Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2023
Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a flexible machine learning framework to predict customer lifetime value (CLV) in the Business-to-Business (B2B) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) setting. The substantive and modeling challenges that surface in this context relate to more nuanced customer relationships, highly heterogeneous populations, multiple product offerings, and temporal data constraints. To tackle these issues, we treat the CLV estimation as a lump sum prediction problem across multiple products and develop a hierarchical ensembled CLV model. Lump sum prediction enables the use of a wide range of supervised machine learning techniques, which provide additional flexibility, richer features and exhibit an improvement over more conventional forecasting methods. The hierarchical approach is well suited to constrained temporal data and a customer segment model ensembling strategy is introduced as a hyperparameter model-tuning step. The proposed model framework is implemented on data from a B2B SaaS company and empirical results demonstrate its advantages in tackling a practical CLV prediction problem over simpler heuristics and traditional CLV approaches. Finally, several business applications are described where CLV predictions are employed to optimize marketing spend, ROI, and drive critical managerial insights in this context.
Recommended Citation
Curiskis, S., Dong, X., Jiang, F., & Scarr, M. (2023). A novel approach to predicting customer lifetime value in B2B SaaS companies. Journal of Marketing Analytics, 11(4), 587–601. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41270-023-00234-6
Comments
Open Access - This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.