Startup Transform, Inc. launches its RevTech platform to tie revenue to specific spending

Brands usually have many different marketing efforts going at once — but which ones help make money?

This week, marketers get another tool to help them answer that question. A Seattle-based startup named Transform, Inc. has launched its RevTech platform, which is designed to directly connect revenue to spending.

It takes data from a variety of impacting efforts, such as pricing, promotion, sales, store traffic and website traffic, as well as relevant external data, including weather or census info.

Machine learning is applied to develop and refine models of analysis, and the results are reports designed for specific company roles, such as one for the CEO and another for the director of marketing.

The reports include recommendations — for example, new market opportunities or how to reduce customer acquisition costs — and graphs that show trends, correlations and regional comparisons. The platform is not self-service, as Transform sets it up at the beginning of an engagement, but users can then log on to see their reports.

Co-founder and COO Randa Minkarah, whose background is in advertising, told me that the need for this platform crystallized about two years ago when a client company said it was struggling to understand “what is working in our advertising” by using a burgeoning Excel spreadsheet.

That company, she said, had 42 different markets, each of which had about 20 different channels for its marketing and ads. RevTech, she said, is not needed for companies that have “only one road to revenue” but is intended for those with many factors. Transform’s website lists Intel, American Apparel, Verizon and Xerox as customers.

Minkarah claims that her company’s platform is the “first to look at sales and marketing holistically and model them to the cash register” — that is, to revenue results.

Of course, machine learning-based modeling of diverse data to determine attribution and return on investment is not uncommon, such as in business intelligence and attribution products.

And new approaches are proliferating, such as the platform released last month by a Phoenix-based startup named Proof, which utilizes machine learning to correlate sales results to marketing efforts, even though there’s a time lag between the two.

Whatever its claim to uniqueness, Minkarah says that RevTech generates a big impact. She recalled that during a year-long beta phase with a few customers, one unnamed retailer saw an astounding 600 percent sales lift over a year when using the platform.

And an also-unnamed education company, she said, got a 23 percent boost in enrollment in one month, because of the insights and recommendations from RevTech.