Using Data Visualization to Improve The Sales Pipeline

Organization’s often use inbound marketing methodologies to fill their sales pipeline with quality leads. Inbound marketing’s foundation is built on the idea of sharing the right content  at the right stage within your buyer’s journey. Usually the buyer’s journey consists of three stages of buyers within your sales pipeline:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

For example, you would create content specifically to help your buyer in the Awareness stage to take notice of your product and understand what it is. For the Consideration stage, you would create content that shows how your product would solve their challenges and so on. At each stage, it is goal to capture their information, add them to your sales pipeline and guide them through the remaining journey to ultimately buy your product. Before you create your content, you need to understand your “buyer” and their needs. Collected data often shows your buyer’s actions online in order to determine behavioral buying patterns and desires. Having this data is important, but what about predicting behavioral patterns, staying two steps ahead ? Using data visualization to stay on top of your buyer’s journey will allow you to make diligent decisions resulting in brand strengthening and profitability.

So how can this be done for your organization?

1. First step is to understand your buyer’s journey and the needs for each stage. One simple solution is to interview an existing or past client that fits your “ideal customer” persona.  Ask them what information they required at each stage and how they found this information.  Was it from you ?
2. Look into the analytics and if that doesn’t work, figure out how to get more intel/data.  Data Visualization plays a critical role to quickly see holes in the data.  What is the most popular content you have currently?  Are customers referring to any of your materials?  Are they sharing your content? Consider adding additional questions during the qualifying stage to determine not only questions previously asked in this article, but other questions to gain better insight to the people knocking at the door.
3. Validate your findings and solutions. Many times, we can be so entrenched in our product that we forget to see if from the buyer’s perspective. Data visualization helps us see the buyer’s actual journey story which will either validate the assumption or bring us back to reality and see what they see.
4. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes it is hard to know what your buyer will do in six months, but data visualization will pull data into your story to help you understand where it may go. The power of having historical insight can lay the foundation of prediction for future growth.

Have your buyers taken a turn that you did not expect that resulted in a lost lead or sales conversion. Data visualization can help you see that coming and prepare for it. We would love to talk to you about your buyers’ journey and how data visualization can help you be ready for their ever-changing behaviors.