PhotonAssay Site Prioritization System
A data-driven engine for focusing sales on the right mine sites
The Challenge
The Core Problem
Signal Buried in Noise
With thousands of active mining sites globally, identifying which ones are genuinely viable prospects for PhotonAssay technology creates an overwhelming challenge. Sales teams face analysis paralysis when every site looks like a potential opportunity.
Misaligned Pursuit
Without systematic filtering, sellers chase sites with weak technical fit or questionable economic viability. Time and resources get invested in conversations that were never likely to progress, damaging team efficiency and morale.
Inconsistent Prioritization
Ad-hoc decision-making leads to wasted sales cycles and missed opportunities. Different reps apply different criteria, creating uneven coverage and making it impossible to learn what actually drives successful deployments.
Credibility Gap
Mining operators are technical buyers who demand evidence-based conversations. Generic sales approaches undermine credibility before the conversation even starts. Technical buyers can immediately spot when a seller hasn't done their homework.
What This System Solves
Intelligence Before Investment
This system fundamentally changes the sales workflow by filtering noise before any effort begins. Instead of spraying resources across hundreds of sites, teams focus their energy where evidence suggests real opportunity exists.
01
Evidence-Anchored Decisions
Every prioritization decision traces back to mine-specific evidence, not hunches or corporate-level assumptions.
02
Clear Go/No-Go Gates
Sites either pass technical viability thresholds or get filtered out, preventing weak prospects from consuming sales attention.
03
Confident Engagement
Reps know exactly where and how to engage, backed by credible, site-specific intelligence that resonates with technical buyers.
What the System Delivers
The PhotonAssay Site Prioritization System produces five core outputs that transform how sales teams identify, evaluate, and pursue mining opportunities. Each output is designed to accelerate decision-making while maintaining technical credibility.
Objective Site Prioritization
Algorithmic ranking removes bias and ensures consistent evaluation across all sites, regardless of who owns the relationship or how vocal a prospect might be.
Stable, Repeatable Scoring
The same site scored today and six months from now yields comparable results, enabling tracking of how priorities shift as new evidence emerges.
Clear Sales Tiers
Every site maps to a specific tier with explicit behaviors attached—no ambiguity about whether a site deserves active pursuit or passive monitoring.
Sales-Ready Briefs
Comprehensive site intelligence packages include technical signals, value drivers, discovery questions, and source links—everything a rep needs for credible conversations.
Explicit Confidence Levels
The system doesn't hide uncertainty. Every output includes a confidence assessment so teams know when they're working with strong evidence versus thin signals.
Foundation
System Design Philosophy
Evidence First, Scoring Second
The system begins by extracting verifiable facts about each mine site. Scoring only happens after a clean evidence base is established. This prevents garbage-in, garbage-out scenarios that plague many prioritization systems.
Site-Specific or It Doesn't Count
Company-level data like market cap or corporate strategy gets deliberately excluded. What matters is what's happening at the individual mine—its methods, its challenges, its scale. This prevents false signals from contaminating site decisions.
Gating Before Prioritization
Sites must pass fundamental technical viability gates before entering the ranking process. This prevents technically irrelevant sites from appearing as high-priority targets simply because they have large production volumes.
Confidence Is Explicit, Not Implied
The system openly acknowledges when evidence is thin, recent, or circumstantial. Reps see confidence levels alongside every score, enabling appropriate calibration of effort and expectation.
System Architecture
Four Independent Layers
The PhotonAssay Site Prioritization System operates through four sequential layers, each with a distinct purpose and strict dependencies. The integrity of each layer ensures the reliability of everything downstream.
Technical Evidence Extraction
Technical Fit & Readiness
Economic & Strategic Value
Sales Brief Generation
Each layer depends entirely on the integrity of the previous one. Layer 2 cannot assess technical fit without clean evidence from Layer 1. Layer 3 cannot evaluate economic value if Layer 2 has already filtered the site out. Layer 4 only generates briefs for sites that have successfully passed through all upstream gates and achieved sufficient priority scores.
Layer 1
Technical Evidence Extraction (Argon)
Purpose
Layer 1 builds a clean, auditable fact base for each mine site by systematically extracting verifiable technical evidence from public sources, technical reports, and operational disclosures.
Key Rule: Facts only. No inference. No scoring. This layer is intentionally constrained to prevent interpretation from contaminating the evidence base.
Argon functions as a pure extraction engine. It identifies and records what is explicitly stated in source materials, maintaining strict separation between observation and analysis. This discipline creates the trustworthy foundation every downstream decision depends on.
What Argon Extracts
Layer 1 systematically captures specific categories of technical evidence that directly inform PhotonAssay relevance and opportunity. Each data point must be traceable to a specific source document.
