Understanding the customer and their experience is key to enhancing marketing return on investment and sales growth. The best tool available to companies to achieve this is Data Science. Companies such as salesforce.com and Act-On have been able to harness the power of data analytics to automate sales processes and marketing tools such as lead generation and predictive targeting.

Predictive analytics can help an organisation locate opourtunities for innovation, new sales leads or chance of customer churn. Relying on the insights gained for Data Science allows companies to make data driven decisions.

Personalising the sales experience is something that a lot of businesses are looking to achieve as through processes such as Customer Segmentation they are able to increase up-selling and cross selling opourtunities. Furthermore, the same kind of analytics can help an organisation identify its Most Valuable Customers (MVCs). It is well known that it costs far more to acquire new customers than it does to retain older ones. Therefore, being able to refine the customer base further to locate and retain MVCs means that marketing budgets become less strained and perform with greater effect.