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Successful sales of a company’s product are usually the driving force behind the company’s continued growth. As such, companies routinely find it important to set aggressive sales targets for their sales teams, and monitor individual members’ progress along these goals. There are many tools available to company owners for keeping track of how well individual sales team members are selling. However, few, if any, contain the unique advantages for tracking information found in Visual Mind Mapping. With Visual Mind Maps, company owners can easily view sales numbers for a given time period in one intuitive, colorful, and spatially formatted diagram. This diagram, because of its non-linear layout and visually stimulating components, makes processing and conceptualizing the information contained in the map much simpler. Company owners can, thus, use Visual Mind Mapping to determine strong versus weak sellers, as well as what volume of their product is being sold.

What are Visual Mind Maps and How Are They Created?

A Visual Mind Map is “a means of organizing information that allows individuals to create diagrams, pictures, and other graphic visuals in order to show the relationship between ideas or other types of information”.¹ With a Visual Mind Map, the creator makes use of colors and symbols to construct the map and represent his or her ideas in a non-linear format. When creating a Visual Mind Map, the individual usually begins by showing the key concept or main topic of the information as a graphic image, located in the center of the map. Any themes surrounding the main idea are shown on “branches” that are attached to the central topic. Subsequent themes of less importance are then attached to these branches using “child branches”, and so on. The resulting diagram is a “map” of the ideas and information presented that includes the images, visual graphics, and colors the individual associates with each of the themes and ideas.

Using a Visual Mind Map to Track Monthly Company Sales

A company owner wants to track how well his sales team is doing on a monthly basis. He decides to make a list of each team member’s actual versus target sales using a Visual Mind Map. He begins his map by first placing a graphic representing company sales in the center of the map. He then lists the names of each member of the sales team on “branches” that are attached to the central graphic. Next to each member’s name, the owner may list his or her actual vs. target sales for that month. The owner makes sure to use pictures and other graphics throughout the map to clearly designate high performing sellers from low performing sellers, as well as make the map easier to conceptualize. When the owner has completed his map, it closely resembles the attached Mind Map diagram.

Improving Company Sales With the Visual Mind Map

As a result of his Visual Mind Map, the owner now has a way to easily and efficiently track company sales from month to month. In addition, he can also see who among his sales associates is consistently meeting his or her sales targets and who is not. Every sales team member, from highest to lowest performer, as well as their respective sales numbers, is neatly mapped out for the owner in one snapshot diagram. The owner can therefore, better improve company sales through motivating his sales team with incentives for exceeding their current sales. The owner may even want to represent the incentives team members receive on future Visual Mind Maps by listing a star or ribbon next to the team member’s name. By using a Visual Mind Map, the company owner finds he is able to manage his company’s sales, assess sales team members’ performances, and improve sales numbers simply and creatively.

1. Farrand, Paul; Hussain, Fearzana and Hennessy, Enid (May 2002). “The efficacy of the ‘mind map’ study technique”. Medical Education 36 (5): 426–431.

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When undertaking any marketing research project, the first step the market researcher needs to take is to determine exactly how the project will be carried out. Questions such as: “Will this be a computer survey or a phone survey?”, “How many respondents will be surveyed?”, and “How long will the survey be in field?” are crucial to answer before starting the research project. It is often at this point that researchers can get a bit overwhelmed; successfully organizing a research project requires the fitting together of many components. Mind Maps can provide an easy and workable way to organize a research project. By clearly “mapping out” the research project, from beginning to end, using visuals, key words and pictures, the intuitive process of finding out what the consumer thinks can naturally emerge.

An Example of Mind Mapping a Research Project

Consider, as an example, a market researcher who has been hired by her client to find out how well his fast food product rates among fast food consumers. The researcher wants to organize how the study will proceed using a Mind Map. He/She begins by listing the main research objective of the study in the center of the Mind Map, which, in this case, is to find out how fast food consumers rate Product X. Next, he or she lists the main points he or she will undertake in the study, such as “recruit panel”, and “field survey”. These steps are attached to the central objective via “branches” that flow from the objective. Here, the researcher may want to insert any pictures, colors or visuals she chooses to make the Mind Map more intuitive. For example, she may insert a graphic depicting people next to the step “recruit panel”, to represent the people in the panel.

After listing the main steps of the project, the researcher outlines the components of each step, and attaches these components to the steps via “child branches”. Thus, she attaches, “contact panel recruitment firm”, to the step regarding recruiting the panel. Again, he/she may use a visual, such as the logo of the recruitment firm he/she ordinarily uses, to enhance the listed components. He/She then continues attaching components to each main step he/she has listed, as well as lists, via more “child branches”, any sub-components of the components. When she has finished, the researcher has a Mind Map outlining the complete research project, from beginning to end, along with each step that will be taken, and the aspects that comprise these steps. Moreover, since he/she has used colors, visuals and other images to construct the Mind Map, he/she now has all of the information he/she needs to begin the project distilled down into an easily comprehensible layout. The attached Mind Map diagram represents the example research project layout described above.

Beginning the Research Project

With the all-important, and arguably most challenging, step of organizing the research project out of the way, the researcher is now free to begin the work of conducting the study. As shown in the attached Mind Map diagram, all of the steps she needs to conduct the study are clearly laid out. Compare this method of organizing a research project with the method of simply taking notes on a piece of paper. Absent the visual imagery and spatial layout of the Mind Map, the second method would likely be more tedious to comprehend, and thus, work with. The researcher now has the advantage of conducting the study using information that is easily organized and intuitively processed. The research project is ready to commence.

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