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Maximizing Sales Opportunities

K. R. Sanjiv, Senior Vice President and Global Head,
Analytics & Information Management Services, Wipro Technologies

Table of Contents
1. Targeting a Segment of One ................................................................................... 03

2. `Next Best Action' in action! .................................................................................. 04

3. The Heart of Next Best Action: What makes it tick ........................................ 04

4. Technologies enabling Next Best Action .............................................................. 04

5. Moving towards Next Best Action ........................................................................ 05

6.Your Next Best Action .............................................................................................. 06

Targeting a Segment of One

The Data Directive commissioned by Wipro and conducted by the
Economist Intelligence Unit and which draws on a survey of over 300 CSuite executives, backs this up. The study shows that CMOs rated
Increasing customer understanding and segmentation as the #1 strategic
area and Improving sales as the #2 strategic area where data has made
the biggest positive difference (see Figure 1: Data helps increase sales).
Without doubt, high performance sales and marketing teams are being
driven by data.

Marketing has two primary areas of impact on customers. First, good

marketing results in positive perceptions of brand value to improve top of
mind recall. Second, great marketing delivers sales. Great marketing in
turn depends on micro segmentation, providing instant gratification and
enhancing customer experience.
Complex as it sounds, in today's data driven environment creating,
identifying and leveraging sales opportunities has become an accurate
science. Nudging customers towards choices that are best for them is no
more a sales pitch; it is the use of smart technology that is creating offers,
packages, bundles, deals, and customized products targeted at customers
even before they realize the need for these products.

How are CMOs using data and analytics to understand which leads will turn
into customers? How do they know which customers have the highest
revenue potential? How do they define the right product for these
customers to create instant conversions? How do they identify the exact
upsell strategy for each customer? How do they turn these customers into
fans? How do they produce better sales numbers without adding to the
sales team?

Data is providing sales teams with customer signals that were previously
invisible. The same data is arming sales and marketing teams with the
ammunition to create the right pitch at the right time. A new study called

Where Data delivers for CMOs

Top strategic aspects of role in which data has made the biggest positive difference
(% respondents selecting in top three choices)
Increasing customer understanding and
segmentation

50

Increasing sales

40

Helping assess potential demand for new

products/services

37
27

Increasing cross-selling efforts

Improving customer service

23

Improving return on marketing

17

Improving pricing optimisation

17

Gaining better grasp of competitive landscape

17
13

Optimizing marketing mix

Improving cross channel experience
Other, please specify
None of the above

7
0
7

Figure 1: Data helps increase sales

Source: Economist Intelligence Unit Survey

03

The report examined global beer brand Anheuser-Busch that created a

data platform in 2004 to track sales. The data platform allowed the sales
team to look at any given account, see a detailed plan of the store and all its
SKUs (stock-keeping units), with related data on local households from a
range of sources. Sales personnel could then use the data to choose the
optimal assortment of beer for that store, knowing which SKUs will
perform better, what the best display options are, and the best
configuration of brands for that demographic. Leveraging this data
Anheuser-Busch is expected to separate it from its competitors.
This is a fairly different process from conventional marketing techniques.
Traditionally, data is handed over to statisticians to chew, turn it inside out,
filter it and run it through various models until we have actionable
marketing insights. In most situations, actionable insights can be quite
exasperating. By the time a business turns actionable insights into a
tactical response, the customer and market conditions have changed.
Such marketing strategy that has inherent lag has limitations with respect
to ROI.
The challenge in becoming customer centric is to market to the right
customer at the right time with the right offering at the right place. An
analytics driven approach that addresses each customer uniquely, based
on customer profile, demonstrated habits, preferences, needs and
location at the point of contact can amplify brand salience, boost
customer spend and improve sales.
The ability to analyze and predict at the granular level what a customer
may want at a particular point of time and place is a paradigm shift in
marketing. It moves the focus from shaping promotions around products
and services to letting customers subtly shape the promotion around their
immediate needs.

`Next Best Action' in action!

An enterprise must consistently aim to meet the expectations of its
customer. Actionable understanding of customer expectations can be
enabled by data. Customer profiles, preferences, behavior and sentiment
analysis, when accurately contextualized, facilitate an understanding of
what an enterprise should do to maximize sales. For example, what should
a financial institution (FI) offer a graduate seeking the first job? Will this
customer buy a car and want automobile insurance? Or will this person
want to enroll for a skill enhancement course and want an education loan?
Or can the FI create a bundle for this customer that includes an
automobile insurance and an education loan based on the customer's
demographic profile and current spending behavior? If the FI does this
accurately and quickly enough, it could result in fresh sales.
Assume that a customer places an order for an iPad with a store on the
web. When the customer goes to pick up the iPad, the store makes a
discounted offer on device accessories that enhance battery life. The
customer immediately buys the accessory. How did the store know that
the customer would opt for that specific purchase? Again, it is data. The
store looked up the customer profile, identified him as a traveling
salesman and defined the Next Best Action for the store. The store could
also have given the customer discount coupons for the same accessory in
the event the customer did not make an instant purchase (another
example of Next Best Action). The action would enhance the likelihood
of a future sale.

