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You’ve heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”— the notion that a visual representation can make a complex idea more easily understood than a wordy description.
For example, take a look at an instruction manual for a LEGO® set
(Fig. 1). With nothing but pictures to describe the process, you can take a random pile of bricks and transform them into a miniature work of art.
Many engineering teams across the globe understand the value of using visuals to present technical information to a wide range of audiences and to plan and track complex procedures and tasks.
If you understand the benefits that engineering is gaining from visuals, you can start applying the power of visualization across the entire company—and better yet, you can employ a visual productivity platform to help you get there.
Fig. 1: LEGO® instructions
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The deal just won’t close. Table of contents
4 Managing friction during the onboarding process
6 Managing friction between reps and leadership
It’s projected to be the biggest your company has ever seen, and you’ve had a team of your top performers working on it for months. Your reps are agonizing over every interaction with the customer—they’ve scrutinized every cold call, email, demo, and negotiation to try and determine what you might be missing. But frankly, no one can determine why this pipeline isn’t translating to your bottom line. 8 Managing friction between reps and sales engineers
10 Managing friction between sales engineers
What if we told you the roadblock has little to do with your customer interactions—that instead the root of the problem is sitting right in front of you?
It’s in the novel email chains between team members, the 50 12 Managing friction between different versions of the same PowerPoint deck passed between sales and implementation sales reps, the hoards of Google Docs housing deal information, teams the royal mess of Slack messages, and the out-of-date PDFs—all of
14 Managing friction between
implementation teams and customer success/support which are aimlessly floating around your sales org.
Your internal sales communication (or rather, the lack thereof) is teams
16 Building bridges of the hidden barrier to closing deals.
communication impactful. Visuals are easily digestible and hold power in their simplicity. You can convey much more in a single diagram than you
can occur between roles and demonstrate how visuals can build a solid bridge that will align your sales org so you can close bigger deals faster.

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Visuals have helped engineering teams to:
• Easily communicate technical information to a non-technical audience.
Using the LEGO® instructions as an example, imagine how hard it would be for a young child to put the toy together if words were used instead of pictures (Fig. 2).
In this case, pictures are just more effective. Similarly, engineers use visuals to convey their vision to team members and stakeholders with different levels of technical knowledge. Visuals are a shared language that everyone can understand.
• Locate and diagnose problems with infrastructure.
When engineers lay out complex infrastructures visually, it's easier for them to see all the areas where issues could occur and see how those issues could impact something down the line.
• Think through problems more effectively.
Engineers use visuals to more quickly understand what they need to build and how applications and systems should function. From simple flowcharts to more complex technical diagrams, visuals help engineers visualize where and when problems may come up and think through how to solve them.
Fig. 2: LEGO® instructions
Assembly Instructions:
1 Place one transparent red 1x1 flat tile
(Element ID: 307021) on the outside stud at the bottom of the light gray 3x6 left angle plate (Element ID: 4282789).
2 Place one transparent red 1x1 flat tile on the outside stud at the bottom of the light gray 3x6 right angle plate (Element ID:
4282786).
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The deal just won’t close. Table of contents
4 Managing friction during the onboarding process
6 Managing friction between reps and leadership
It’s projected to be the biggest your company has ever seen, and you’ve had a team of your top performers working on it for months. Your reps are agonizing over every interaction with the customer—they’ve scrutinized every cold call, email, demo, and negotiation to try and determine what you might be missing. But frankly, no one can determine why this pipeline isn’t translating to your bottom line. 8 Managing friction between reps and sales engineers
10 Managing friction between sales engineers
What if we told you the roadblock has little to do with your customer interactions—that instead the root of the problem is sitting right in front of you?
It’s in the novel email chains between team members, the 50 12 Managing friction between different versions of the same PowerPoint deck passed between sales and implementation sales reps, the hoards of Google Docs housing deal information, teams the royal mess of Slack messages, and the out-of-date PDFs—all of
14 Managing friction between
implementation teams and customer success/support which are aimlessly floating around your sales org.
