Businesses generate and collect huge amounts of data, and at the end of the day, it’s on marketing and sales teams to make use of it. Using available tools, sales managers need to translate this data into forms that can be presented, measured, compared, and related. This process of converting a large volume of data into a form that highlights its essence in a visual form is called data visualization. But how can it benefit your sales division?
Identify Trends and Disruptions
One of the essential duties of a sales professional is to identify trends or spikes in the data that require prompt action. The right format of data visualization, such as the waterfall chart can be used to indicate changes over a specific period. Let’s take an example of blog traffic over a month’s period.
If a waterfall chart shows a 28 percent increase in blog views compared to the previous month, and a bar/line chart from Google Analytics shows that the blog consistently generates about 60 percent of all website visits, a sales analyst can conclude that new blog posts successful in driving a healthy increase in traffic, but that neither of posts created a large spike.
Enable Swift Response
The human brain interprets visual presentation much easier than numerical or textual information. Data visualization brings a whole new level of clarity and transparency, allowing decision-makers in the sales department to take appropriate actions swiftly.
A sales manager who receives timely information is not only capable of managing sales activities, but also send notifications to the other parties related to the company’s CRM. Data visualization fosters fluidity between the sales and marketing team, making sure that necessary actions are taken at the appropriate time.
Integrate Data From Different Sources
Sales and marketing teams often use different data collecting tools and data visualization allows for improved integration of data. To integrate data resulting from sales and marketing activities, data visualization software solutions create a common platform that merges the impact of both data streams.
With data visually represented, the combined impact of data on sales and marketing activities can be analyzed as required, helping further distinguish developing patterns based on activities of both departments.
Track Goals and Results
Visual representation of data can be used to monitor progress towards one or more business goals. For example, you can monitor sales performance against quarterly goals for revenue, percentage of closed deals, and the status of the deal stages in the sales funnel.
This gives sales managers instant insight into overall performance, helping them take specific goal-focused actions, such as directing the team to generate more deals or realize that a large number of deals remain in the negotiation phase.
Enhance communications
One way to reduce miscommunication is to make sure all your teams use the same data visualization and analytics tool. This provides them with the same source of information, and if the data visualization layer is transparent enough, they will interpret the data in the same way.
However, there is another way data visualization improves communication — by coaching, which is an important skill for any manager. Visual communication is often the only way a sales manager can tell a sales rep about what they are doing wrong.
On another level, executive officers want to know high-level information from the sales floor. The problem with these reports is that they are time-consuming to create and confusing to read. With data visualization, the problem is solved for both parties — sales managers can communicate more clearly, while the executive floor can use visualization to find room for improvement.
Increase Productivity and Sales
In a report from Aberdeen Group, it was discovered that businesses that employ visual data management tools have 28 percent more chance to find information on time than organizations that rely solely on reporting and dashboards. With the capability to visualize data, your employees can spend more time being productive.
The same study further concludes that 48 percent of business intelligence users at organizations that rely on visual data discovery are able to find the information they need without the help of IT staff in almost all cases.
Another survey from consulting firm PwC found that although only 26 percent of the respondent’s organizations used data visualization, the majority of those that did were leading companies in terms of revenue growth.
Conclusion
Responsiveness and real-time access are features that ultimately determine the effectiveness of data visualization. By using appropriate data visualization tools, your sales management can promptly consume large volumes of data, analyze it, and take action.