Compare this with the conventional method of publishing coupons in a

newspaper in the hope that customers will redeem them. Publishing
coupons in the papers is the equivalent of blind carpet-bombing when the
need is for a precise and targeted approach. Next Best Action enables a
customized approach, improving sales and customer satisfaction. As a
consequence it also reduces marketing campaign wastage.
Consider a person owning two homes, both funded by loans from a bank.
Trying to sell the customer another home loan may be futile. The customer
is unlikely to opt for another home loan, although data shows a high
propensity to consume home loans. The customer profile and data may
appear correct, but the time to sell another home loan is wrong.
In the gaming industry, the challenge is to make the gamer continue even
after losing or getting stuck at a particular level. How old is the gamer?
Should the gamer be given a cheat sheet or a free beer as an incentive to
continue playing the game? Next Best Action technologies produce
accurate and quick responses to such situations.

The Heart of Next Best Action:

What makes it tick
Data availability is no longer the problem faced by businesses. Intelligent
devices, sensors, grids and networks are generating data at an
unprecedented rate. These key sources of data provide granular insights
that can be deployed to drive decision management engines that are at the
heart of Next Best Action. Some of the sources are:
Plants and production floors (machine2machine): Sensors, meters,
thermal devices, RFID tags, GPS devices, bar code scanners,
surveillance cameras and microphones are capturing machine
transactions in manufacturing plants. The Internet of Things is
generating large volumes of machine2machine data.1
Consumers using products (person2machine): The data exhaust
from consumer using medical devices, digital TV, smart cards, bank
cards, cars, cameras, computers and mobiles. Device proliferation is
at the centre of this real-time data explosion.2
Consumers interacting with each other (person2person): Social data
is proliferating as societies are networked and collaborate over voice
and data networks. E-mails, SMS, videos, images, Tweets have sent
person2person data on an exponential growth path.3

Technologies enabling Next

Best Action
The Decision Management Hub that lies between the Data streams and
the Next Best Action (recommendation) is the 800-pound gorilla.
This is a complex real-time decision management engine that uses
mathematical representations of the data and combines it with business
rules, event analysis, behavior analysis, sentiment analysis and knowledge to
make predictions of what the customer is likely to want next
(see representation below).

04

Target Customer
Email
Direct Call
Point to URL
Point to POS

Next Best Action

Snail Mail

Onboard

Cross Sell / Upsell

Customer Management

Retail / Grow

Reduce Contact
Send Offer / Proposal / Message

Historical data
Website, Mobile, Credit

Card, Loyalty Card, etc

Case History
Conversation Management

3
Data Streams

Mobile Message (SMS / MMS)

Decision Management Hub

Statistical Forecasting

Predictive Models
Big Data Technologies

CRM
BPM
ERP
Transaction Data
Social Data

Adaptive Learning
Business Rules
Real-time Event

Processing
Behavior Models
Sentiment Analysis
Knowledge Base

Unstructured Data
Location Data
Syndicated Data

Predictive models create patterns by crunching complex data sets. They

discover signals in unstructured data from diverse sources. The patterns
and signals can quickly identify if a person is likely to buy a box of cereals on
the next visit to the store, wants an education loan, will accept a device
accessory, or combine loyalty points to upgrade a purchase.
As an example of instantly connecting the dots using data, when our
traveling salesman goes to pick up the iPad, data from his purchase history
could reveal that he has a bias towards device protection accessories.
Simultaneously the store system identifies the fact that the customer has
almost the required number of points on his loyalty card to make a
purchase of a protection accessory. Can the two demonstrated
customer preference and availability of loyalty points be used to create
an instant offer that helps make another sale? Next Best Action
technology is meant to do precisely this sort of thing.
Predictive models that are at the bottom of Next Best Action
technologies create recommendations and prompts that anticipate what
the customer wants even before the customer fully realizes the need.
These technologies are helping CMOs uncover and leverage neverbefore sales opportunities.

