Predictive analytics is an extension of advanced analytics allowing the user to make predictions about unknown future events. It adopts varied approaches from data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to evaluate present data and to make predictions about the future. Predictive analytics is used in marketing, financial services, insurance, retail, travel, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and various other fields.

Salesforce predictive analytics helps organizations get intelligent sales insights, manage the sales pipeline and improves the sales process. This can be achieved by using one of the products of Salesforce Einstein; Sales Cloud Einstein, which has artificial intelligence (AI) built into the core of the Salesforce platform. Sales Cloud Einstein equips the sales leaders with full visibility into team performances, helping sales teams sell smarter.

Your organization's sales team does a lot of things right and there are a few skills they require to have a robust sales process. They use different technical tools to maximize their sales but are still unable to achieve their goals. Sales Cloud Einstein helps organizations to sell smarter by making intelligent predictions & recommendations about the sales deals. With Einstein Forecasting, sales leaders understand exactly what to expect from the pipeline at every level by the sales rep or by the team. The sales leaders will be able to make informed decisions with accurate revenue expectations. Hence with Sales Cloud Einstein, the sales team’s productivity gets supercharged.

The work process of Sales Cloud Einstein includes capturing of data, learning that data and finally connect it with sales reps to give the insights by eliminating the manual entry of data into the system which gives more time for sales reps to focus on selling.

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) can dig through the text of emails exchanged with customers to estimate the likelihood of a potential sale, detect the best possible deals, identify deals a team is at greatest risk of losing, and provide recommended actions to improve the sales process.

There are various problems faced by an organization in their Sales cycle:

• Drop in Sales The following are the probable reasons which cause a decrease in sales:
  • Lack of automation tools, a lot of time is spent documenting the details manually.
  • Improper data analysis, as data is entered manually.
  • Lack of forecast & recommendations about deals, hence unable to close deals.
  • Lack of predictions & alerts to understand what kind of opportunities are trending.
  • Excess work is done manually, leading to inconsistent sales reports.
  • Unable to make faster decisions due to lack of automation.

It becomes difficult for tools to analyze a large volume of data & find actionable insights. In such a scenario, salesforce predictive analytics helps in analyzing massive sales data, predict market changes early, prescribe a timely action plan and achieve positive results.

One of our customers in the retail industry has benefited from AI embedded predictive tools of Salesforce Einstein viz.; Sales Cloud Einstein to predict the valuable prospects in the sales cycle and also creates personalized customer journeys.

How They are Benefitted:

Here is how Sales Cloud Einstein helps the retail industry with beneficial predictions, recommendations, and insights for each phase of sales:

• Identified high priority leads and target them for sales.
• Save time by automatically adding/creating records in Salesforce. Hence, an increase in sales productivity by automating activity capture, and connecting sales rep email and calendar
• You can close deals faster by looking at existing data and finding which deals are more or less likely to close based on recent activity.
• Stay well informed having the ability to connect with your customers with up-to-date information about crucial business developments that would affect the prospect.
• The sales managers have richer insights powered by AI, making them well equipped to get ready for business decisions.
• Email assistant for Sales Cloud Einstein finds the most important emails and recommending the best action to help the sales team prioritize their inbox and quickly handle client needs.

Figure 1. Sales Cloud Einstein Architecture

Based on the financial goals, life events, and other variables for each customer, Salesforce Einstein will provide managers the best-recommended actions, leading to higher customer satisfaction level and retention and will increase sales productivity with the implementation of Sales Cloud Einstein.