Aaron Bird
Aaron Bird. (Via Bizible)

Bizible has spent the past five years helping B2B marketers assess their spend and drive better decision-making for the future. Now the company is taking it up a notch with the help of machine learning.

The Seattle startup today rolled out a new revenue planning product that uses machine learning to crunch historical data and better predict specific “what if” scenarios — like increasing marketing spend for outbound calling, or reducing event sponsorship budgets, for example.

Bizible CEO Aaron Bird called it the biggest product launch since his company started in 2012.

“We’ve been solving this problem indirectly since we launched, but now we’ve got to the point where we have a really good view of causality for marketing activities,” Bird told GeekWire. “The next level for us is to use all of that rich data we have about causality, layer on machine learning, and use that to predict the future around what is going to happen with your marketing efforts.”

Here’s an example of what the new product looks like to a user (click to enlarge):

Bird explained that most B2B marketing teams try to forecast by taking averages of conversation rates, velocity, deal size, and other factors. But this isn’t the most effective way of planning for the future, he said.

Bizible’s machine learning algorithms help provide a projected revenue for every contact, lead, and opportunity based on each piece of historical data measured at a granular level.

“If you don’t have a good understanding of causality in the past, then you can’t do a good job of planning the future,” he noted.

Bird added that the new product is particularly valuable for B2B marketers who deal with longer sales cycles and need to forecast for several months out to the future.

Bird, a former Microsoft program manager, started Bizible in 2011 and took it through Techstars in 2012. The company, which has raised $10.5 million to date, now counts more than 280 customers and expects its revenue to double this year. Bizible also just moved into a new office in Seattle where it employs 65 people — that’s up 50 percent from January — and hiring will continue throughout 2017.

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