The effectiveness of pre-sales meetings can go a long way to advance the success of a sale, depending upon a number of factors.
Using dashboards in pre-sales meetings can provide clarity and focus of your sales message and be a valuable tool to lead potential customers through the story of the sale.
Whether you’re an accountant, a marketing agency, or a consultant, coherent and appealing visualizations elevate your ability to demonstrate the impact of your services and help to bring home the sale. Here’s why.
Reason #1: Visuals leave a stronger impression
Data visualization tools like dashboards leave a deeper impression on your prospects because so much more can be communicated visually than with mere words.
Customer dashboards can skip right to the bottom line, the results, and the rewards almost instantaneously. They provide a higher-level “birds-eye-view” perspective by demonstrating the returns of key performance metrics and analytical insights.
For example, you can compare and contrast relevant data insights or provide a visual depiction of business trends, patterns, and forecasts. Data visualization tools bring more clarity and focus right where you want it.
Key indicators, visually illustrated, are simply more convincing than their counterparts of narratives and bulleted lists. Pictures are, after all, worth a thousand words. Dashboards provide a great advantage and differentiator with your competitors.
Reason #2: Metrics demonstrate your knowledge to your customers
Sure, you’re busy, but having an in-depth understanding of your client or prospect goes far in setting up the foundation of a sale.
When surveyed, buyer executives report that effective meetings with consultants are those where the consultants show that they understand the customer’s business. Understanding the customer should be Job 1 of pre-sales.
Be sure to research the organization’s history, revenues, or spending, depending upon the nature of your intended sale. If relevant, get to know the company’s timeline, their media mix, and volume, as well as their marketing campaigns.
All of these can be depicted in a dashboard for your client or prospect to see that you’ve done your homework and that you’re responding to their unique business challenges.
Successful presales consultants excel by identifying, understanding, and addressing their specific customers’ needs, problems, and opportunities. This is critical to successfully customize complex solutions to your customer’s specific requirements.
Knowing your customers’ concerns allows you to pinpoint their pain points and represent them quantitatively and graphically. When you understand where their greatest challenges are occurring, you can demonstrate how your product will help them in the future. The more metrics you have to demonstrate before-and-after solutions, the more you will get their attention.
For example, you can capture and display their track record in their industry, possibly in comparison to some of their competition. Or in comparison to the industry as a whole.
Begin with the basics, like reviewing their P&L, showing campaign metrics, and delivering financial analyses. Then, impress them even more by demonstrating their potential ability to monitor and track their business performance in real-time, using technology that only dashboards can provide so handily.
Reason #3: Benefits and value build confidence
The primary presales goal is to persuasively connect the product or solution to real benefits and realizable value for your prospective client.
Benefits and value supersede any technical or even production concerns and help manage expectations. You can build your prospect’s confidence in you by illustrating the experience, anecdotes, or case studies from similar customers you’ve worked with previously with success.
Defining and demonstrating these experiences with quantitative benefits and value metrics helps to build trust that you will deliver a successful solution to your prospective client, too.
Reason #4: Persuasiveness rules
In every sales interaction, including pre-sales, persuasion is the currency.
Dashboards help you clearly communicate and persuade more effectively with the help of visualization tools that report key findings, salient metrics, comparisons of anything from financials to production, and even real-time tracking of events and performance.
More than just numbers, dashboards can tell the story you’re wanting to tell.
For every phase of pre-sales—from solution preparation to product demonstrations to proof of concept—using dashboards to illustrate challenges, successes, and solutions for your prospective client can accelerate your close.
ClicData takes data visualization seriously. We invest generously in research to ensure our BI dashboard templates and reports contain the most effective and easily consumable visuals possible.
While providing consolidation of disparate data stores, we focus on providing the data analysis you and your prospects need to take action and improve your business’ bottom line.
If you’d like to know more about how ClicData can help you manage your sales pipeline more efficiently, give us a call!