The Real Opportunity

Your sales team is burning through leads. Your best customers are walking. Your marketing budget is bleeding.

Smart CEOs and CTOs are solving this with propensity models - predictive models that identify which companies will buy, upgrade, or churn before it happens. But not all models are the same.

Propensity to Buy: Stop Wasting Marketing and Sales Resources

The problems:

  • Your marketing team is spending their budget on ill-defined audiences.
  • Your sales team is spending 80% of their time on prospects that will never convert.

The solution:

  • A propensity model predicts which demographics are most likely to buy.
  • Another propensity model predicts the products or services they want, even before your sales team makes contact.

Real Results:

We worked with a European bank to help them predict which products certain customers were most likely to buy.

To do this, we used user attributes, demographics and behaviour to predict if a certain client would be likely to get a loan, an insurance or any other product the bank offers. The model transformed their approach from broad marketing campaigns to surgical precision targeting. This project won industry awards for its business impact.

When Hire Space, a company in the real estate industry, needed to predict which venues customers would choose, our model outperformed their venue experts by over 200%. Human specialists rely on intuition, limited pattern recognition and time. Our propensity model identified key aspects from each inquiry and client information and used it to predict how likely each venue would be chosen for each lead. The result: faster replies, which lead to faster bookings, which lead to increased revenue.

Propensity to Upgrade or Upsell

The Problem: You’re treating all customers the same, missing millions in expansion revenue from clients ready to spend more.

The Solution: Identify which existing customers are ready for upselling.

Strategic Advantage: This isn’t just about existing customers. Smart CTOs use upgrade propensity during acquisition—prioritizing prospects with higher lifetime value potential.

Propensity to Churn: Protect Your Revenue Base

The Problem: Customer acquisition costs 5-7x more than retention. Every churned customer represents lost investment plus future revenue.

The Solution: Churn propensity models identify at-risk customers weeks before they leave.

We helped a gym chain predict member cancellations up to 30 days in advance. Our model identified behavioral patterns invisible to human managers—frequency changes, class preferences, payment timing. By intervening with targeted retention offers, they could save members before they walked.

Critical Insight: Sometimes the best retention strategy is doing nothing. Some subscribers forget they’re paying for services, and contacting them actually triggers cancellation. Another propensity model pinpointed when intervention would help, and when it would backfire.

Beyond the Big Three: Specialized Propensity Models

We have defined data strategies that deploy other models beyond the usual:

  • Propensity to Pay: Predict payment defaults before extending credit
  • Propensity to Recommend: Identify customers likely to generate referrals
  • Propensity to Respond: Optimize communication timing and channel selection. For even more sophisticated customer interactions, consider integrating LLMs to personalize and automate your communication strategy.

Each targets a specific business leak costing you money. The key is understanding which problems cost you the most money and targeting them with the right tool.

The Data Strategy Framework: Chaining Propensity Models

Having a good data strategy gives you the necessary clarity to leverage all these models not as isolated tools, but as an integrated system.

Most companies lack this vision. They build models in isolation instead of systems. A structured data strategy methodology like FORCE designs interconnected propensity systems:

  • Acquisition: Buy propensity identifies best prospects
  • Expansion: Upgrade propensity maximizes customer value
  • Retention: Churn propensity protects revenue base
  • Optimization: Response propensity fine-tunes every interaction

The Multiplier Effect: When propensity models work together, business impact compounds. We’ve seen companies achieve 3-5x ROI improvements compared to single-model implementations.

Implementation Reality: What CTOs Need to Know

Technical Complexity: Propensity models require a strong Foundation - clean data pipelines, feature engineering, and continuous monitoring. Most internal teams lack this expertise. Our Data Engineering Consulting team can help build the robust data foundation you need.

Business Integration: The model is worthless without operational processes to act on predictions. Sales teams need CRM integration. Marketing needs automated triggers. Customer success needs intervention playbooks.

Measurement Framework: You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. Effective propensity modeling requires clear KPIs tied to business outcomes, not just model accuracy.

The Bottom Line

Propensity models aren’t academic exercises—they’re sophisticated revenue protection and generation systems. The companies deploying them strategically, and especially the ones creating interconnections between them, have a serious advantage compared to others.

The question isn’t whether you need propensity models, but if you can afford to keep your marketing team guessing your audience, your sales team contacting prospects that will never convert, and your clients leaving without warning. Ready to start? Our team can help you build and deploy propensity models that drive real business results.

Next Step: Identify which customer behavior costs you the most. That’s where your first propensity model should focus.