getting started with beyondcore

Smart Data Discovery

Getting Started with BeyondCore August 4, 2016

© Copyright BeyondCore, 2016 1

Contents Introduction to BeyondCore .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Finding the Signal in the Noise ................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Getting Started with the Sample ............................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Sample Data: Sales Opportunities ................................................................................................................................................................................. 4

Loading and Preparing Data ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Choose Data Source Type .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Prepare Data .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 7

Finding Insights ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 12

Create a Story........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 12

Read Story ................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 15

Story Graph Types .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 17

What Happened (Descriptive Graphs) ..................................................................................................................................................................... 18

Why it Happened (Diagnostic Graphs) ..................................................................................................................................................................... 20

What will Happen (Predictive Graphs) ..................................................................................................................................................................... 22

How to Improve It (Prescriptive Graphs) ................................................................................................................................................................. 24

Sharing Insights ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 27

Export Story ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 27

Next Steps .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 29


Introduction


Introduction to BeyondCore BeyondCore analyzes millions of data combinations in minutes, for unbiased answers, explanations and recommendations. Unlike manual data analysis, BeyondCore smart data discovery automatically finds and explains statistically significant key metric drivers that truly matter. It explains what happened, why it happened, what will happen and how you can improve it. In a rapidly-paced digital business era, BeyondCore can be an invaluable asset in your analytics arsenal.

Finding the Signal in the Noise To identify relationships in data “the signals” and isolate distracting, irrelevant data “the noise”, BeyondCore uses powerful machine learning algorithms (prediction models) for estimating relationships among independent variables (product category, region, date of sale, customer type) and an outcome measure (revenue, units, days).

Getting Started with the Sample To get you up and running with BeyondCore, we will walk through a simple Sales example. The source file for the example is SalesOpportunities.csv. You can download it from the Data Sets section on the BeyondCore Support website.

If you do not have the sample data set, you can download it from the BeyondCore Support website.

In this tutorial, we will load the sample data set, create a story, find and share insights to Introduce you to basic BeyondCore concepts.

http://beyondcore-enterprise.support.beyondcore.com/customer/portal/articles/2523131-sales-opportunities-win-loss-analysis-sample-data





Sample Data: Sales Opportunities Imagine you are a sales or marketing manager that wants to optimize limited budget and sales time. You have decided to review a recent Quick Start promotion to see if it is influencing deal wins. To do that, you are going to analyze sales opportunity wins and losses, lead source and promotion performance, discount influence and competitive pressure. Starting with downloaded data from your favorite CRM, you have also combined web site visits from Google Analytics and a social media sentiment score to get a better sense of prospect engagement.

The fields in your sample SalesOpportunities.csv data set include the following:

• Opportunity ID: A unique value that identifies one deal. • Lead Source: The lead source type indicated on an Opportunity in your CRM. This might be a referring, existing accounts, cold call, event,

article, white paper or other type of lead source. • Product: This is the primary solution being sold to the prospect in the deal. • Region: This field represents the worldwide regional location of your Prospect. • Vertical: The prospect’s primary organizational vertical line of business. • Company Size: This field represents a categorical size of the prospect organization such as small or Fortune 500. • Ownership: This field indicates if the prospect organization is ownership type is public, private, government. non-profit or other. • Web Site Visits: This field is an aggregate count of known web site visits by the prospect. This information, if collected, can be highly

valuable for many types of customer experience analytics projects. • Social Sentiment: This field is a previously collected sentiment score from 0 to 5 where 0 is unknown or none, 1 reflects negative

sentiment on social metrics and 5 is associated with positive sentiment. • Existing Account: This is a YES or NO indication if the Opportunity is for an existing account. • Discount: This field represents a value ranging from 0 to 100. It should contain the last known offered discount percentage of the total

deal amount as a whole number. • Primary Competitor: This is the primary competitor listed on a deal as indicated in your CRM. • Promotion: This field represents a promotion type. • Won: This field represents one of two possible values. We will indicate lost deals with a 0 and won deals with 100. We will not use any

other values for this specific analysis.

Now that you understand the data to be analyzed, let’s log into BeyondCore and upload your sample data set.


Loading and Preparing Data After logging into BeyondCore, you should see a list of projects and the option to “Choose a Data Source to Create a New Story”. You might need to exit the guided tour by clicking Exit Tour button located at the top right of your screen.

Choose Data Source Type

1. To upload the sample SalesOpportunities.csv file, click on Upload CSV and navigate to the file location on your computer.


2. BeyondCore will display file upload progress and return you to a Prepare Data screen that can guide you through recommended and automated data cleansing steps. In our sample, there a few errors that we will have BeyondCore fix for us. You can scroll down the page to see all of the recommendations. Although you could choose Repair and Continue, we will first make a couple changes to learn about the available Data Prep features.