Your internal sales communication (or rather, the lack thereof) is teams
16 Building bridges of the hidden barrier to closing deals.
communication impactful. Visuals are easily digestible and hold power in their simplicity. You can convey much more in a single diagram than you
can occur between roles and demonstrate how visuals can build a


If your company is already making good use of visuals and diagramming to plan, schedule, and track projects, that’s fantastic—your teams are learning and growing more every day as you are able to visually process more data.
But how can you get more out of your visuals?
Many diagrammers have used client-based, platform-dependent programs such as Microsoft Visio® in the past. These types of applications can be adequate for your needs, but look at what
“adequate” means: acceptable, okay, passable, good enough, and so on. A cloud-based visual productivity platform, such as
Lucidchart, provides collaboration and constant innovation so you can create and share all types of visuals more easily.
See what benefits your company can gain from implementing this solution.
Using a web-based visual productivity platform lets you create any type of diagram that’ll help you see your business clearly, make better decisions, and run your company more efficiently.
Because documents created on this platform are saved in the cloud, all team members can access and collaborate on the same documents in real time.
With Visio® Pro, users need to send documents back and forth in order to give feedback and make changes, creating a versioning nightmare. Even in Visio® Online, Microsoft’s web-based version of the diagramming software, only one person at a time can edit a document. If you try to open a shared document, you are prompted to open in read-only mode or create a copy of the document to make edits. As a result, you could end up with multiple copies of the same document with no version control.
It’s too costly for your company to try to manage and maintain licenses for software solutions that only work on one platform. A survey conducted by Lucidchart revealed that most companies, particularly those who have implemented BYOD or CYOD policies, have a mix of operating systems. On average, 55% of employees use Windows, 26% of employees use Mac, and 19% use Linux.
Costs add up quickly once you have to pay for virtual machines and add IT support for multiple operating systems.
There are no workarounds or additional support needed for a cloud-based visual productivity platform—anyone on any browser, any operating system, and any device can use it, reducing costs and headaches.
Visio® Online works across multiple platforms, but because many of the advanced features are only available with Visio® Pro, you’re going to need everybody working in Windows for advanced diagramming.
The Lucidchart cloud-based visual productivity platform works on any platform, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. In fact, Lucidchart works on any device that supports HTML5 web browsers.
Lucidchart lets multiple participants work on the same document at the same time. All changes made sync up automatically, giving you constant access to the latest version of the document.
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You get some simple shapes and arrows with Visio® Online. To create more than just simple diagrams, you need to use Visio® Pro to add or edit shape data, import stencils, and add layers.
Lucidchart gives you all of the advanced diagramming features online. You don’t have to deal with clunky workarounds, and everybody who has access rights can work on any diagram in the cloud.
Working visually should not create more work for you. Many engineers want to see diagrams of their network architecture, code in their repository, etc. in order to gain a quick understanding and explain these systems to others—without taking the time to build those diagrams from scratch.
A good cloud-based visual productivity platform should give users the ability to import data and generate diagrams that can provide actionable insight. In Lucidchart, users can automatically create many types of diagrams, including network diagrams from AWS architecture, organizational charts from CSVs, UML sequence diagrams from text markup, and UML class diagrams from code in their Bitbucket repository.
As more people work from home, companies are looking for better ways to engage their remote employees.
A cloud-based visual productivity platform can facilitate better collaboration in a virtual office setting. Remote workers can chat in the document, make comments on specific parts, and tag other team members. The most current version of the document is available to everyone at all times, keeping everybody on the same page and moving toward the same goals. Copies of various revisions and document history are stored and can be referenced as needed.
And because everything is stored in the cloud, anyone with the proper security access can open and work on any available document. You no longer have to worry about finding documents that may have been lost when an employee leaves the company.
Every document you need is stored securely in a location that can be accessed anytime from anywhere in the world.
Case study: Appirio
Appirio is a virtual company with employees spread across the globe. Appirio decided to use Lucidchart as its cloudbased visual productivity platform, and it has been crucial to their success. Employees can keep data updated across different time zones, track edits, and work simultaneously on documents from locations around the world.
