Big Quota, Sluggish Sales, and a Small Marketing Budget
What if your B2B or B2C sales are dragging, but your quota has increased? What if no new product rollouts are ready to trumpet, you’re short on account managers, and you don’t have much marketing budget for the rest of the year?
Suppose you have a CRM with your customers’ purchase and support ticket histories and monthly billing history in your ERP or billing system. In that case, there may be a way to refocus your marketing, retarget your sales, and meet or exceed your new quota. It’s NMLP.
NMLP
NMLP is the “next most likely purchase.” Looking backward, it’s the connection between what your customers purchased first, then next. NMLP is also about the interval between each purchase and the next.
Looking forward, NMLP can be the answer to your prayers. With specialized mathematical models (we’ll get to those later), it’s possible to recognize, with some amount of certainty, the shortlist of products or services that each customer is likely to purchase next and when.
How Does This Help Me?
If you have a nearly magical forecast of which current customers will next be in the market, what they’ll want to buy, and when you could close the deal, wouldn’t that help?
Of course, it would.
- You’d be able to steer part of your marketing budget to nurturing campaigns that focus on the buyers nearing a predicted in-market date.
- You’d be able to put product or service upgrade offers to the right buyers at the right time.
- You could provide each account manager with a forecast showing which accounts are approaching in-market dates and the products or services those same customers are likely to buy.
- Better still, you can tell your sales team who not to call. Why waste a great deal of time calling on someone who is not likely to buy right now? For example, why try to sell an ERP system to a customer who just installed a new ERP system and might still be finishing the implementation?
How Does NMLP Work?
Without going into a Ph.D. dissertation, the short answer is that “it depends.” Blackstone and Cullen will create your NMLP model to work best with your available data, industry, market, products and services, and customer life cycle.
The model we build will combine your historical data, customer intelligence, market intelligence, and other data.
Proprietary machine learning and operations research-based code will work together. The model will deliver the NMLP forecasts (when and what) that your sales and marketing teams will be thrilled to receive because the forecasts provide sales-making potential.
What Data Do I Need?
We start with:
- Everything in your CRM
- Your billing data
- Your support ticket history
- Your product lifecycle data
We may connect with the tools you use to manage your marketing campaigns.
We enrich this data set from external sources, including various types of customer intelligence, marketplace, economic indicator, and geodata.
Benefits
By accelerating sales, locking in customers on their next deal, and having insight into who will buy and what, you will enjoy very significant benefits that go to the bottom line.
- Increased sales, expanded margin, increased revenue
- Accelerated sales not only bring one-time revenue forward but drags forward recurring monthly revenue (from periodic maintenance and support billings or monthly usage fees)
- Increased customer retention - resulting from getting deals in front of customers before they start shopping around
- Higher yield on marketing spending because of better targeting
- Avoiding wasted time on customers who won’t buy boosts sales productivity
- Productivity gains in your sales team will help you retain your standout salespeople
How Long Does It Take
A project can take six to eight weeks to deliver complete initial results. The amount of work and project duration depends on the number of data sources you have, the amount of data available, the complexity of your market, and the number of products and services you offer.
Blackstone and Cullen can, in an additional phase, provide automation and integration with your existing systems so that you can refresh your NMLP report monthly or weekly. This information enables you to steer your marketing and sales teams and sustain the benefits ongoing.
