Good question.

I’ve not used them in a situation to gain new clients, but I think you could very easily use it to look at behavioural patterns i.e if you were trying to find things in common that potential customers might have.

For example, if one of your clients had potential customers fill out a survey, you can use it to easily see how various “groupings” responded to certain questions. You could then compare how males vs. females (or various age or income brackets) answered a certain question which may give you additional recommendations for marketing efforts, tactics or approaches, your client might want to consider.

Sure you can do this in other ways, but with pivot tables you can also add several items together to try and see how someone might have responded, you could parse out your exact target audience, age, gender etc and see how their responses varied by certain questions as compared to those outside of the target audience.

As complicated as they look – pivot tables are really very easy once you know how to create them. They can honestly be created within a couple of minutes (or less) and will automatically update formaulas without any extra work on your end.

I mostly use them for analyzing marketing results, but I’d love to hear if anyone else uses them as I’ve described above, or in another way that might be helpful to Chris.

I do a lot of marketing with clients who are looking for more customers. Can you give me an example of how I could use pivot table data in this situation? Then I’ll take the time to really try to figure out how to do it.
Thanks!!
Chris