Aaron Barratt, senior IT specialist and Lucidchart admin at
Appirio, had this to say about Lucidchart:
“Lucidchart has provided these collaboration features that we’ve always hoped for. They have smoothed out the process of project teams working together when half of the team is on the other side of the world. There’s now a very steady, almost around-the-clock flow as opposed to before, when the team in one country would work on something for a day and then send it to the team in another country who would work on it for another day. Now, it’s just flowing straight through as though we are all in the same room.”
See more differences between Lucidchart and Visio®.
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The deal just won’t close. Table of contents
4 Managing friction during the onboarding process
6 Managing friction between reps and leadership
It’s projected to be the biggest your company has ever seen, and you’ve had a team of your top performers working on it for months. Your reps are agonizing over every interaction with the customer—they’ve scrutinized every cold call, email, demo, and negotiation to try and determine what you might be missing. But frankly, no one can determine why this pipeline isn’t translating to your bottom line. 8 Managing friction between reps and sales engineers
10 Managing friction between sales engineers
What if we told you the roadblock has little to do with your customer interactions—that instead the root of the problem is sitting right in front of you?
It’s in the novel email chains between team members, the 50 12 Managing friction between different versions of the same PowerPoint deck passed between sales and implementation sales reps, the hoards of Google Docs housing deal information, teams the royal mess of Slack messages, and the out-of-date PDFs—all of
14 Managing friction between
implementation teams and customer success/support which are aimlessly floating around your sales org.
Your internal sales communication (or rather, the lack thereof) is teams
16 Building bridges of the hidden barrier to closing deals.
communication impactful. Visuals are easily digestible and hold power in their simplicity. You can convey much more in a single diagram than you
can occur between roles and demonstrate how visuals can build a solid bridge that will align your sales org so you can close bigger deals faster.


As you can see, engineering teams across the world have reaped the benefits associated with diagramming and using a cloud-based visual productivity platform to share ideas, communicate technical information, and diagnose and solve problems.
But visualization isn’t just for the engineers—every department and team in your company can benefit from using this solution. Learn how diagramming and visuals can be beneficial to your information technology, human resources, sales, project management, and operations departments throughout your company.
The responsibilities of an IT professional are numerous and varied.
Employees in your IT organization are responsible for the architecture, hardware, software, and networking of computers. They keep everything up and running to ensure employee productivity.
In order to keep things running smoothly, IT professionals need to follow standardized procedures. Diagramming these procedures can help identify gaps, breakdowns, and areas for improvement.
Case study: Taco Bell
Taco Bell is more than the people who take your order and make delicious tacos and burritos. With over 7,000 restaurants worldwide, it can be an IT nightmare to plan and track common processes that may be shared across all sites.
Mike Doane is an IT service delivery consultant at Taco Bell.
Using diagrams, Mike has a knack for finding what’s broken and patching it up.
Mike explains the benefits of having visuals:
“Generally, processes exist in each person's mind in a different way. There are misunderstandings, but when you get everyone in the same room and you project it up on the screen and everyone's looking at it from a visual process or perspective, then you're able to have breakthroughs that you wouldn't have otherwise."
Mike uses these meetings with the client to design new and improved processes, and visuals help him identify gaps and inefficiencies. In one instance, he was working with an IT support team that had a terrible reputation. Mike was brought in to turn things around, and at first, he was stumped—the team seemed sharp and easy to work with, but customers kept complaining about their unresponsiveness.
While diagramming, Mike and the team realized there was one email address that wasn’t being monitored. They discovered that the email address was similar to the one that had been put into an IT department letterhead, except that it included one extra hyphen. As a result, there were thousands of support requests that had gone unread and unanswered.
Mike explains:
“You would think someone should have caught that. But they never did. There were so many different ways that people could request support. One little hyphen was causing all these problems. We were able to fix it just by mapping everything in Lucidchart with everyone in a room talking.
Lucidchart helps get people to break through mental barriers and identify blind spots that exist in processes.
“The cool thing about Lucidchart is that you’re able to give a finished product that lives on even after I leave the team.
Hopefully, they’re still using the Lucidchart documents today—that’s my goal."
