Best Practices in Graphing Sales Metrics

Knowledge is power, and an empowered sales team is one with a clear understanding of its performance metrics. Ambition's Jeremy Boudinet explains the best practices in visualizing Sales Metrics for your workforce.

More than ever before, team managers and decision makers have a bevy options for displaying business team performance metrics. The key is understanding which of these options are presenting your team's data in a way that's compelling, efficient and informative.

In viewing the sales software landscape, we have come across several softwares that display - often on the same page - maps, pie charts, flow charts, diagrams, and random revenue numbers. All at once. This is insane. You can give a sales rep all the data in the world, that will not change the biological limits of the human brain and its inability to actually absorb the information.

Sales team members already have a million things going on in their daily workflow, and this type of performance data presentation is not what they need. For these reasons, I wanted to do a blog post covering the most critical components of effective infographics, and how they tie in with performance data presentation.

Engage with Clear and Concise Display

Sales teams need a similarly firm grasp of the important metrics and performance indicators driving their success. Leading experts in enterprise data and information graphics cite two pivotal elements of persuasive presentations of team metrics:

Limit data presented to core metrics.
Make the presentation compelling with bold, crisp colors and styles.

William James once said that, "The essence of genius is to know what to overlook." In that sense, your infographics should overlook all but the most essential metrics of your team's performance and visually appeal to your team members (so as not to be overlooked). Let's break this down.

Keep It Simple

The Harvard Business Review recently interviewed the editor of the Best American Infographics series, Gareth Cook, about how the most consumable infographics work. The takeaway: make your data visualization persuasive by boiling it down to its core elements. Source: The Harvard Business Review. What Makes the Best Infographics so Convincing? Link

Cook saw a common thread amongst leading infographics, in that they "removed all the extraneous details so you see just what you need to understand the message behind it.” Source: Ryan Morrill. Make More Persuasive Infographics By Balancing Context With Simplicity. Link

Again, the idea is to simplify the information to its core elements that can be stored in the brain. Main point: The initial focus of your enterprise data graphics should be on one thing: utility.

Make it Attractive

Leading data insight professional Ryan Morrill advocates supplementing simplicity with style, to make your data more compelling and add subtle context to the information being given.

When stripping your data down to its bare elements, it's critical that the presentation be simple, not bland. Morrill presents a compelling visual demonstrating how an effective infographic combines clarity with style to impact your team's members.

sales metrics

Look how much sharper and easier to understand the graphic on the right appears. If you are going to be presenting performance metrics to your sales reps, the graphic you present them needs to resemble this second image.

Ambition: Sales Data for Sales People

Going back to the article's initial point, the main issue we see within our industry is a proliferation of enterprise softwares that go overboard with your data and how to present it. Sales is too fast-paced for your team members to be spending their days studying flow charts and watching interactive visualizations of arcane metrics. What team members need is a metrics dashboard that's easily digestible and meaningful to their day-to-day operations. So what did we do here at Ambition? See for yourself:

Visualize Real-Time Sales Metrics for Reps

Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs every sales organization department, data source, and performance metric on one easy system.

Ambition clarifies and publicizes real-time performance analytics for your entire sales organization. Using a drag-and-drop interface, non-technical sales leaders can build custom scorecards, contests, reports, and TVs.

Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for managing millennial sales teams. Hear from our customers below.

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