Prepare Data

1. Navigate to the Opportunity ID (Col 1), choose Drop Column in the Recommended Fix option. 2. On Company Size (Col 6), choose Find and Replace from the Recommended Options drop-down. Review the options and then select

Close Window and choose Do Nothing. In this case, even though we could update the values. We will analyze the data first with the existing values.


3. Now go to Ownership (Col 7) and choose Delete Rows.

4. Go to Primary Competitor (Col 12) and choose Delete Rows. 5. Now let’s review our work and click on Preview Updated Dataset.

6. The changes look good. Let’s now click Repair and Continue.


7. BeyondCore will make the changes to your data and show you the results. It appears that there are a few missing Numbers(1). Click on Change Data Format to see a screen where you can assign the proper data type to the numeric columns.


8. In the Change Type column, choose Numbers in the drop-down list for Social Sentiment, Discount and Won. Then click Update.


9. You should now see a summary of your dataset again that now has Numbers(4) and Categories(9). Although you could continue to enhance or filter your dataset with Create Data Subset, Add Derived Columns, Add a Column from a Lookup Table or Create a Grouped Table, we will skip these options and move on finding insights by clicking Set Up Story.


Finding Insights Now we will Create a Story to have BeyondCore automatically analyze hundreds, thousands or millions of variable combinations to find hidden, statistically significant insights in your dataset.

Create a Story

1. On the Story Setup screen, choose Won in the I want to Understand drop-down. Then type in the Rows represent Opportunity and the unit is Wins/Losses. Then click Create Story.


2. After automated analysis completes, BeyondCore will display results along with additional suggestions to further improve your dataset, links to an automated briefing Watch Analysis and a link to Read Analysis. In our Sales Opportunities sample, 10 statistically significant insights were identified. Click Watch Analysis to have BeyondCore tell you what has been found.


3. After you click Watch Analysis, BeyondCore will automatically showcase and narrate the analytical insights identified. Solid bars show averages for the current graph. You can watch the entire briefing, pause it and then click on Read Story.


Read Story BeyondCore Stories can reveal a plethora of hidden insights in your data set that might never have been found using manual analysis techniques. The insights are presented in the order of impact or influence on the chosen outcome variable.

1. In our Sales Opportunities sample, we chose Won as the metric that we wanted to analyze. In our Story, we see Web Site Visits has the most predictive influence since it is displayed first at the top right of the screen. Other variables that have statistically significant impact on the outcome include Social Sentiment, Existing Account, Ownership and Lead Source. If no other insights were found, knowing the true influencer variables alone can help a sales or marketing manager choose where to invest budget and what areas are less important.

2. By clicking on a variable you can see a Summary of variable influence and any related second order variable combinations that increase or decrease the outcome indicated by green or red colored bars in the Summary charts.


3. Click on Social Sentiment to review a Summary and hover over the red bars in the When Web Site Visits is 0, Social Sentiment does worse chart. Here we can see that the Won outcome is negatively impacted by Bad (Decreased) when the values of Social Sentiment are 2 or 0. This makes sense since unhappy users might use Twitter to tweet negative product feedback.

4. Now choose Lead Source and hover over the chart bars that are not faded. The bright color bars indicate statistically significant values. Here you can see that White Paper is a lead source that significantly influences Won deals. Exploring further, Referral is also significant.


5. Now scroll down the page to read more details and get additional insights. Every time you pause on a graph in Story, BeyondCore has to do several complex computations to recommend the appropriate additional graphs for you to see. For the best experience, scroll slowly through the report to allow the recommendations to catch up or use the table of contents feature at the top right menu to skip directly to the graphs you are interested in.

Story Graph Types BeyondCore Stories are an executive report containing four different graph types.

What Happened (Descriptive)

These are the primary graphs in your story. They are similar to what you would see in BI / visualization / reporting products, but here BeyondCore has looked at all the possible graphs and highlighted those that you should see (highest statistical importance). BeyondCore also conducts statistical soundness tests and highlights the specific parts of each graph you should focus on.

Why it Happened (Diagnostic)

There might be several unrelated factors that contribute to a visual pattern you can see in a graph. For each Descriptive graph, BeyondCore automatically checks for what other factors might be contributing to the pattern. In out example, negative social sentiment was found to negatively impact the out win/loss outcome. Diagnostic graphs ensure that the patterns you focus on are real and not accidents of the data.

What will Happen (Predictive)

BeyondCore conducts predictive analysis both to select the Descriptive graphs you should see as well as to make Prescriptive recommendations. Expert users can access predictive capabilities directly from the ‘Choose a graph’ feature. Predictions are similar to the kind of regression or machine learning analysis Data Scientists might conduct using advanced analytics tools.

How to Improve It (Prescriptive)

Prescriptive findings are actionable. With these graphs, you can explore what values of variables maximize or minimize your desired outcome. BeyondCore recommends specific actions, quantifies the expected impact, and explains the reasoning behind the recommendations.


