What Is Data Visualization?

It feels impossible to get through any sales and marketing strategy discussion without mentioning data, and there is a good reason for this. Data helps give your company a competitive edge in the industry. However, merely providing statistics and figures when asked doesn’t often truly help explain the whole picture to your team. 

It’s no secret that data is powerful. To remain competitive in any market, your company needs to rely on the insights this information can provide to make informed business decisions. 

Data visualization helps provide a clear, digestible view of your team’s efforts. Simply put, it’s the visual (think graphs and charts) representation of your company’s data. 

The goal is to make this information easier to understand across all departments. Your sales and marketing team should already be measuring their activity with key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics. Data visualization can enhance the presentation and comprehension of this information. 

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Part of the appeal of this strategy is clear and effective communication between departments. Avoiding silos can help your company run more smoothly, especially when sales and marketing may have distinctive departmental jargon surrounding their goals that are unfamiliar to other teams. Visualization helps explain these efforts so everyone in the company can better understand how things are going.

Data visualization can also help your teams drill down on things like customer patterns, sales forecasts, and potential pain points. This information can help inform overall company decisions, improve sales strategy, and boost return on investment (ROI).

Getting Started With B2B Data Analytics

Whether your company has a large team of data analysts or a few employees handling these tasks, having a data analysis strategy will help set you apart from the competition. Collecting and storing data is the first step in having a strong analysis strategy. Utilizing your tech stack, including a CRM, can help store this data where it’s easily accessible for multiple departments.

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Collecting data, like contact information, customer purchase history, and marketing touchpoints, helps your teams improve their outreach and better understand their ideal client profiles. This information helps inform sales and marketing tactics, which can play a large role in your departments hitting their goals. Along with storing data, keeping clean and up-to-date information is crucial for successful data analysis. 

Knowing the basics, like having a clear understanding of who your target audiences are and how to reach them, is important for outreach tactics, but data can inform your team on a deeper level. This is where analysis can help give your company a competitive edge. Your teams should dig into the data to better understand patterns within the sales and marketing efforts.

After you’ve analyzed the data, finding ways to effectively communicate this information across the company is important. Data visualization will help create charts and graphs for team members to examine, and stakeholders can use these representations to make informed decisions. 

The Power of Visual Data

Visual representation is one of the best ways to effectively showcase information. People generally retain just 20% of the information they read compared to a whopping 80% retention rate for visual data. This means these charts and graphs not only make explaining data easier, they also help your audience better understand the information they are receiving. 

The goal is to provide context and show a deeper meaning to the numbers and figures in the data. Through graphs and charts, data can be examined to identify trends and patterns easily, without having to sort through complicated equations or long chunks of text. 

Visual data is crucial to a competitive edge as well. Research shows the brain receives 90% of information through visualization.

Data analytics covers complex topics, and sorting through it can feel like an enormous task. However, sometimes, communicating the information seems even more challenging. 

If your team is simply handing over a document based on numbers, there’s a good chance trends and patterns are going to be overlooked. Some of the information may be completely misunderstood. Visualization helps avoid these problems by segmenting and showcasing the data in ways that make it easy for employees across departments to understand. 

Visualization also allows different sets of data to be examined side-by-side, which helps your team work off comparisons when creating strategies or discussing overall company productivity. For example, a simple pie chart can be used to show the different ways leads are captured from your marketing and sales efforts, which helps your team understand which areas are most effective. Your company can go a step further,  by placing two pie charts side-by-side to analyze year-over-year trends in lead capture. 

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Bar graphs can be used to showcase year-to-date revenue reports, as well as compared to past years to see if your company is hitting its goals. This type of representation makes sharing data so much easier across channels. Rather than stakeholders having to muddle through long reports, visuals can help break down the important data points.

Using this type of strategy to identify trends, as well as anomalies, is also helpful when making large-scale decisions. If your customers are reporting on the same pain points, visual graphics can help your teams connect the dots on these issues and even find the underlying cause. For example, if your customers are complaining about onboarding times, your team can pull data to create timelines of the onboarding cycle and find areas where the process is taking longer than needed. 

Internal usage of visual data is great, but your team can also take it a step further and create graphics for your prospects and customers. This can provide your sales team with easily digestible charts to aid in their sales pitch. By providing tangible visuals, prospective clients can share this data with decision-makers, which can improve the sales process and increase conversion rates. 

Utilizing Data Analysis With Your Business Tools

The idea of doing all of this analysis by hand is enough to stress anyone out, but there’s no need to worry. Utilizing data analysis to create visual representations can be done from your tech stack. 

You’ll want to make sure your team is working off the most current information available. Using the data your company collects is the best way to do this.

Creating dashboards within your customer relationship management (CRM) system is a good first step to utilizing data in a regular capacity for your salespeople. These visualizations can help your team track KPIs and easily measure progress. This provides an easy view of sales activity at a glance and can be pulled from data sitting in your CRM like sales activity information. 

When adding to your tech stack to help with data analysis, your team should make sure to analyze its current data, assess areas with needs, and choose programs that will aid your employees. Going one step further than CRM data visualization, your sales and marketing teams can use visuals to better understand lead generation.

Leads are a fundamental aspect of the sales pipeline, especially when multiple departments are involved with lead capture, scoring, and nurturing. Visualization can help streamline communication in these efforts, track where quality leads are generated, and showcase the effectiveness of your lead cycle. Using Leadboxer’s data visualization tool is a great way to create these representations in the lead generation part of the sales funnel.

Leadboxer’s visual reporting feature creates an overview of the collected data, so your team can get an easy look at the status of the leads funnel. Reporting with this tool is customized through blocks, which helps break down the data into subsets for convenient access. These blocks include engagement, demographics, industry and size, and top accounts.

Engagement is a great chart to show daily trends for your audience's behavior. Demographics help break down insights like geographical locations to better understand where your leads are located. Industry and size show the type of audience your team is engaging with and help keep the company on track with its outreach. 

Top accounts give a visual breakdown of which companies are engaging the most with your team. Using software, like Leadboxer, that can integrate with your CRM and the rest of your tech stack can help simplify the process of data visualization. Get started with your free trial of Leadboxer today!