After posting Sales Tools – Keep Them Simple (e.g. A Heat Map) I got a couple of comments saying “show an example.” (Now that’s a great example of NOT keeping it simple – I’ll verbally describe things instead of graphically showing you the example – duh… sorry about that. I bet you wouldn’t believe me if I told you that I’ve read Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.)
The heat map above shows you that we have Company_1 and Company_3 as customers, we’ve pentrated Company_1 really well but have some work to do on Company_3, we should be making good progress on Company_2, and we’ve got a long way to go on Company_4 and Company_5. I also think MikeL should spend some time with JimR figuring out how to pentrate a Division_2 type customer and MaryB should probably spend some time with JimR also talking about Division_3 type customers, especially in Europe.
Now – envision this as 20 companies instead of 5 and 10 sales people instead of 3 and you can see how you could quickly see patterns that would be hard to otherwise see in a traditional sales pipeline report.