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Case study: LogMeIn
LogMeIn, a SaaS company based in Boston, Massachusetts, offers remote connectivity services so users can access their work and IT professionals and technicians can provide support from anywhere.
Trevor Bryant, senior network engineer at LogMeIn—a SaaS company based in Boston, Massachusetts—oversees the network infrastructure of all the company’s North American offices. He creates network diagrams to discover, design, and document the setup of each office for faster planning and support.
Trevor’s team is split between Mac and Windows users, which often made it difficult to share diagrams with other team members. By using a web-based visual productivity platform, the team’s network diagrams are available on any operating system, anywhere in the world, from one central location.
Because of Trevor and his team’s efforts, LogMeIn has realized the following benefits:
• Documentation in a central location
Everyone on the network engineering team at LogMeIn has immediate access to network diagrams when they need them.
• Collaboration
Because the diagrams are easily accessible from anywhere at any time, LogMeIn employees are more likely to update their diagrams more often, and real-time collaboration gives everybody access to the most up-to-date information.
• Company-wide use
Because a centralized, cloud-based productivity platform is so cost-effective, it can be rolled out to and used by more people throughout the company. As more people use the diagrams, understanding of processes and procedures increases.
The employees in your HR department love organizational charts because they provide a visual overview of your organization's structure and the hierarchical relationships among all employees.
The org chart gives you a quick understanding of who reports to whom and where each employee fits in the company. HR professionals and business leaders can use this information to assess future hiring needs and to plan for organizational changes.
A centralized, cloud-based visual productivity platform can be very beneficial to an HR team since it gives them the ability to share and review chart diagrams in real time, updating as necessary. HR can also grant anyone at the company access to the org chart, so other departments can ensure pay equity, make hiring plans, etc.
No matter what kind of business you operate, you depend on your sales team to bring in the revenue you need to stay in business.
Although procedures may vary, the sales process is similar for all companies—a customer exchanges money for products or services. Of course, there is a lot more to selling than that simplified explanation, and diagramming can help sales teams define standardized procedures and processes to be more successful.
When sales teams build account maps, process maps, and other visuals in a cloud-based visual productivity platform, they can:
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• Visualize key relationships among clients and prospects and identify the best path to sale.
• Make essential account knowledge accessible to the entire org, which is especially beneficial when a rep leaves or switches territories.
• Drive more accurate reporting and forecasting when sales leadership uses account maps to quickly understand the progress on an account or deal.
• Conduct in-depth deal reviews by using account maps to quickly understand the current status of an account and identify next steps.
• Standardize processes and best practices for lead qualification, rules of engagement, etc.
Project managers are very busy and have many responsibilities, including the planning and execution of a project. To accomplish the various tasks on their plates, project managers can use a visual productivity platform and:
• Create customer journey maps to understand how customers use the product and what their needs are.
• Create user flows and mockups to show engineers and stakeholders how the product should look and function.
• Build process flows, timelines, and Gantt charts to keep the entire team on the same page to hit product release dates.
• Develop, manage, and share product roadmaps.
• Gather requirements and map dependencies.
A visual productivity platform will help project managers manage and easily share data with all stakeholders.
Case study: DocuSign
DocuSign is a San Francisco-based company that provides electronic signature technology that allows you to send, sign, and manage agreements anytime, anywhere, on any device. Jen Zagofsky, senior director on the program management team at DocuSign, wanted to improve the team’s planning cycle.
With teams in San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago, Jen found that it was difficult to conduct quarterly increment planning sessions without all participants being together in the same room. A component of Scaled Agile, her increment planning sessions consisted of constructing a large product development board with horizontal swimlanes designating teams and vertical swimlanes designating sprints. Different stories, epics, or pieces of work were written on Post-it notes scattered throughout the resulting checkerboard, with strings linking the dependencies.
“We would be in there all day, overwhelmed by this giant poster chart and simply trying to keep everyone sane until the end of the day,” recalls Kunal Arora, senior program manager at DocuSign.
DocuSign needed a better solution.
Jen started looking for a tool that was cloud-based and could allow multiple team members to work on the same document at the same time from any location.
