From Numbers to Pictures: Why Visualizing Data is key to the success of your business
From
Numbers to
Pictures
Why Visualizing Data is key to the success of your business.
So you’ve probably noticed since your days playing “kaalvoet”-rugby that data rarely stays in the raw format of columns and digits. There is always some exciting way to visualise data and to quote Willbert Kinnear, “Frustration is only a matter of Perspective”. So if you’re frustrated at looking at boring Excel spreadsheet, always remember that the digits you are staring at might as well be the next Picasso that will tell you something you didn’t know about your business.
"Frustration is only a matter of Perspective"
So, except for the luring attraction of seeing your data in such a beautiful format, what other possible reasons could there be to convert data into mind-bending flows of art? Well, to your brain, this is a feat far easier to accomplish. Pictures are perceived better by your brain in comparison to text. The generation of young millennial business executives prefers a picture-format to understand the state of their business. Instagram realised the power of images far earlier and pertained their strategy to the maximum visuals and the minimum amount of text. This is because our brains can get far more information in a tenth of a second from a visual versus only seeing a matrix of numbers flowing down a spreadsheet.
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Visuals are also committed to your long-term memory. Remembering information is key to making decisions ahead and having a brief time to understand the current state of affairs would require something that will stick to your memory for the time forward. Visuals also tell stories. When it comes to painting a better picture in the minds of those you are trying to get your point across, making it easier for them to relate to on a deeper human level will be a specific catalyst in communicating your ideas and arguments to co-workers and prospective clients.
Visuals will always reveal patterns, trends, changes and correlations far more efficiently over time than trying to spot it in a raw spreadsheet. Visuals also have a great way of simplifying complex data into something more comprehensible. When it comes to data, there are often many factors that help to paint a picture and trying to consider all those factors at one glance without a helpful visual can be quite tedious. Lastly, it is proved that visuals also create a better chance of convincing others of your argument than the use of words only. In a 3M-sponsored study at the University of Minnesota School of Management found that presenters who use visual aids are 43% more effective in persuading audience members than those who didn’t use visual aids.
Are you harnessing the full potential of your business’ data by using compelling visuals to communicate ideas, results and arguments to others? Drivatic can be of great aid to build you the ultimate visuals tool in the form of a dynamic dashboard that will not only paint the best picture possible of your business but make it all come to life when drilling down to the answers you seek.
Twelve Sales KPIs that will change your Salesforce
Much like driving a Ferrari in the fast lane at 200 km/h and monitoring your control at every second, so you would like to have a good grip on each aspect of your Salesforce and where to use which Sales Rep at the right place at the right time. Salesforces should be one of the most data-driven facets of any business as growth in any company won’t be possible without an active unit seeking new business opportunities daily.
The first thing you’ll need to analyse your sales data is a set of crucial full-proof performance indicators, or KPIs for short, that will indicate a drop or rise in performance of your Salesforce and to ensure a proactive action to follow to remedy any problem in your sales process or funnel. However, before we discuss the necessary KPIs you’ll need, we need to establish what Sales Analytics is all about.
Sales Analytics is the practice of generating valuable insights from daily sales data to identify trends over time as to produce the right measures that lead to better deciding what monthly targets should be and future sales performance.
Your analysis should lead to developing a better strategy that will improve sales performance in the short- and long-term.
However, still, why do this? If your business were a rock band, your Salesforce would be the lead singer to attract all your new screaming fans.
All eyes are regularly on sales and revenue performance, and an evil act can lead to a drop in company morale and reputation. Better analytics will lead to accountability on all terms to Sales Reps without having to micro-manage their every action.
So, let’s get into it…
1. Sales Growth
A key measure to estimate the ability of your sales team to increase revenue over a fixed period. Without revenue growth, your business might be overtaken by a competitor, or it will face the ill fate of stagnating over time. It can also be laced with a previous period’s sales growth to compare your current year again the last year.
2. Sales Target
It would help if you had something to compare current performance to the target you have set for the period applicable. Whether it’s in terms of units sold or given as a percentage, you need to know where you stand when comes to running too slow as a salesforce and whether you’ll reach the winner’s circle on time.
3. Sales Opportunity
It would be best if you prioritised your opportunities as Salesforce. As the 80/20 principle states, identifying the top 20% of opportunities that will lead to 80% of your sales revenue is essential in developing the best time-value for each Sales Rep. Know the probability of closing the deal will also help to prioritise your opportunities from the highest to the lowest.
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4. Sales-to-Date
The sale-to-date measure is a great way to evaluate and keep track of the figures about the current year, in comparison to the previous year. Just another way to pace your workforce to keep up with past performance or improve on it.
5. Product Performance
This ties into a customer analysis metric, but to establish which products are the best sellers will give your Sales Reps the advantage of knowing which product to punt more in presenting your offering to clients.
6. Sales Conversion Rate
Determine how many leads provided to Sales Reps have been converted to actual paying customers. From prospect to client, this percentage rate will also give more insight into the marketing function of your company to determine whether their strategy is generating the most valuable leads possible for your business.
7. Sell-through rate
A metric that will measure the amount of inventory you’ve sold for a period versus the inventory shipped from all your suppliers. This will tie into the efficiency of your supply-chain to inform you which part of your inventory is slow-moving or fast-moving.
8. Cannibalisation Rate
This rate gives insight into the impact new products have on sales revenue versus existing products. Also, a desirable metric for your marketing team, this metric will show you if/when the demand for existing products decreases as new products are presented to clients and prospects.
