Gartner Blog: We are Very early in Predictive Analytics

Here an excerpt.    Interesting thought, and our forecasting will become much better, in some areas spectacularly so.  But still, it will be operating with some of the same data. Old, faulty, in the wrong context, gathered haphazardly.  So you still cannot expect exact predictions.  If you are not exactly right there is the risk of implemented error.  And that risk itself cannot be perfectly tagged.   So there again a caution.   And I would certainly not use the position of a technology on a wavy line as predictive input data.  So please, save your pennies, but caution all around.

Start Saving for Predictive Analytics
by Steve Rietberg  |  August 8, 2019  | 

When I was young and fresh out of college, people urged me to start contributing to a retirement fund as soon as I could. They explained that since I had time on my side, even modest investments would pay significant dividends. I just needed the discipline to start saving early.

We’re all young, with respect to predictive analytics technology. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, sales predictive analytics (which includes predictive forecasting, upsell/cross-sell recommendations and opportunity scoring) is still in its adolescence. This market is expected to grow quickly in the immediate future.

How can we take advantage of our youth, and get a head start on preparing for advances in predictive pipeline analytics?

Your CRM Thinks Too Linearly

Consider this. Your historic pipeline data suggests a correlation between sales stage and an opportunity’s likelihood to close. In many organizations, that correlation–directly or indirectly–informs seller coaching and forecasting decisions. But there is a disconnect between the sequential sales stages in a typical CRM system and the nonlinear buying process that customers actually follow. To improve the validity and accuracy of your pipeline analytics, you need to track more than sales stage. For this reason, measuring buyer behavior along with seller-provided sales stage and probability clears a path to improved predictive analytics. .... "