Private equity-backed software company | Analytics & AI
Analysis delivers insight for acting on $1.1 billion cross-selling opportunity
Analysis delivers insight for acting on $1.1 billion cross-selling opportunity
What We Did
With aggressive growth plans, a $1 billion private equity-backed software company needed to understand its best short-term opportunities to increase revenue from current customers. Years of acquisitions, however, created an environment of fragmented customer and product data. Building a growth strategy backed by real data was next to impossible—until we came equipped with a proprietary machine learning platform and capabilities designed specifically for this type of analysis.
Our team worked with the software company and its C-suite to:
- Clean up customer data to allow analysis and use across business units
- Design analyses that answered questions about cross-selling, product upgrade, and retention opportunities
- Score customer/product family combinations based on their potential
- Prepare actionable reports
The software company now has insight that will help it build value in a way that others cannot. Better yet, we delivered that insight in just weeks.
$1.1B
cross-selling opportunity in the first two years – including $788 million in year one
$52M
upgrade potential from existing customers
$71M
churn risk identified, allowing the company to mitigate
Project Timeline
2
weeks
Import, cleanse, and normalize client data
4
weeks
De-dupe and match data to create parent and child accounts for analysis
2
weeks
Ingest data into our analytics platform
6
Weeks
Conduct analyses, score accounts and develop reports
The Challenge
The software company has plans to grow revenue to $1.5 billion, and its new CEO needed to quickly introduce growth strategies to deliver on that goal. The CEO wanted data-backed analysis to answer key questions:
- What is our cross-selling opportunity?
- How much opportunity do we have to upgrade existing customers?
- How great is our risk of customer churn?
- Which of these areas is the fastest/best way to grow revenue in the short term?
But before the company could answer these questions, it had to address underlying data issues. The organization has grown rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, and its five business units did not share data. This meant the company did not have consolidated customer and product data that it could use to understand the potential for cross-selling and predict customer behavior – keys to future growth.
That’s when we came in.
An Undeniably Different Approach
The software company’s CEO worked with West Monroe in a previous role and has seen, first hand, the impact of our unique approach – powered by Intellio® Predict, a proprietary advanced analytics platform that uses machine learning to evaluate revenue streams and predict growth potential with precision.
We rapidly assembled a multidisciplinary team with software industry experience as well as data management and data science expertise.
Our team first made sure the client’s data could support analysis. We imported 28 million rows of customer and product data from 16 Salesforce, Siebel, and Oracle data tables. One of our key tasks was “de-duping” account data using ML-DQ and creating a universal identification approach that would allow account-level analytics.
Then, the team used our proprietary platform to analyze data and develop precise, quantified answers to the company’s questions. We used a credit score-like approach to value customers – analyzing 30 million combinations of customer and product data points to produce 7.74 million scores for 70,000 customers. This included 96 cross-selling scores per customer. Each customer also received a score indicating likelihood of upgrading in a product family, as well as a score reflecting risk of churn. Our machine learning platform identifies important features in the likelihood particular behaviors and then finds optimal splits in the data to separate high versus low probability of upgrade and churn.
Because our platform includes established predictive models and tools, we were able to complete this analysis in a matter of weeks.
The output:
- 17 metrics produced from company data
- Analysis of company and business unit growth
- Analysis of retention, annual recurring revenue, lifetime revenue, and average selling price
- Product recommendations for each customer based on product history
- Probability of cross-selling success and expected value for each customer-product combination
- Prioritized list of customer-product family combinations, with probability of upgrade and potential value if upsold
- Prioritized list of contracts up for renewal for which reactivation can reduce churn rate
Returns You Can Measure
The software company now has insight that will allow it to build value in ways that others cannot. It can see cross-selling white space exists and develop strategies to capture it. Our analysis showed that the best cross-selling opportunities exist in three of the five business units, and 20% of customer/product family combinations are responsible for 81% of potential cross-selling value. The company can now give its salespeople specific lists of who to call and what to sell. And, it can establish clear accountability for developing growth targets – something it could not do before.
The company understands where to act to maximize upgrade potential and reduce churn. For example, 91% of churn risk resides in 20% of customer/product families – allowing it to focus proactive retention efforts more precisely.
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