Taming Unstructured Data

Background & Challenges

Rapid access to critical data is key in a competitive tech industry landscape. This was the case with a major global technology business whose salespeople and internal staff needed to locate crucial product-related information. This information consisted of competitive narratives that included performance claims, proof points, benchmarks, partner solutions, case studies, and other related information.

Navigating an Avalanche of Claims

The company had over five thousand current performance claims embedded in white papers, product briefs, and product demos. And new product claims were being generated weekly by prolific test engineers. Clearly, the company had no shortage of historical and new data points available for generating sales and marketing content. These claims primarily lived in published documents, mostly as individual or combined data points in charts contained within hundreds of slides in Microsoft PowerPoint® decks. Additionally, these PowerPoint decks and published content documents were stored in a variety of digital locations/repositories. New assets were disseminated across the company as they became available, but sales staff quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. The approach and system they were using were inefficient, unscalable, difficult to search, and unsustainable. This situation hindered the ability of sales representatives to quickly find relevant claims that they needed to close critical deals.

Solution

To address the problem, Prowess Consulting collaborated with key client stakeholders to create an efficient web-based solution that would enable sales and marketing staff to access data-driven claims quickly and easily based on a wide range of keywords, tags, and other search parameters. The solution would provide a simple, sustainable method for entering and maintaining data and for providing a clean, simple interface that would let users quickly pull relevant proof points out of a vast sea of data.

Building the Claims Navigator Tool

The design process began with identifying all the critical fields that would be required for a technically accurate and legally valid proof point or claim. These points included hardware and software details of tested systems, applications or benchmarks used in testing, testing dates, and many other details. Most important for sales and marketing teams, each entry also needed to include performance measurements.

Prowess needed to determine the most efficient way to store and access the data. A traditional database was initially considered but was rejected in favor of a Microsoft SharePoint® list. For the client, the SharePoint list offered several advantages: it was faster to develop and easier to build and use, cost less, and required less administrative overhead because SharePoint was already integrated into the client’s existing operations.

A test site was developed, and a team of Prowess Consulting editors entered claims data. As claims were reviewed, the look and feel of the interface was further refined even while additional claims were being added. This process meant that the site would be well populated with claims information and data when the design was finalized, shortening the time from development to release. In only 10 weeks, the completed solution was ported from Prowess Consulting test servers to the client’s internal servers.