This leading commercial lending and leasing firm wanted to improve sales performance by understanding why deals were won or lost beyond just the numbers. While managers could analyze structured sales data in TIBCO Spotfire, determining why required reviewing unstructured comments and notes manually. The company implemented Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine to integrate their structured salesforce data with unstructured content for analysis in Spotfire. This gave managers a complete understanding of why deals succeeded or failed to help improve win rates and boost revenues.

1. Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA • o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072
info@attivio.com • www.attivio.com
Challenge: Provide insight into business wins and losses beyond ‘the
numbers’ – not just “what” happened, but also “why.” This leading
commercial lending and leasing firm wanted to improve its sales performance
by understanding the root causes and trends behind their business wins and
losses. The company had already given managers access to a sales
performance data warehouse for analysis using TIBCO Spotfire, a leading
visual business intelligence (BI) tool. However, the data could only explain
what deals were won or lost; answering why could only be answered by
manually reviewing insights buried within written comments and messages
about each deal (unstructured content).
Recognizing the need for insight beyond just ‘the numbers’, the company
selected Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine® (AIE®), to freely integrate and
correlate its sales structured data and unstructured content, for access and
analysis using TIBCO Spotfire. Attivio rapidly implemented AIE for the
company under its BI Accelerator professional services package.
“We now use Attivio AIE as our new enterprise information backend,” a
company executive explained to Attivio. “Our managers still slice and dice
Salesforce.com data using TIBCO Spotfire as before, but now with expanded
insights from unstructured Salesforce.com content as well. We now have a
complete and actionable understanding into why deals were won or lost.”
Solution: Attivio AIE unifies Salesforce structured data with unstructured
content: comments, Chatter messages, call notes. “We use Salesforce.com to
track each sales opportunity,” the executive said. “If, for example, a deal is
lost at any stage in the sales cycle, our marketing team will initiate a detailed
loss analysis. They manually review all Salesforce.com comments and notes,
and make further inquiries on their own. The final in-depth loss report is then
entered as a comments field.
“There is a wealth of valuable information there, but with tens of thousands
of deals in process at once, we had no way to analyze this unstructured
content in an efficient and effective manner. If managers wanted to review
comments on deals lost in their sector, they had to manually browse them in
Excel, a slow process making it difficult to uncover actionable insights.”
“Attivio AIE has eliminated this cumbersome process by making unstructured
content as easy to analyze as traditional structured data, right in our users’
Spotfire BI dashboards.”
Attivio AIE makes this possible by first ingesting Salesforce data from the
company’s enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and Salesforce.com text-based
information. AIE performs advanced text analytics on this content, including
entity and key phrase extraction, automated classification of content, and
sentiment analysis – positive or negative feelings expressed about a product,
person or other entity.
Adding structure to unstructured content, unlocking its analytic value: Very
importantly, AIE also normalizes entities extracted from text to maximize the
analytic use of content. For example, occurrences of product codes such as
Business Intelligence Case Study:
Salesforce.com Analytics
Customer Profile:
This leading global provider of financial services
provides commercial lending and leasing to
businesses spanning a wide range of industries.
Key Challenge:
Empower managers to visually analyze and
discover not only what business deals were won
or lost, but also why – enabling timely, highly
informed strategic decisions to improve sales
win rates and boost revenues.
This deeper level of BI insight requires going
beyond analyzing sales performance data alone
to also include business signals buried within
comments, messages and other unstructured,
text-based content about each deal.
Our managers still slice
and dice Salesforce data
using TIBCO Spotfire as
before, but now with
expanded insights from
unstructured Salesforce
content as well.
We now have a complete
and actionable under-
standing into why deals
were won or lost.
- Company Executive

2. Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA • o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072
info@attivio.com • www.attivio.com
3400 or ABL are replaced with a common user-friendly description Lending.
Synonymous competitor names, for example, Bank of the North or BOTN are
replaced with the desired name BoN.
All Salesforce.com data and newly normalized and enriched and unstructured
content is integrated within AIE’s universal index. AIE then exposes this
unified information to TIBCO Spotfire via SQL support and ODBC/JDBC
connectivity. When a Spotfire user submits a query, AIE automatically JOINs
all related data and content at query time, with no data modeling required.
“All of this functionality enables Attivio AIE to add structure to unstructured
content, which is necessary to unlock the analytic value buried within text
and gain the new level of insight we were looking for,” a company executive
said.
Managers can now make informed decisions to increase win rates: Initial
feedback to the company’s new unified information dashboards has been
very positive. “AIE gives us new insight into why deals were won or lost,” the
executive said. There’s no way we could have scaled a manual process to get
the same insights AIE is providing automatically.”
Company managers are excited by expectations to improve win rates through
the new level of sales win/loss insight enabled by AIE. “We are talking about
multi-billion dollar deals,” the executive said. “Increasing our win rate by 1%
alone will yield the company an exceptional return on its AIE investment.”
“The most important new Attivio-powered insight is the ability to visually
analyze recurring key phrases correlated to structured sales data. Managers
can observe how these key phrases change as they drill into the data (e.g., by
industry, sector, sales prospect, competitor) to help understand the root
causes and trends explaining why deals were lost.”
“With AIE, managers can now make informed decisions regarding what
markets to more actively pursue, when to change our go-to-market strategy
or make other adjustments to our selling process in order to increase win
rates.”
A key enabler for an effective Big Data analytics strategy: Summing up the
new business impact of Attivio AIE, the executive said, “We are making Big
Data analytics, particularly unstructured content, a key part of its technology
strategy, to help grow revenue and increase productivity. We are seeing more
and more use cases for analyzing unstructured content to optimize our
assets, including managed fleet vehicles, leased equipment and machinery,
and other financial assets.”
“Achieving this new level of insight requires the ability to systematically
analyze and visualize unstructured content as easily as structured data.
Attivio AIE has made this possible for the company, eliminating the
technology barriers that have made it very difficult to gain insights from text-
based information.”
© 2013 Attivio, Inc. All rights reserved.
Attivio, Active Intelligence Engine, and all other
related logos and product names are
registered trademarks of Attivio. All other
company, product, and service names are the
property of their respective holders.
Attivio AIE gives us very
good new insight into why
deals were won or lost…
Managers can now make
informed decisions
regarding what markets to
more actively pursue,
when to change our go-to-
market strategy, or make
other adjustments to our
selling process in order to
increase win rates.
- Company Executive