The encyclopedia · Sales & Retail · Marketing decision · 2022–2026
Geiger's random forest flags twice as many at-risk customers as gut feel
A German promo-products distributor scores every account's churn risk monthly in Power BI, doubling hit rate versus unsupported selection.
Geiger GmbH
the move
Geiger GmbH, a German distributor of promotional products, was losing drop-shipment customers without seeing it coming. With professors and students from Hochschule Düsseldorf, it turned transactional, demographic and interaction data into a random-forest model that assigns every account a churn-risk score each month.
The scores feed a Power BI dashboard that sales representatives use to decide whom to call first. The deployed model identifies more than twice as many future churners as random targeting, so retention effort goes to accounts that would actually leave.
The project began as an academic collaboration and became part of daily sales operations, showing that a structured analytics project can pay off in a small B2B company without a big data team.
why it works
- Churn signals hide in transaction frequency, order size and contact patterns that reps cannot track manually.
- Monthly automated scoring makes retention proactive instead of reactive to a cancelled account.
- Power BI puts the model where reps already work, removing the adoption barrier of a new system.
- A university partnership supplied modeling skill that the mid-sized firm could not hire internally.
what transfers
In mid-market B2B, a model embedded in the sales team's existing dashboard beats a standalone analytics project.
what came after
The model is firmly anchored in Geiger's daily sales practice and continues to be refined. The case was published in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, and the Hochschule Düsseldorf project became a template for how structured analytics projects create measurable value in mid-market B2B environments.
references
- Nicht warten, bis Kunden gehen – vom Forschungsprojekt zur KI-gestützten Vertriebssteuerung im Mittelstand
- Geiger Uses Machine Learning to Reduce Customer Churn in the Promotional Products Industry
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