Imagine selling something - a clothing line, a car, a machine tool - where you couldn’t let the buyer touch, test, and experience the product. Tough?

Your sales materials provide plenty of data about how your product performs or meets market needs. Your buyer’s fully engaged attention to that data sells the expertise you bring.

But data are just figures on a page. There's always some boredom and skepticism in the buyer's mind.

No boredom and skepticism for Gordon’s Finest Knots, a top purveyor of table tennis nets who had plans for a big expansion in the US market. That’s a fictitious name, but we worked with a real consumer products maker with real US expansion plans. Their product has particularly strong appeal with certain income range and ethnic groups. So as part of their sales and marketing planning, their agency, AC&M (that’s their real name, a top notch multi-cultural agency) asked us how to bring the market opportunity data to life for Kimball’s sales team to present to retail buyers.

You can use the tool we put together for them, right below. (We’ve disguised the retailers they were selling to and scrambled the store locations, but otherwise it’s exactly the same.)

We built it with principles we’ve learned about making data interesting:

1. Have a big main message. Gordon’s needed to show the size of the market potential.

2. Visuals. Maps are engaging, and location is important to every retailer.

3. Interactivity. Almost every element is interactive. Click on the map legend to filter, or the bar graphs to drill in. Hover over the map to see store details. Gordon’s sales team can activate a store hierarchy so the retailer can see opportunity by their regions / districts as well.

4. Flexibility to meet buyer objections. Does the retailer think that an average sale of $60 is too high? Is their store trade radius 10 miles, not 5? Simple controls right on the page let Gordon’s reps change assumptions and respond immediately.

This unique sales tool is instrumental in helping close sales, including one the first week their reps has it.

An interactive tool like this is far more impactful than static numbers in a presentation. Interactive visuals grab attention better than a spreadsheet of numbers.

Whether it’s market data like this, or product performance, configurable pricing, or whatever, we can have an interactive tool like this in your prospects’ hands in a few weeks.