Introducing data driven practices into sales environments: examining the impact of data visualisation on user engagement and sales results

Abstract: Data visualisation is a key tool to drive both end user adoption and change management activities within data initiatives and especially so in sales environments. Data is as much a part of the problem as the solution itself. There’s too much of it, it’s difficult to interpret and sellers hold on to tactical workload out of distrust in the data systems they are provided with. A data-driven approach to the sales engagement cycle can fundamentally improve performance. Using an analytical approach to determine client needs and sales ‘signals’, sales engagement can be tuned to be in sync with market needs. However, a range of technical, organisational and cultural issues need to be addressed before such a solution can truly start to deliver results. A prototype has been developed and implemented within IBM Digital Sales Europe to test the effectiveness of a data-driven approach to territory management. Buy-in to the value proposition has been strong in principal but getting seller engagement and manager attention has been challenging. The pull of the standard approach with clients is strong, seller time is at a premium and users are very unforgiving of ill-considered experiments within their working day.After a series of iterations, it was discovered that improvements in the visualisation component of the data-project were transformative. It allowed sellers see meaning in the data for the first time and it helped them to build effective sales narratives for partners and clients alike. It helped managers to see patterns and take course correction action and it helped build dialogue and relationships throughout the sales ecosystem.Visualisation also became a potent agent for change itself. It ‘surfaced’ and shed light on a range of problems that had gone unnoticed, undiagnosed or simply ignored. It raised questions for the sales organisation, forced trade-offs and started to drive more informed decision-making.This paper concludes that data initiatives require considerable transformation effort to be successful. In this context, visualisation serves as the ice-breaker carving a path through hidden and complex problems in need of change, simplifying choices and highlighting the opportunity costs ahead.