Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

The following are excerpts from the interview.  The read the interview in its entirety, please visit: lattice-engines.com/news.htm or knowledge@wharton

When Shashi Upadhyay, Kent McCormick and Andrew Schwartz co-founded Lattice Engines in 2006, their plan was to offer data integration solutions. But based on market feedback, they soon changed their business to offer sales intelligence software. Upadhyay, who holds a doctorate in physics from Cornell University and worked with management consulting firm McKinsey for eight years before becoming an entrepreneur, says that the Lattice Engines software integrates internal and external data and then uses predictive analysis to present the most relevant information to its customers’ sales teams. Companies, he notes, are now increasingly realizing that better data and better information leads to better insights into what consumers want; this in turn enables the businesses to use their sales and marketing investments more effectively. In a discussion with India Knowledge@Wharton Upadhyay talks about how the growth of the Internet has transformed the way data can be used, future trends in data and what Lattice Engine hopes to achieve.

“The term ‘big data’ is an umbrella word that describes a lot of different things that are going on in the world today. It started with the advent of the Internet where we had this platform that could track user activity in great detail. You could track every click, every site that people went to. When that became possible, a lot of things that people used to dream about, like targeted marketing promotions, measuring marketing ROIs on the fly — all these things that you really couldn’t do [using] television or other forms of media — became possible. As mobile devices are coming on, there’s all kinds of new data that you can capture.

But there’s another story which has not got as much attention — that is big data and enterprises, which is where we’re playing. And that itself has two parts to it. One, over time, companies have been implementing systems that capture data. So they put in a CRM system, then they put in a marketing automation system, a service order system and so on. It was very clear even 10 years ago that people who were doing a good job of putting in systems and capturing the data and analyzing it and forecasting correctly were more productive than others. So these systems have become much more mature inside the companies.

At the same time, you have, outside the firewall, massive amounts of data being generated about the consumers and the users of [different] products — [including] product reviews, analyst reports and surveys. All kinds of information that you really couldn’t know earlier about your customers and about your users have now become widely available. As that’s become available, there’s much more of an appetite to bring it all together. You have more data, you have more information. You have more information, you have better insights into what people want, which means you’re less likely to waste your sales and marketing and other kinds of investments.”

“Our sales intelligence software integrates both internal and external data about customers and prospects, finds patterns and triggers events, and uses predictive analytics to present the most relevant information to sales reps at the time of interaction. The software works by integrating existing CRM, marketing automation and transactional systems to deliver B2B sales intelligence directly to sales reps.”

“We observed that B2B has very specific problems. It needs very specific types of data. You need to take all that domain knowledge about B2B and make sure that your software is aware of the domain knowledge. That’s what we have done differently.”

I was recently introduced through a fellow Wharton MBA alum to Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative. WIMI’s website (http://www.whartoninteractive.com) provides the following overview about their mission:

“Designed to capitalize on Wharton’s longstanding strength in conducting data-driven research, WIMI influences decision making across several industries and will help companies understand how to monetize interactive data that they and others have collected. World class researchers collaborate with leading-edge businesses to ask and answer the critical questions.”

Peter Fader and Eric Bradlow, both Marketing professors at Wharton, lead WIMI and share a passion for extracting insights from large corporate data sets. WIMI’s initial focus has been on interactive media, and they are now expanding to cover a broader range of highly complex data and analytics problems. As I was listening to Peter discuss WIMI’s mission, I felt that we were kindred spirits in our belief that the future will herald exponentially greater amounts of data and that there will be a premium for academic organizations like WIMI and companies like Lattice Engines to make sense of it all for better business decision-making.

I was also impressed by Peter’s determination to expose his students to the wide variety of fascinating, challenging and rewarding career paths open to data and analytics practitioners. I look forward to seeing how Lattice Engines and WIMI can collaborate in the future to bringing our academic and corporate perspectives together.