Opportunity activity sequence investigations in B2B CRM systems

Abstract Closing a deal in a business to business environment implies a series of orchestrated actions that the sales representatives are taking to take a prospective buyer from first contact to a closed sale. The actions, such as meetings, emails, phone calls happen in succession and in different points in time relative to the first interaction. Time-series are ordered sequences of discrete-time data. In this work, we are examining the relationship between the actions as time series and the final win outcome for each deal. To assess whether the behavior of the salespeople have a direct influence on the final outcome of the current deal, we used histogram analysis, dynamic time warping and string edit distance on a real-world Customer Relationship Management System data set. The results are discussed and included in this paper.