In today’s age of the customer, where companies are striving for deeper and deeper customer insights, the value of data has never been stronger. In last year’s The State of Salesforce Report, 81% of Salesforce customers cited increasing the use of predictive analytics as the most important initiative for their sales strategies. However, many business leaders approach the use of predictive analytics warily, due to a misconception that pristine data is a requisite for any successful use of these tools. In truth, no business has perfect data. Rather than hold you back from implementing predictive tools, the existence of imperfect data should be seen as an opportunity to identify points of weakness in your data sets and mature your strategy. The dramatic benefits of predictive analytics can be seen at every level of their use — the key is simply to start.

Improve Your Data with Use
“Predictive” has a wide definition with many use cases. At a basic level, predictive analytics can be used in simply identifying a key customer segment in your database. Beginning to use a predictive tool doesn’t have to be an astronomical project — you can find insight even in the worst data. If you don’t start using your data, you won’t have the opportunity further sophisticate its usefulness.For example, if you begin sorting service cases by product in order to identify trends in customer dissatisfaction and find the product field to be blank in many of those records, you’ve just revealed a core problem with your data. These kinds of insights are the building blocks of a more robust and insightful data-driven business model.

Predictive Data Offers an Edge
From basic to advanced uses, predictive analytics allow business decisions to be made proactively rather than reactively. Examples of business insights include: identifying customers who are most likely to attrite, discover opportunities likely to have the most immediate impact, or predict which accounts carry the highest lifetime value. Data’s power comes from its versatility. Almost any business decision can be made smarter with data as its foundation. We recently worked with a warehouse company and a media corporation; though very different businesses, both were able to optimize their pricing for goods and services by utilizing Salesforce’s Wave Analytics to gain insight into their most valuable assets. By moving this process out of Excel and uniting their data sources, both companies were able to drastically improve their revenue by predicting value more efficiently.

Empower Every Part of Your Business with Data
Data can add intelligence to every part of your business. With Salesforce Wave, you can build dashboards and set up alerts to deliver these intelligent insights to each team in your business. When customers likely to attrit are identified, your marketing team will be notified and enabled to tailor campaigns to those customers to improve those relationships. An automatic service message can be configured to be sent to that database segment, or you can send those contacts to a queue to be called by your service team to make sure those customers are successful and feel remembered. Sales teams can be aided with predictions of the best products to sell or contracts to target for renewal. Big business goals for price optimization, retention, white space analysis, and targeted marketing all begin with data.

To learn more about how the application of predictive analytics can help you meet your business goals, download our special report on Salesforce use for IT teams.