Sales and marketing analytics have long shared one common trait: An addiction to Excel spreadsheets. According to one study conducted by the Business Performance Management Forum, 73% of marketing executives use spreadsheets for analytics, while nearly 80% rely on spreadsheets for forecasting.
Now, some experts say, a growing number of analytics tools might give both sales and marketing organizations better – and far more automated – decision-making and forecasting capabilities, while also ultimately serving the cause of sales and marketing integration.
Craig Moore, Service Director of Marketing Operations Strategies at SiriusDecisions, said this new crop of advanced analytics tools moves decision-makers away from manual analytics processes and towards more advanced predictive capabilities. “Business intelligence focuses on past performance,” Moore stated. “Predictive analytics forecasts behavior and results in order to guide specific decisions.”
A Fast-Growing Market For Predictive Analytics
For sales and marketing organizations, typical predictive analytics activities include sales forecasting, details on expected buying behavior and propensity to buy, as well as “defection detection” to predict and prevent customer churn. The analytics applications may draw data exclusively from a CRM or marketing automation platform, although they more commonly integrate data from multiple enterprise applications, including (for the largest companies) “big data” repositories that aggregate vast quantities of enterprise data.
According to Moore, about 15% of B2B marketing organizations currently use advanced analytics tools with predictive capabilities, and this number could double within the next 2-3 years. “The tools are evolving to the point where they’re useful to business analysts, as opposed only to [business intelligence] experts,” Moore said. “There’s a great opportunity for them to use analytics techniques and tools to gain greater insights.”
On the marketing side, Moore cited a number of vendors that provide advanced analytics solutions with predictive capabilities, including Opera Solutions, MuSigma and PivotLink. While some of these solutions tend to require a high level of customization and on-premises resources, others – such as GoodData and Birst – have SaaS-based offerings and third-party app ecosystems that require a relatively simple implementation process.
Many marketing automation and CRM platforms also include traditional analytics that provide a dashboard-based view of current performance and, in some cases, comparisons to historical trends. As a rule, however, these built-in analytics tend to be less robust than stand-alone analytics solutions. This has created an opportunity for advanced analytics vendors to integrate their offerings with popular CRM and marketing automation tools; GoodData, for example, offers analytics apps for Salesforce, Pardot, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SugarCRM, among others.
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