Mine Name Attribution
Precise identification of the facility, including alternative names and parent company ownership.
Operational Status
Current production state—active, care and maintenance, development stage, or closed.
Assay & Sampling Methods
Documented techniques for sample collection, preparation, and analysis currently in use at the site.
Lab Usage & Turnaround
References to laboratory partners, assay bottlenecks, or turnaround time concerns mentioned in disclosures.
Expansion & Capex Signals
Announced plans for processing expansion, new infrastructure, or significant capital investment at the site.
Explicit Data Gaps
Documentation of what information could not be found, preventing false confidence from incomplete evidence.
Why This Matters
Prevents Data Contamination
By maintaining strict separation between site-level and company-level data, the system ensures that corporate financial performance or headquarters strategy doesn't influence site-specific technical decisions. A struggling company might operate a highly attractive mine site, and vice versa.
Creates Traceable Evidence
Every extracted fact links back to a specific source document with date and context. When a sales rep references an operational signal in conversation with a mine engineer, they can cite the exact disclosure where it appeared, building immediate credibility.
Establishes Trust with Technical Buyers
Mining professionals are skeptical of generic claims. When reps demonstrate knowledge of site-specific methods, challenges, and plans—backed by verifiable sources—they signal competence and earn the right to a substantive technical conversation.
Layer 2
Technical Fit & Readiness
Core Question
Does PhotonAssay technically belong here?
Layer 2 evaluates whether a mine site's operational characteristics, assay challenges, and technical maturity create genuine relevance for PhotonAssay technology.
This layer transforms raw evidence into technical assessment. It doesn't ask whether the mine might buy PhotonAssay—that's a sales question. It asks whether PhotonAssay's core value propositions align with the site's actual technical reality.
Sites with no assay pain, no sampling challenges, and no operational bottlenecks fail here regardless of production volume or company prestige. Conversely, sites with clear technical friction earn high scores even if they're smaller operations.
Technical Fit Signals
Layer 2 evaluates four categories of technical signals that indicate PhotonAssay relevance. Each category contributes to the overall technical fit assessment.
Assay Pain & Workflow Friction
Evidence of lab turnaround complaints, assay backlogs, or production delays attributed to analytical bottlenecks. Sites that explicitly reference assay speed as a constraint signal immediate relevance.
Sampling Challenges & Variability
Documented difficulties with representative sampling, heterogeneous ore bodies, or concerns about sample quality degrading analytical confidence. These challenges directly map to PhotonAssay's non-destructive advantages.
Nugget Effect Indicators
References to coarse gold, visible gold, or erratic assay results that complicate grade control. Nugget effect is one of the strongest technical fit signals for PhotonAssay relevance.
Operational Maturity
Evidence of process optimization culture, adoption of advanced technologies, or stated commitment to operational improvement. Mature operations are more likely to evaluate and adopt new analytical methods.
Outputs of Layer 2
Layer 2 produces four discrete outputs that together determine whether a site advances to economic evaluation or gets filtered out of active consideration.
1
Assay Workflow Relevance Score
Numeric assessment (0-100) of how strongly the site's assay challenges align with PhotonAssay's value propositions. Higher scores indicate clearer technical fit.
2
Site Readiness Classification
Qualitative judgment of the site's capacity to evaluate and adopt new analytical technology based on operational maturity and organizational signals.
3
Gate Outcome
Pass: Site advances to Layer 3. Hold: Insufficient evidence; revisit when more data available. Fail: Technical fit is weak; exclude from active prioritization.
4
Confidence Level
High: Strong, recent evidence across multiple signals. Medium: Good evidence but some gaps. Low: Thin evidence or significant uncertainty.
Why Gating Is Critical
The gate mechanism is the system's most important quality control feature. It prevents technically irrelevant sites from advancing to economic evaluation, regardless of how attractive they might appear on other dimensions.
Stops Weak Sites Early: Sites with poor technical fit get filtered before consuming sales resources.
Prevents False Positives: A large mine with no assay challenges won't rank high just because of production volume.
Keeps Downstream Scoring Clean: Layer 3 only evaluates sites that have already cleared technical hurdles.
Protects Sales Focus: Reps don't waste time on sites where PhotonAssay doesn't solve a real problem.
Layer 3
Economic & Strategic Value
Core Question
If PhotonAssay works here, how much does it matter?
Layer 3 evaluates the economic significance and strategic importance of sites that have already passed technical fit gates. This isn't about predicting whether they'll buy—it's about understanding the magnitude of opportunity if they do.
A technically perfect fit at a small exploration project might rank lower than a good fit at a major producing mine. Layer 3 ensures effort aligns with potential impact.
