Confusion vs Information

via FlowData, via Indexed Blog.

Excel works well for most quick tasks – but how cool would it be to be able to create interactive, colorful charts that breathe life into rows and rows of data?

And speaking of  FlowingData, they have nice beginner’s guides to get started:

What Visualization Tool/Software Should You Use? – Getting Started

40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data

Now that I’ve been with the company for almost 7 months, I thought I’d share the activity dataset. In the graph below, you’ll see the following stats for each day (outbound and inbound activity):

• Email: how many email I wrote,
• Call – No Message: how many calls I made in which no one picked up and I didn’t leave a message,
• Call – Left Message: how messages I left,
• Call – With: how many meaningful conversations I’ve had about whether it’s an opp or not
• Call: All other types of calls (getting to the right person).

You’ll also see that during the course of the last 7 months, I’ve switched strategies in how I approach my job, twice. The first few months, my strategy was to get a hold of someone, no matter how many calls it took. I also didn’t leave any messages, because I thought it would be a waste of time (people almost never call back).

After about two months of relentless calling (and following the advice of my manager), I switched tactics, and started leaving voice messages every time I called someone for the first time. I also tightened my “abandon” criteria – meaning I stopped hounding people until they answered the phone – I would call, leave a message, follow up by email and be done with it.

Tracking daily activity in Sales

By tightening the abandon criteria, I can reach out to a lot more people, and by leaving a message, hope for a better chance that they will notice my outreach.

And the most recent change in strategy (after I got back from vacation) was prompted on my own, with the realization that my goal should be to maximize the number of people I reach out to everyday. With the help of a lot of email templates, I can now send out a lot more email per day, and call to leave a message only to the most promising prospects.

Notice that there is a crucial piece of data missing above. I left out the outcomes data on purpose. The data above is real, and I don’t want to in anyway compromise my current employer’s competitive status by revealing too much information.

What do you think? Have you been able to extract useful strategic information by analyzing daily sales tasks data?

via Flowing Data