3 Ways Data Visualization Can Improve Sales Analysis

Data visualization is a powerful tool for sales leaders and professionals to improve analysis and decision-making. From prospecting more effectively to understanding your pipeline and seeing where your greatest account opportunities lie, the ability to take bare numbers and make them visual can make the difference between stagnant results and continually improving performance.

What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization is the act of taking a group of numbers and creating a graphic representation of their relationship to each other. Line graphs, pie charts, bar charts, tables, histograms and treemaps are examples of data visualizations.

Data visualization takes complex sets of numbers and makes them more memorable and easy to understand at a glance. For complex B2B sales, this ability to see the complex in a simple framework is critical to good analysis and decision-making.

Numbers can be hard to interpret, but visuals are easier.

We’re big on visualizations at Membrain, because it’s critical to be able to visualize everything in a good, understandable way.

How to Use Visualization to Improve Sales Decision Making

In Membrain, each of our core workflows has a central visualization that enables sales professionals to quickly see what matters most and make fast decisions, as well as a full library of customizable visualizations for nearly every use. We have just recently added two new visualization options, a tree map and a bubble graph.

We’re committed to providing the best visualization tools in the industry, because visualization is key to making good decisions. Here are 3 ways data visualization can improve your sales decision making.

1. Plan Better
   From pipeline views to org charts and visuals showing time spent with individual stakeholders, visualizations can help you get a quick and effective understanding of where things stand, where they’re going, and how to plan for greater success.
   
   One of Membrain’s key planning visuals is the Account Growth Grid in our Account Growth module. This visualization helps you see which accounts have the most opportunity for growth, so you can focus your attention and efforts where they will be most fruitful. It focuses on factors like the account’s room to grow and their success with your offerings that they currently use. Making these things visual makes account planning both more effective and faster.
2. Manage and Coach More Effectively
   The right visuals can help managers quickly see where each salesperson needs the most help, as well as where they’re performing well. This allows better and faster decision making regarding where and how to deploy sales resources, as well as when and how to coach individual salespeople.
   
   Inside Membrain, our performance dashboard makes it easy to see how each salesperson performs over time against other salespeople, against a benchmark, or against individual goals. Rather than a static snapshot of a single point in time, these timelines allow you to see trends as they develop, and intervene faster to keep salespeople on track.
   
   It also helps you account for factors such as ramp-up time, seasonal shifts, and differences in how each salesperson’s territories and other factors are impacting their performance over time.
3. Use Your Time Better
   Numbers can be hard to interpret, but visuals are easier. When you have access to good visualization tools, time spent pouring over endless spreadsheets and tables to create useful analyses can be spent quickly reviewing the visual and then making effective decisions. And those decisions, in turn, can mean you and your team are spending your time more productively.
   
   Membrain provides a large library of user-friendly, customizable, and beautiful visuals to save time and make it possible to be more effective with where you spend your time. Recently, we added treemaps. These visualizations can help you see where your team is spending their time, so you can make adjustments to be more effective.
   
   We’re also adding a bubble graph view soon. Bubble graphs make the standard X-Y axis chart even more useful by adding a third dimension via the size of the bubbles.
   
   At Membrain, we believe in the power of  visuals to improve everything about HOW you sell. These examples are only a small slice of the potential for visualization to make your sales organization more effective, from daily salesperson activity, to training, to coaching, to strategy and process. We’re proud to offer one of the most robust, beautiful, and user-friendly libraries of visualizations in the industry. 
   
   Reach out to learn how powerfully we can help you understand your data.