Data Analysis Significant Variables for Winning Deals @ Oracle

Omkar Hande BITS Pilani Intern, June 2013

Objective & Data Analysis Methods

Oracles sales team maintains the database of its process flow with each of the prospective customers. The details include various touch points including if customer downloads materials from Oracles website/tool. It is important to asses based on early activities and interactions, the likelihood of conversion. The sales team had an intuition that suggested that download (PPT or Excel) indicates propensity to win the deal.

Results
Results strongly suggests the fact that a case is more likely to convert into a Won case if the user downloads a PPT or Excel or Both, related to the case. The result described below is statistically significant at alpha =1% (obvious with so many data points). The probability of conversion increase 9-25 times, if likely customer has done download activities. Please refer table 2(b) for conditional probabilities.

Categorical Tables
Won Downloaded PPT Not Downloaded 213 244 Not Won 11448 36560 Downloaded Excel Not Downloaded Won 176 281 Not Won 8145 39863

1(a)

1(b)

Won Downloaded Excel & PPT Not downloaded 133 324

Not Won 5296 42712

1(c)

Tables 1 (a), (b), (c) summarize what proportion of users have downloaded PPT, downloaded Excel and downloaded both Excel & PPT respectively. Then we have - how many cases have been Won or not for both such categories. Following are some probabilities that are of our use:
Event User Downloads PPT User Download Excel User Downloads Excel & PPT P(E) 0.240606623 0.171690911 0.112018983

2(a) Using tables 1(a), (b), (c) and 2(a) we can compute conditional probabilities,

E Downloaded PPT Downloaded Excel Downloaded Both

P(Winning | E) 0.075917 0.123194 0.218696

P(Winning | ~E) 0.008730277 0.008450711 0.008478313

2(b)
Note: The conditional probability denoted by P(B|A) is the Probability that B will occur given A has occurred.

We can clearly see from table 2(b) that probability of winning a case increases if user downloads PPT, Excel or both. For the data provided, downloading a PPT increases chance of success by 8.7 times, while for excel it is 14.6 times and if user downloads both the chance of winning increases by as much as 25.8 times. The above findings are also supported by the chi-squared test that I did on this data using categorical tables 1(a), (b), (c). Following are 2 (chi -squared) values that I computed.

Categorical Table 1(a) 1(b) 1(c)

128.3687 147.7746 148.6235

2(c) 2 values in table 2(c) are sufficiently large and would give very small values of probability (smaller than 0.001) if we look up the standard probabilities table (here degrees of freedom is 1). This means we can reject the claim that downloading PPT, Excel or Both has no effect on winning or nor winning a case. Hence we accept the hypothesis that such downloads do indeed result in more conversions to Won cases.