9. Quote-to-Close
Want to know effective your team is at closing a deal? This measure will show you the number of quotes done for every sale closed. When it comes to having the perfect Salesforce, you’d like to get this figure closer to 1:1. It’s the last essential part of any pipeline or sales funnel and closing the deal while it’s hot is something to take a closer look at more often.
10. Sales per Rep
Probably one of the most apparent metrics you’ll need to manage your Salesforce. Any team should work as a unit with every member performing their best. To know which members are hindering your sales revenue to reach its target and potential is integral have a well-oiled sales machine.
11. Average Purchase Value
Measure the average sales revenue through all sales transactions you process. Not only will this help for making projections and doing projections, but this will also help your team develop a way of incentivising customers to learn more into buying higher end products.
12. Sales per Region
A key metric for your marketing team. Knowing where most of your revenue is generated geologically will help in targeting the right areas to produce the best leads. Knowing which Sales Rep does best in which region will also provide you with reason to use them more in that region or if a product does better in a certain province or country, you’d be better of focusing your efforts on that part to maximise sales revenue for the next quarter.
Read MoreWhat is the difference between Excel and Power BI?
For years Microsoft Excel was the backbone comfort zone when it came to reporting financial figures to executives and analysing data. However, data had become the most valued asset of today, and it comes in large volumes.
When it comes to capturing data, calculating formulas across columns and generating simple static graphs, Microsoft Excel makes the cut. However, to analyse your data on the fly and to link vast amounts of different sources to generate the appropriate KPIs and creating dynamic graphs for easy filtering and drill down into the facets of your company, Power BI will be the overachiever.
One of the problems ordinary Excel users encounter is when facing the analysis of large files of big data. Records of 300 MB are harder to run on most computers, and when it comes to performing dynamic analysis, it can become a drag for any analyst, especially when multiple sources of data need to be linked.
Power BI’s new compression algorithms can handle more significant amounts of data to produce swift analysis and links between tables.
When KPIs need are calculated from various datasets, Power BI includes more powerful tools for building data models that will create a coherent machine of analysis. Power BI saves all the steps made in queries when building a model, and so each level will be applied to new data added.
Another matter is the challenge of time intelligence. Many analysts would perhaps spend hours writing macros via VBA to produced time series analysis. Power BI can take the load off by creating date tables within any model to build better communication between datasets to provide accurate measures at a given time.
Set aside from the mighty features Power BI supplies, another significant aspect would be its user experience. Once your data model is created, the journey from a first visual to a full-blown dashboard is a pleasurable challenge and a fun way to see your data come to life. With easy switching between multiple options of visuals to choose from, any analyst would find it a dream to work with such a versatile tool.
Another big win for Power BI is its ability for cloud computing within the Power BI Service platform. Instead of sending large Excel files to colleagues and letting them know data are updated on a shared drive, one can easily publish new reports to the cloud to quickly analyse the latest data as it streams in. All measures and calculation were done with Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing crunching the numbers.
Are you still stuck using Microsoft Excel to harness the actual value of all the data your company accumulates?
Allow Drivatic to provide you with the easy solution of taking all development off your hands and giving room for you to do fun parts of seeing your business come alive with its data in stunning visual dashboards, created for practical use to drill down to the specific piece of info you need to grow your business.
Contact Drivatic today for a demo of our analytics platform.
Power BI vs Excel
The basis Of Comparison Between Power BI vs Excel |
Excel |
Power BI |
Applications | Excel does have some of the newer charts now; they can’t connect to the data model. |
Power BI is ideal for Dashboards, alerts, KPIs, and visualisations, including analysing your data visually. |
Reports | Excel reports are average and ordinary comparing Power BI. |
Power BI offers beautifully branded reports comparing Excel. |
Cross Filtering | Excel does not advanced Cross filtering between charts. |
Power BI allows advanced features in Cross filtering between charts. |
Dashboard Refreshment |
Excel does not allow dashboard refreshment.
|
You can refresh data in Power BI. |
Analytics | Excel offers simple analytics compared to Power BI. |
Power BI offers High-level analytics. |
Reports Availability | Reports available is limited to specific users. |
Reports available to a broad range of readers with varying degrees of tech-savvy. |
Tool | Excel is your traditional spreadsheet program with a very long history, which leads to a vast array of features. |
Power BI is an advanced version of the analytics tool with a large number of features to play with data. |
Data Model | Excel is entirely focused on structured and straightforward data models with a wide range of features. |
Power BI is really focused on data ingest and building potentially complex data models quickly. |
Separate Table | In Excel, it is difficult to relate the separate table to one another. |
In Power BI, you can easily relate separate tables to one another. |
Dataset | Capable of handling a limited dataset. |
Capable of handling larger dataset. |
Flexible | Dataset and report are not so resilient. |
Sharing data and reports are very flexible. |
Dashboard | A user has limited features to build up reports. |
A user can build up a customized dashboard. |
Processing Speed | Speed for processing with table, graph, and filtering is slow. |
Faster Processing with table, graph, and filtering. |
Purpose | Excel is historical analytics tools for an analyst. | Powerquery is a very good idea to simplify cleaning and crunching of any source of data. |
Popularity | Excel applications are a little bit difficult to use comparing Power BI. |
Powerful tool and easy to use compared to Excel. |