What This Is NOT
Not a Buying Prediction
Layer 3 does not attempt to forecast purchase probability. That depends on budget cycles, decision-maker preferences, competitive dynamics, and dozens of factors outside this system's scope. This layer assesses opportunity magnitude, not likelihood.
Not a Corporate Valuation
Parent company market cap, enterprise value, or corporate financial health are explicitly excluded. What matters is the site's operational scale and importance, not the balance sheet in headquarters.
Not Speculative
Scores rely on documented evidence of current operations and announced plans. Rumors about future expansions, unofficial production targets, or speculative projections do not factor into economic assessment.
Value Drivers Considered
Layer 3 evaluates five dimensions of economic and strategic significance, each grounded in observable site-level evidence.
Processing Throughput & Scale
Tons processed per day or year, indicating the volume of material flowing through operations. Higher throughput creates more assay demand and larger potential impact from workflow improvements.
Annual Production Magnitude
Gold or copper production in absolute terms, providing a proxy for operational importance and budget availability for process optimization investments.
Sample Volume Exposure
Estimated number of assays conducted annually, whether explicitly stated or inferred from production scale and sampling protocols. More samples mean more opportunity for PhotonAssay impact.
Mine Life & Expansion Horizon
Remaining reserve life and announced expansion projects, indicating runway for long-term technology partnerships and willingness to invest in infrastructure improvements.
Strategic Site Importance
Signals that this site is a core asset for the parent company—flagship operations, reference sites, or mines frequently mentioned in investor communications warrant higher prioritization.
Scoring Guardrails
Layer 3 operates under strict constraints to prevent score inflation and maintain credibility. These guardrails ensure economic value scores remain conservative and defensible.
Site-Level Evidence Only
All value assessments must derive from information specific to the individual mine site. Regional production totals, corporate-wide revenue, or company-level guidance are excluded from scoring calculations.
No Scale = Capped Score
Sites where production volume, throughput, or sample load cannot be verified receive automatically capped economic value scores, regardless of other attractive signals. Uncertainty in scale means uncertainty in impact.
Thin Evidence = Conservative Confidence
When economic indicators rely on limited sources, dated information, or indirect inference, the confidence level downgrades to Medium or Low. This signals to sales teams that the value estimate has wider error bars.
Layer 4
Composite Priority Scoring
Layer 4 combines outputs from Layers 2 and 3 into a single, actionable priority score that determines sales tier assignment and resource allocation.
Inputs Combined
- Technical workflow relevance (Layer 2)
- Site readiness classification (Layer 2)
- Economic & strategic value (Layer 3)
- Readiness modifier (applied to raw score)
The composite score balances technical fit with economic impact. A site with perfect technical fit but minimal scale won't outscore a site with strong technical fit and major production volume. Conversely, a massive mine with weak technical relevance stays filtered out regardless of throughput.
Composite Output
0-100
Final Priority Score
Single numeric value enabling rank-order comparison across all evaluated sites
±3
Stable Rankings
Scores vary by less than 3 points across reruns, ensuring consistency in prioritization decisions
Global
Cross-Comparable
Scores enable apples-to-apples comparison across companies, regions, and commodity types
The composite score provides a universal language for discussing opportunity quality. Sales leadership can confidently compare a copper mine in Chile against a gold mine in Australia, knowing both were evaluated through identical logic and evidence standards.
Tiering Philosophy
Tier assignment is built for behavior, not vanity. The goal isn't to create impressive-sounding categories—it's to drive specific, differentiated sales actions at each level.
Tiers are intentionally wide to absorb natural model variance. A 3-point score fluctuation shouldn't change tier assignment or trigger a strategy shift. Stability matters more than precision.
Optimized for Execution: Each tier maps to clear behaviors that sales teams can actually execute.
Absorbs Uncertainty: Wide tier boundaries prevent minor score changes from triggering tier shifts.
Enables Learning: Consistent tier definitions allow tracking of what tier-to-conversion patterns emerge over time.
Final Tier Structure
The system assigns every site to one of four tiers, each with explicit sales behaviors and resource allocation guidance.
Tier 2A – Priority Discovery
Small, highly selective list of sites with exceptional technical fit and significant economic value. These receive active, persistent pursuit with senior sales engagement and customized technical presentations.
Tier 2B – Active Discovery
Primary hunting ground for most sales activity. Strong technical fit or solid economic value with good supporting evidence. Pursue with site visits, technical discovery calls, and relationship development.
Tier 3 – Opportunistic
Sites with moderate signals or significant evidence gaps. Light touch monitoring—watch for triggering events like expansion announcements, but no proactive outreach. Respond if inbound interest emerges.
Tier 4 – Backlog
Weak technical fit, low economic value, or insufficient evidence to assess. No active effort. Revisit only if major operational changes occur or new evidence becomes available.