“That’s what makes Lucidchart great,” Jen explains. “It’s real-time, and it’s in the cloud. Three teams can be updating it at once.”
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“Lucidchart allows teams to more accurately and efficiently reflect what their commitments are each sprint. The tool helps us make adjustments to those commitments on the fly, as we have the flexibility to revise as needed. Lucidchart is working wonders for us,” said Kunal of the new process.
“It’s very easy to use, yet when I need it for a complex use case such as this, I can drill down and get the functionality I need,” says Jen.
“Lucidchart is absolutely required for our process now. I don’t know how we would get this information ready and in front of the executive team without the use of this tool. We are very excited about this process and how it is working for us,”
Kunal states.
Operations professionals, such as business analysts and process engineers, need to communicate well and interact on a personal level with many people throughout an organization to help different teams and divisions work together smoothly. A cloud-based visual productivity platform can help in the following ways:
• Map out as-is and to-be processes
After gathering business requirements, those who work in operations can easily create workflows to define business architecture and clarify business needs. They can also map process improvements to standardize and optimize existing workflows.
• Get buy-in from stakeholders
Centralized maps and charts help clearly communicate potential problems and solutions to decision-makers and stakeholders.
• Communicate a deployment plan
A cloud-based system makes it easier to communicate and execute deployment plans by sharing easy-to-digest visuals with those implementing the process.
• Create a single source of truth
Working in the cloud enables collaboration in real time and allows multiple users to contribute and update documents at the same time. This functionality results in a single source of truth and eliminates the confusion that comes with multiple versions of the same document floating around.
Best P ath of Sale
Best P ath of Sale
Best P ath of Sale
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The deal just won’t close. Table of contents
4 Managing friction during the onboarding process
6 Managing friction between reps and leadership
It’s projected to be the biggest your company has ever seen, and you’ve had a team of your top performers working on it for months. Your reps are agonizing over every interaction with the customer—they’ve scrutinized every cold call, email, demo, and negotiation to try and determine what you might be missing. But frankly, no one can determine why this pipeline isn’t translating to your bottom line. 8 Managing friction between reps and sales engineers
10 Managing friction between sales engineers
What if we told you the roadblock has little to do with your customer interactions—that instead the root of the problem is sitting right in front of you?
It’s in the novel email chains between team members, the 50 12 Managing friction between different versions of the same PowerPoint deck passed between sales and implementation sales reps, the hoards of Google Docs housing deal information, teams the royal mess of Slack messages, and the out-of-date PDFs—all of
14 Managing friction between
implementation teams and customer success/support which are aimlessly floating around your sales org.
Your internal sales communication (or rather, the lack thereof) is teams
16 Building bridges of the hidden barrier to closing deals.
communication impactful. Visuals are easily digestible and hold power in their simplicity. You can convey much more in a single diagram than you
can occur between roles and demonstrate how visuals can build a


As companies have spread out across the country and the world, they have turned to solutions that allow teams to collaborate together from any location at any time. Collaborative platforms, such as Slack, Atlassian, G Suite, and Office 365, provide many benefits, including easy access to documentation, more efficient communication, cost savings, and improved team alignment.
The one problem? None of these platforms leverage the power of visualization.
A cloud-based visual productivity platform can seamlessly integrate with and maximize the value of the tools you already have in place.
People learn more and retain more knowledge when the information is presented to them visually. By integrating a visual productivity platform with other apps, users can include diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, or any other visual data into any document that can be accessed and worked on as needed by any other team member. In addition, you could easily import data from these other tools into your visual productivity platform to automatically build diagrams and charts.
Lucidchart seamlessly integrates with many of the most popular productivity tools being used throughout the world, including:
• Slack — Share previously created diagrams in Slack or create new Lucidchart documents that can be accessed by anybody assigned to your channel.
• Google —Easily share, create, and manage Lucidchart documents in Google apps such as Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and
G Suite.
• Atlassian— Seamlessly integrate with the Atlassian programs
Confluence, Jira, and Bitbucket.