Moving towards Next

Best Action
The possibilities presented by Next Best Action over a layer of rich data to
improve customer interactions and impact bottom lines are unique.
Successful implementation of processes and technologies that support
Next Best Action can largely be centered on five key factors:
1. Developing Use Cases: What is it that the business wants to achieve?
What are the KPIs that will measure the success of the Next Best Action
initiative? It is campaign efficiency? Increased customer retention? Improved
cross selling? Location-based marketing? Customer avoidance? Developing
use case and detailed business requirements for Next Best Action initiatives
is the key to managing data and developing the tools to deliver against the
KPIs.
2. Data Capture and Management: The profusion of data presents an
equally large problem in terms of capturing and managing it. Data, especially
historical, needs to be cleansed in order to become usable (ex: the marital
status of people changes, their educational qualifications and the

05

geographies they live in change, employment data is in constant flux, etc).

Data also has a unique way of proliferating. In many enterprises, it is
common to find the same data in over a dozen locations. How does the
enterprise ensure that all copies of the data are identical at all times? Or
that data is sourced from a single repository each time it is required? Data
capture, cleansing, storage, shipment, security and deployment need to be
carefully structured to minimize costs, ensure flexibility and guarantee data
integrity at all times to meet regulatory requirements. For this, generic data
may be in Hadoop, more important data in Oracle, and so on. As is
apparent, it is equally possible to over engineer the quality of data adding
an unnecessary and significant cost to operations. On the other hand, it is
equally clear that traditional databases will prove to be inadequate for
emerging needs. Somewhere in between is the balance for each
enterprise.

5. Technology: Technologies such as Hadoop and MapReduce will be

needed to integrate to existing architecture. Appliances that integrate
servers, networking and storage into a single enclosure to run analytical
engines for near-real time extraction of insights and information are
becoming popular. These require specialized technical expertise. The
number of devices that generate and transmit data are growing. Each of
them has their own characteristics that call for a deep understanding of the
underlying technology. In addition, deploying Next Best Action initiatives
could mean process automation and relooking at workflow, BPM practices
and an understanding of in memory appliances such as Oracle's Exalytics InMemory Machine and SAP's HANA that help run multiple queries on a
variety of data types at speeds that are not possible with traditional
databases.

3. Change Management: The approach to leveraging data for Next Best

Action and therefore increased sales - implies organization-wide
changes and a heightened discipline that data management and usage
demand. Business processes need to be optimized and changes need to
be communicated across the organization along with employee training.
Organizations must be alert to and must immediately address
undercurrents related to implementing such recommendation engines.

Your Next Best Action

4. Science: The science behind Next Best Action is based on complex

mathematical models, predictive analytics and forecasting, the ability to
process real time events (such as birthdays, pregnancies, accidents,
relocation), adaptive learning, behavior models, and sentiment analysis.
These are then combined with business rules and integrated with
recommendation engines and customer management tools. Traditional
analytical skill sets are inadequate to meet the sophisticated needs of such
techniques. Additionally, organizations may find it challenging to train and
retain talent in this area of intelligent analytics. The solution is to outsource
these skills to partners who specialize in analytics.

CMOs are taking advantage of emerging technologies to create

differentiators and improve sales. Next Best Action initiatives are in their
infancy. This presents a challenge, as roadmaps, tools and techniques are
not well defined. The ideal way to approach technologies that are evolving
rapidly is to look for an end-to-end implementation partner who has
domain specific expertise as well as proven technological capability. By
helping create an intelligent implementation strategy for Next Best Action,
the partner can put your business ahead of the curve, providing an immense
competitive advantage.

References / Citations
1. http://www.wipro.com/documents/Big%20Data.pdf
2. http://www.wipro.com/documents/Big%20Data.pdf
3. http://www.wipro.com/documents/Big%20Data.pdf

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About the Author

K. R. Sanjiv is the Senior Vice President and Global Head of Analytics & Information Management, Wipro Technologies. He carries P&L responsibility, strategy
and operations of this unit globally reporting to CEO.
Analytics & Information Management helps customers derive valuable insights out of integrated information by bringing together the combined expertise of
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Information Management.
The group provides consulting, business centric and technology specific analytical solutions and data management frameworks developed through a complete
ecosystem of partners, focusing on industry specific analytics, optimization and operations analytics, Enterprise Data Warehouse, MDM, Data quality and data
life cycle management.
Sanjiv has over 25 years of enterprise IT experience, including consulting, application and technology development spanning multiple industry segments and
diverse technology areas.
Since joining Wipro in 1989, Sanjiv has been involved in defining enterprise architectures for organizations that included technical models, transformation
program definitions and governance models. He has designed OLTP mission critical systems such as screen-based trading systems for stock exchanges,
surveillance systems and order routing systems for brokerage houses. He has spearheaded due diligence exercises in M&A situations for customers and also
managed large project implementations in a global delivery model.
Sanjiv has spoken at leading CXO summits, industry and academic conferences on varied topics related to Business Technology. He holds a bachelor's degree
from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

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