What Happened (Descriptive Graphs) BeyondCore shows you the story as soon as the initial analysis is completed and Descriptive Graphs are available. It continues doing additional statistical tests to look for Diagnostic Graphs and create the models it needs for Predictive and Prescriptive Graphs. Once these steps are complete, you get a message saying ‘Regression Complete.’

1. Scroll down to Lead Source and review the Descriptive Graph and textual summary of analysis below the graph. Note the average outcome is indicated on the chart as a dashed line. Any bars that are a solid filled color, not translucent or faded in color, significantly influence the outcome. You can get more detail by clicking on a bar in the graph.

The average outcome is indicated on the chart as

a dashed line.


2. On the right side of the screen, you can see combinations of variables in order of influence on the outcome. To dig deeper into those findings, let’s choose Add.

3. BeyondCore analyzes that specific combination of variables and displays related results.


Why it Happened (Diagnostic Graphs)

1. Now scroll back up to Lead Source in and in the right menu click on Diagnostic and then choose the first option and click Add.


2. Now scroll down and review the Diagnostic Graph to see the lift or decrease of each variable on your outcome. The global average value for Won will be the grey color bar. From there you can explore the increase or decrease to Won that significant variables contribute in the waterfall by hovering over each bar. The chart is segmented on the bottom axis to show variable combination relationships.


What will Happen (Predictive Graphs) Predictive graphs have several options to further explore your dataset. You can select What-If to see predicted outcomes for different chosen variables. You can opt for a Prediction graph to see the predicted outcome for a specific variable combination. More advanced options are also available that include Bulk Prediction or Exploring Regression Terms. For our Sales Opportunities scenario, we will explore a simple What-If analysis to see if discounts influence won deals for Enterprise and Desktop products.

1. Scroll back up to Lead Source and this time let’s click on Predictive in the top right menu. 2. A What-If screen is shown that will allow you to choose variables to analyze. In the What-If variable drop-down, pick Discount. Then

select Product and Personal Desktop and click Update. With Personal Desktop sales, discounts of 15% positively influence the Won outcome. This is what we might expect. It is interesting that discounts of 0-5% had more positive influence than a 10% or 15% discount.


3. Now pick Enterprise Suite for Product and look at the difference. Interestingly, 15% discounts decrease the Won outcome probability. Let’s add this insight to our story by clicking Add to Story.


How to Improve It (Prescriptive Graphs) Lead Sources are a tool that sales and marketing management has some control over. Let’s use a BeyondCore Prescriptive Graph to maximize Won deals by optimizing the use of Lead Sources.

1. Navigate to the Lead Source chart and click on Prescriptive in the top right menu. BeyondCore will run Prescriptive Analysis. This process may take a few minutes to complete.

2. Now click on the Maximize by Lead Source card.


3. BeyondCore will show any recommended Won outcome improvements that can be explored by presenting a series of Recommendation Cards on the right menu. Click Add on the Recommendation Card that says Predicted impact of 133,000 if change Lead Source from Channel Partner to Referral when Primary Competitor is Vista.


4. Review the Diagnostic Graph to see the lift or decrease of each variable on your outcome. The global average value for Won will be the grey color bar. From there you can explore the increase or decrease to Won that significant variables contribute in the waterfall by hovering over each bar. These are statistically significant, actionable insights that influence Won deals. Now let’s share this insight.


Sharing Insights BeyondCore makes sharing stories incredibly easy to do. Now that you have found compelling insights that can improve your sales effectiveness, increase win rates, optimize offered discount rates and marketing spend on the right lead sources, you will share those actionable insights with the rest of your team.

Export Story

1. In the top right menu of your Story in BeyondCore, select the Download icon and choose a download option. The available options include HTML, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. For our example, pick PPTX (Descriptive) for Microsoft PowerPoint. BeyondCore will created PowerPoint presentation for your containing the graphs and summaries that you can further customize and show to your team.


2. Open the PowerPoint SalesOpportunities.pptx file and explore the automatically created presentation slides. Notice that the text summaries within your BeyondCore Story have been also been added in the slide notes section. Now you can customize this presentation and start implementing the recommended changes to win more sales deals.


Next Steps In this tutorial, we walked through BeyondCore basics with a simple sample file. Now it is your turn to enjoy and explore BeyondCore with your own data set or other sample files shared at the BeyondCore Support website.

To continue learning about BeyondCore data preparation, scheduled analysis, bulk predictions, integration with applications, and many other advanced analytics capabilities that we did not learn in the Getting Started tutorial, check out the following resources.

• Download the BeyondCore User Guide • Watch our Vimeo Videos • Reed our White Papers • Review BeyondCore Support site FAQs, articles and data sets. • Attend one of our Upcoming Webinars

If you’d like additional assistance with BeyondCore, please contact us at [email protected].


https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B06vG-gPi0W-eGh1Vlptd0Jubjg

https://vimeo.com/147346436

http://beyondcore-enterprise.support.beyondcore.com/customer/en/portal/topics/972156-white-papers/articles


https://beyondcore.com/resources/

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getting started with beyondcore

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