Why There Is No Tier 1
You'll notice the tier structure begins at 2A, not 1. This is intentional and philosophically important.
Tier 1 implies certainty. It suggests we already know this site will adopt PhotonAssay—we're just executing a foregone conclusion. That level of certainty doesn't exist in complex B2B sales, especially for capital equipment in mining.
This system is about discovery, not assumptions. Even the highest-scoring sites in Tier 2A require technical validation, stakeholder alignment, and budget availability. Calling them "Tier 1" would suggest we've skipped discovery and moved straight to closing.
Tier 2A earns Tier 1 behavior through validation. When a Tier 2A site progresses through successful technical trials, stakeholder buy-in, and budget confirmation, it graduates to Tier 1 in practice—but that promotion happens through sales execution, not scoring algorithms.
Sales Intelligence
Sales Brief Generation
Layer 4 automatically generates detailed sales briefs for every site in Tier 2A and Tier 2B. These briefs package all relevant intelligence into a format optimized for sales conversations.
Important: Briefs are created only for Tier 2A and Tier 2B sites. Tier 3 and Tier 4 sites do not receive briefs, reinforcing the behavioral distinction between active pursuit and passive monitoring.
What Each Sales Brief Includes
Sales briefs follow a consistent structure designed to prepare reps for credible, technically grounded conversations with mine operators.
01
Rep Signal (Priority, Motion, Deal Shape)
Tier assignment, recommended approach, and expected deal complexity based on site characteristics.
02
Executive Summary
Two-paragraph overview of why this site matters and what makes it a priority target.
03
Why This Site Matters
Specific technical fit signals and economic drivers that elevate this site above others.
04
Site Snapshot
Operational fundamentals—production, throughput, ownership, location, mine type.
05
Key Operational Signals
Extracted evidence of assay challenges, expansion plans, or technology adoption patterns.
06
Value & Upside
Economic significance of the opportunity if PhotonAssay deployment succeeds.
07
Discovery Questions
Specific questions to ask during initial conversations to validate or refine the assessment.
08
Evidence & Source Links
Direct links to source documents where key facts were extracted, enabling verification.
09
Assessment Confidence
Explicit statement of confidence level (High/Medium/Low) with explanation of evidence gaps.
Why Reps Trust These Briefs
Evidence Is Visible
Reps can see exactly what evidence supports each claim in the brief, not just the conclusions.
Sources Are Linked
Direct links to original documents mean reps can verify facts or pull additional context as needed.
Confidence Is Stated
The system doesn't pretend to know more than it does—confidence levels set appropriate expectations.
Gaps Are Acknowledged
When evidence is thin or missing, the brief explicitly calls it out, preventing false confidence.
Trust comes from transparency. Reps use these briefs because they know what's behind them—and what isn't. That honesty makes the briefs more valuable, not less.
How This Changes Sales Behavior
Less Guessing
Reps spend less time debating which sites to pursue and more time executing against clear priorities backed by evidence.
Better Technical Conversations
Armed with site-specific knowledge, reps engage mining engineers on their terms, discussing actual operational challenges rather than generic value propositions.
Faster Qualification
Discovery questions in each brief accelerate the process of confirming or disconfirming site fit, preventing prolonged pursuit of dead-end opportunities.
Stronger Credibility
When reps demonstrate knowledge of specific site conditions and challenges, operators recognize competence and engage more seriously in technical discussions.
Who This System Is For
The PhotonAssay Site Prioritization System serves multiple stakeholders across the go-to-market organization, each deriving distinct value from its outputs.
Technical Sellers
Individual contributors use sales briefs to prepare for conversations, prioritize their territory, and engage prospects with credible, site-specific intelligence that builds trust.
Sales Leadership
Managers use tier assignments and composite scores to allocate resources, set territory expectations, and identify coaching opportunities when reps pursue off-target sites.
GTM Strategy Teams
Strategy and operations teams use aggregate tier distributions to identify white space, assess market coverage, and inform decisions about geographic expansion or vertical focus.
Mining-Focused Growth Teams
Teams responsible for long-term market development use the evidence base and scoring logic to test hypotheses about ideal customer profiles and refine targeting criteria over time.
One-Slide Summary
Evidence → Gating → Scoring → Action
The PhotonAssay Site Prioritization System transforms mine-level facts into clear sales priorities and credible, sales-ready intelligence. It filters noise before effort begins, anchors decisions in site-specific evidence, and produces stable, defensible rankings that guide resource allocation.
By maintaining strict separation between evidence extraction, technical assessment, economic evaluation, and sales brief generation, the system ensures every prioritization decision traces back to verifiable facts—not assumptions, not corporate-level proxies, not guesswork.
The result: sales teams spend less time debating where to focus and more time executing technically credible conversations with the right mine sites.