How Pendo’s analytics team uses Data Sync to optimize the customer lifecycle

Revenue forecasts. Upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Churn risk. How does a business best understand the road ahead? 

To gauge the future, most businesses rely on the judgment, instincts, and process methodologies of their sales and customer success teams. Some even rely on algorithms that generate data-driven predictions based on data captured in their customer relationship management (CRM) solution. This mix gets the job done most of the time… but it’s missing a key ingredient: product usage data.

Enter Pendo Data Sync. Using Data Sync, Pendo is able to extract product usage data at a granular level, allowing your organization to see the full picture of the customer journey. The insights and signals you capture from your customers and prospects’ usage patterns are incredibly valuable—especially when blended with the wealth of historical data captured in your CRM.  

Let’s take a look at three examples of how we utilize our own product data at Pendo to operationalize the customer lifecycle.

1. Forecasting customer renewals and preventing churn 

When it comes to predicting churn, there’s no crystal ball. Even though customer success managers (CSMs) and account executives may have a good sense of who is definitely going to renew vs. who is going to leave, some uncertainty still clouds the picture.  

Adding Pendo data with other inputs such as Salesforce data, firmographic account data, and meeting notes helps reduce that uncertainty. Here at Pendo, our analytics team uses this full picture to compare current data against historical data of our customers who either renewed or churned. And as a result, we’re able to identify usage patterns and trends that signal at-risk accounts.

Over time, we’ve been able to start tracking accounts by assigning each a health score. The higher the score, the more likely the customer is to renew. The lower their score, the more likely they are to churn. With this information, our customer success and account teams can better prioritize which accounts to flag and focus their efforts on. And by using Data Sync to combine all of these key data sources and pushing them into a machine learning (ML) model, the team can proactively prevent churn and take measures to increase portfolio retention rates.

2. Building the right model to accurately predict your win rate

Facing high pressure and ambitious revenue targets, sales reps need a source of truth for predicting the win rate of their opportunities. The Pendo analytics team has solved this problem with Data Sync. 

By gathering all the opportunity data from different sources, we’ve developed a ML model designed to predict sales-attributable annual recurring revenue (ARR). The model leverages Data Sync to combine historical Pendo trial usage data with sales engagement and other key customer data points. 

With this holistic view, our team can now gauge the probability of deals won. Because each opportunity is assigned with a probability of closing, it provides a top-line, data-driven ARR forecast for each quarter—giving our sales leadership greater visibility and more accurate benchmarks for quarterly revenue attainment. 

3. Creating a scoring model to increase paid conversions

What if your organization could identify leads earlier in the funnel in order to fast-track them to paid conversions? To identify early signs of intent in trial accounts, the Pendo analytics team used Data Sync to create a scoring model to do just that. 

Using Data Sync, we’ve aggregated different inputs—including trial usage data, firmographic data, user behavior data, and marketing funnel data—into a single source of truth. From there, we’re able to correlate against historical data of converting to a paid subscription. The model assigns the trial accounts a probability of converting, and passes the leads that are likeliest to convert to our sales representatives.

With Data Sync, the Pendo analytics team has developed three unique ML models to enhance Pendo’s own customer lifecycle management structure. And you can do it, too. 

Book a personalized demo with our team to find out how—and to see Data Sync in action for yourself.