anyway. In other words, if you offer every new customer a rebate on her or his second purchase, those destined to come back will simply pay that much less when they do.

Predictive modeling does the trick. A predictive model tells you which new customers are likely to return and which are probably one-timers. The model is created with data mining methods that “learn” from the collective experience of your company contained in your sales records. The model then applies what has been learned to produce a predictive score for each new customer in real time. …

Driven with Business Expertise, Analytics Produces Actionable Predictions – Destination CRM, March 2004

Excerpt:  … A central capability of CRM analytics is to predict customer actions, that is, to forecast the individual behavior of each existing or prospective customer under certain conditions. Naturally, such customer predictions are key to allocating marketing and sales resources. For example, by predicting which product features each customer will respond to, you can target each customer accordingly.

There are three steps where business expertise is needed to direct predictive analytics: defining your prediction goal; evaluating the prediction results and redirecting; and deploying your prediction model. …