• Microsoft —Word, Excel, and PowerPoint add-ons allow you to include Lucidchart diagrams within your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. When integrating with Microsoft
Teams, you can create or add a Lucidchart document as a tab in any team channel.
• BambooHR —Import data into Lucidchart to generate org charts automatically.
• Salesforce —Import Salesforce contact data into Lucidchart to build account maps and discover the best path to sale.
So what results do you see when you combine the power of collaboration and visuals? Because people understand and follow visuals more easily than text-heavy data, employees are more likely to share documents that include integrated visuals. For example, companies that have integrated Lucidchart with G Suite share 25% more documents with their colleagues.
Case study: Pearson
Pearson is a leading learning company with 48,000 employees in over 60 countries. They chose to integrate Lucidchart and G Suite.
Neha Datt, digital product manager at Pearson, said, "I think that Lucidchart works quite well with the Google Suite to be able to provide you with a mechanism for providing written as well as visual representations of what you are trying to convey to people.”
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Pearson employees found that Lucidchart’s integration was simple and painless. Nicholas Williams, senior technical design engineer at Pearson, had been using Visio and was skeptical about switching to Lucidchart. He said, “Coming from the Visio world previously, I doubted that any remote or web-based application would be as responsive as Visio.
Lucidchart works fantastically—it's zippy, it's fast, there's no delay."
Lucidchart is powerful, is easy to use, and has a very small learning curve. Gabe Gloege, Director of Learning and Development said, "What drew me to Lucidchart was the elegance of the interface. It required virtually no training—drag a shape, drag a line, connect things, move them around—and that was really important for me. Lucidchart brings clarity and insight to situations where PowerPoint just wouldn’t cut it."
The ability to integrate with popular, industry-leading software means that your employees can innovate faster and get more work done in less time. When Lucidchart is integrated with existing tools to form a visual productivity and collaboration solution, productivity and innovation across your enterprise can increase by 40%.
The following statistics, collected from a survey sent to Lucidchart customers in May 2017, illustrate how your company can benefit from adding Lucidchart into your tech stack:
• Innovation increased by an average of 42% across diverse business segments such as:
42% 45% 38% 35% 38%
40%
20%
0%
100%
80%
60%
Executive/
Leadership
Network
Engineering
Software
Engineering
Operations Sales/
Marketing
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• The following business segments saw significant efficiency increases when improving processes:
43% 43% 34% 37% 38%
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
Executive/
Leadership
Network
Engineering
Software
Engineering
Operations Sales/
Marketing
• The following business segments reported saving significant amounts of time when using Lucidchart for training and onboarding:
4.2 hrs
5 hrs
4 hrs
3 hrs
2 hrs
1 hr
0 hrs
Executive/
Leadership
3.6 hrs 3.2 hrs 2.6 hrs
Network
Engineering
Software
Engineering
Operations
2.8 hrs
Sales/
Marketing
• On average, users reported that, when using Lucidchart, they experienced a 38% increase in productivity and a 43% increase in transparency.
• Executive leadership reported that teams save 4.9 hours per week when architecting new applications and systems.
• On average, businesses reported saving 2.9 hours per week when using Lucidchart to share and collaborate with others.
• Sales teams reported saving 3.9 hours per week when using
Lucidchart.
• Network engineers reported saving five hours per week when using Lucidchart to track and troubleshoot problems.
Hopefully now you see that your engineering departments are onto something.
Just as engineers are using diagrams and visuals to communicate technical information to all audiences and solve problems more efficiently, every role throughout your company can also reap the benefits of working visually. Empower your entire workforce with a cloud-based visual productivity platform, combined with the collaboration tools your employees already use, to increase collaboration and effectiveness across all departments and locations.
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Lucidchart is the essential visual productivity platform that helps anyone understand and share ideas, information, and processes with clarity. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, anyone can learn to work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more. Lucidchart is utilized in over 180 countries by more than 15 million users, from sales managers mapping out prospective organizations to IT directors visualizing their network infrastructure. The platform integrates with leading productivity applications, including G
Suite, Microsoft Office, Salesforce, Confluence, Jira, and Slack.
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