By: Eric Siegel, Founder, Predictive Analytics World
In anticipation of his upcoming conference presentation, Predicting B2B Sales Success at Predictive Analytics World Boston, Sept 27-Oct 1, 2015, we asked John Smits, Chief Data Officer, Global Business 
Operations at EMC, a few questions about his work in predictive analytics.
Q: In your work with predictive analytics, what behavior do your models predict?
A: We have realized great success in our Sales efforts through the prediction of a variety of different behaviors. We predict territory “opportunity”, leveraging insights on customer/prospect clustering techniques – this enables us to design and optimize our market coverage. We also analyze customer propensity in certain technology solutions, here we are able to associate customers into peer groups where common purchase patterns and business needs help us position the next best solution at the optimal time.
Q: How does predictive analytics deliver value at your organization? What is one specific way in which it actively drives decisions?
A: We are actively applying analytics on the inspection of our sales forecast. Leveraging both internal and external factors, we are able to isolate factors relative to our customers, the market/economy, and the sales channel performance to provide us with leading indicators of risk. With more than 50 actionable risk factors, we are able to drive focused inspection and support to manage our pipeline quality.
Q: Can you describe a successful result, such as the predictive lift of your model or the ROI of an analytics initiative?
A: We witness successful results on the performance of targeted sales campaigns, our outbound predictive models are generally more than 5X as effective in opportunity conversions vs. traditional targeting methods. We also analyze the productivity of our sales resources based on their adoption and use of predictive tools; we have seen a strong correlation with the use/leverage of account intelligence resources with rep quota attainment.
Q: What surprising discovery have you unearthed in your data?
A: That it’s not perfect! Far from it — but leveraging multiple data sources and generating a common master identifier we are able to find insight that while not always complete is still actionable!
Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Predictive Analytics World.
A: EMC will share our real-life journey bringing predictive analytics to a global sales operation. The discussion will share hard lessons learned with data, tools, talent and business process.
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Don't miss John Smits’ conference presentation, Predicting B2B Sales Success on Monday, September 28, 2015 at 11:20am to 12:05pm at Predictive Analytics World Boston. Click here to register to attend.
By: Eric Siegel, Founder, Predictive Analytics World
Eric Siegel is the founder of Predictive Analytics World (www.pawcon.com) — the leading cross-vendor conference series consisting of 10 annual events in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington D.C., London, and Berlin — and the author of the bestselling, award-winning book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die.