One form of data visualization that is underutilized by sales and marketing professionals is a relationship graph which shows you connections between people, places, things, events...any attributes you want to see in the graph. This form of visualization has long been used by the intelligence community to find bad guys and identify fraud networks. But it also has practical applications in sales and marketing. Lets say youre trying to improve your lead conversion process and accelerate sales cycles. Wouldnt it be important to analyze relationships between campaigns, qualified leads created, the business development people that created the leads and how fast each lead progressed through sales stages? Imagine a network graph that showed the campaigns, business development people that worked the lead pool, qualified leads and the number of opportunities created. Imagine if components of the graph (nodes) were scaled based on the amount of money spent on each campaign, the number of leads each person worked and the value of each opportunity. Your eye would be immediately drawn to a number of insights. You could quickly see which campaigns provided the most bang for your buck - the ones with relatively low cost and high qualified lead production. You could quickly see which business development reps generated a high volume of qualified leads and how many turned into real opportunities. Now imagine if you could play the creation of the graph over time. You could see when campaigns started to generate qualified leads. How long did it take? How soon could sales expect to get qualified leads? Should your campaign planning cycles change? Are your more expensive campaigns having the impact you expected? Is this all happening fast enough to meet sales targets? This form of data visualization is easier to apply than you think. There are tools on the market that allow you to connect to almost any file exported from your CRM system and draw the graph in seconds. As data visualization becomes more common in business, sales and marketing professionals will start to use this approach to measure performance of campaigns and employees while better understanding influencing factors in each stage of the sales cycles.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:20:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015