Spot the analytics opportunity: Where to focus your sales effort and why

The good news is, if you invest in the skills to sell and implement predictive analytics, you’re unlikely to run out of sales opportunities for years to come. You only have to think about the Internet of Things to appreciate the sheer volume of data that will be produced by machines across all sectors. Yet Big Data alone doesn’t give your customers business intelligence. Only sophisticated analytics can do that, which is why the market is set to grow at astonishing levels in the next few years.

So how big are we talking?

In their report called ‘Predictive Analytics Market by Business Function, Applications […], Organization Size, Deployment Model, Vertical, & by Region - Global Forecast to 2020’, analysts MarketsandMarkets expect the global market to grow from US$ 2.74 Billion in 2015 to US$ 9.20 Billion by 2020. That’s a stunning CAGR of 27.4%.

And the winners in the analytics sales race will be…

Helping customers to achieve actionable results from their investment in advanced predictive analytics will be the key to your success. Here are some other tips:

• Create verticalised market offers: they’ll help you to demonstrate powerful use cases.
• Sell proven solutions with market credibility and scope: for example, SAS has been operating in and innovating the advanced analytics market since 1976. Because ours is one of the broadest and most sophisticated platforms in the industry with vast capability – from real-time behavioural analysis to ‘what if’ scenario testing, Gartner rates these benefits highly, positioning us as leaders in their Magic Quadrants for BI and Analytics Platforms for 2014 and 2015. This gives your customers peace of mind, and you instant credibility.
• Support deployments with paid-for skills: professional services, but more importantly, data scientists who can be deployed at customer sites will help you to drive initial ROI and enable ‘citizen data scientists’. Ensuring this growing group of super-users are embedded will help to secure your renewal and up-sell pipelines.

Who has the biggest appetite for analytics?

The short answer is: most industries. Why? Because data is known to hold the key to competitive advantage – but only when analysed with clever tools. The following vertical industries, however, are known to offer ‘low hanging fruit’:

• Retail – modelling processes, forecasting demand and building proactive customer relationships
• Healthcare – from both the supply and provider sides of the industry across to pharmaceutical firms predicting disease and demand, as well as to optimise product (drug) development processes
• Central and local government – think immigration, law enforcement (societal and cyber) and counter-terrorism, in particular
• Banking and finance – similar ambitions to retail, predicting customer risk, combating fraudulent use of cards, and detecting other criminal activity such as cybercrime
• Regulated industries – such as utilities and manufacturing, where internal processes and changes to service provision or manufacturing techniques must be modelled to de-risk outcomes and ensure they meet stringent regulatory demands.