DxContinuum Blog

It’s YOUR Data That Matters

January 20, 2015
By Dr. Kannan Govindarajan

Opportunity scoring is becoming fashionable these days. One company that specializes in taking snapshots of CRM data to show pipeline changes just announced their opportunity scoring solution. We at DxContinuum have been scoring the opportunities for our customers for some time now and welcome the recognition that opportunity scoring helps sales teams make better decisions.

What caught my eye from their press release was the following fragment: "... has built the world’s largest repository of pipeline data… Having all the data changes for more than two trillion dollars of opportunities over several years gives ... a unique advantage..."

The two trillion dollar statement got me thinking that the only way to make such a claim is if the vendor was aggregating all the data from all the opportunities they have gathered from all their customers. In other words, they use what is known in the data business as 'consortium data' to help with the opportunity scoring.

From any customer's perspective, using consortium data for opportunity scoring is problematic because:

  • If the consortium data includes all companies, the question how relevant is pipeline data for companies in different industries with different sales cycles and different price points to your opportunities?
  • If the consortium data is specific to your industry, it probably includes your past, current, or future competitors in it as well. Would you want your pipeline changes be implicitly made visible to your competition in terms of how their opportunities will convert?
  • Most importantly, using consortium data does not improve the quality of prediction. The vendor in question claimed 80% accuracy of their scoring. We at DxContinuum have demonstrated better accuracy using only the data that the customer owns and publicly available data.

Each customer is unique, and what actually drives their success can be inferred from their own data. They do not need access to data from others. For this reason, we at DxContinuum generate the most accurate opportunity scoring using a combination of public data and our customer’s CRM data only, eschewing consortium data. For more information our approach, contact us at info@dxcontinuum.com.
Dr. Kannan Govindarajan

Written by Dr. Kannan Govindarajan

DxContinuum Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer Kannan’s 15+ year career in software and services has spanned multiple functions and businesses. In the first 10 years of his career in R&D, he shipped products for Oracle and HP focused on Java and web services middleware technologies. He was one of the architects of the team that created one of the earliest web services implementations, and represented HP in standards bodies such as UDDI. He co-founded a new research program in HP Labs for creating technology for automating business processes for services businesses. Subsequently, he was Chief Technologist of HP’s IT Outsourcing services and implemented some of the ideas from his research. Kannan has multiple patents and publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals in a variety of areas. Kannan has spent the last 6+ years in Product Management/marketing/strategy roles where he managed the Application Operations Service Line in HP Outsourcing Services, and ran product marketing for HP’s data warehousing product. Most recently, as Director Strategy, he drove thought leadership for HP through the mega-trends project, and led business planning for Cloud applications and infrastructure services including the go-to-market model for cloud offerings in HP Enterprise services. Kannan has a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a PhD in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Masters in Management from MIT Sloan School of Management.

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