Pipeline management is rarely a linear path. While current views focus on meeting the quarter’s revenue targets, in my experience true pipeline health requires a “human-in-the-loop” approach that monitors leading indicators up to three quarters out to allow for proactive adjustments. To truly optimize revenue, organizations must orchestrate the entire journey—from lead generation to final…

Why Collaborative Filtering (CF) Matters In modern B2B or B2C marketing, the “Discovery Problem” is the primary barrier to growth. Collaborative Filtering addresses this by: This is the third and final installment in my series on recommender systems, presented in the order I first applied them in B2B marketing. Fourteen years ago, my team began…

In a previous article, I explored the Analytics Shoot-Out: Mike vs. Agentic AI. Today, I’m shifting the lens from competition with AI to integration of AI to provide a scalable extension of my personal marketing methodology. Perhaps the most profound realization in building this agent is the ability to have a specialized ‘staff’ at one’s…

Why Recommender Systems Matter Introduction In my first article on recommender systems entitled Recommender Systems: Market Basket Analysis & Next-Likely-Purchase in Cross-Sell, I explored Association Rules (Market Basket Analysis), which identifies which products tend to be purchased together in a single transaction. It’s a powerful “snapshot” tool and is built on deep historical data, like…

Why Recommender Systems Matter Introduction In the first article of this series entitled My Favorite Segmentation Scheme (https://mikesdatamarketing.com/2025/12/10/my-favorite-segmentation-scheme/) I identified the Loyal or High-Potential Customer segment and postulated a strategic portfolio management strategy to migrate the HiPo customers to Champions through cross-sell and up-sell. Here is a data visualization for the customer base in that…

Analytics Shootout

Why Marketing Mix Optimization Matters Introduction The Problem: Beyond the “3+ Rule”: It is widely accepted that a synergistic media mix will always outperform a single media vehicle. Historically, the industry adhered to the “3+ rule”—popularized in the 1970s—which suggested that three exposures to a message were required to influence a purchase. In the digital…

Why Contact Targeting Matters Introduction & The B2B Modeling Hierarchy In my experience, B2B contact data lacks the predictive weight found in B2C or subscriber databases. Having managed contact data at Hearst, Cisco, and DellEMC, I’ve seen firsthand that while contact attributes (PII, job titles, and history) are essential for execution, they are often secondary…

In this article, I demonstrate how to use the IBM Telco dataset with XGBoost and Survival Analysis (Lifelines) to identify at-risk customers and predict the timing of churn to protect business revenue.

Why Customer Lifetime Value Matters Introduction My previous articles on RFM analysis and propensity-to-buy modeling explored stand-alone frameworks for segmentation and targeting. However, these models also serve as the foundational inputs for the ultimate metric in account prioritization: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). While I have typically used CLV with subscription-based B2C models or B2B IT…

Why Propensity-to-Buy Targeting Matters Introduction The “workhorse” of modern demand generation is a family of binary classification models. These models are designed to predict a specific response, such as “…whether a customer buys, whether a customer stays with the company or leaves to buy from another company, and whether the customer recommends a company’s products…

Why RFM Segmentation Matters Introduction Let me know if you’d like this visual refined or sequenced into your infographic series once your image limit resets. I can also prep the next slide — perhaps Accounts to Contact Personas or Multi-Channel Force Multiplier — so we keep momentum. As I recall from school, the idea of…