Sales And Marketing Dashboards: The Perfect Gift For A Great 2019

Knowing What Marketing And Sales Tactics Are Showing Results Is A Missing Ingredient In Many Revenue Growth Programs

With Thanksgiving behind us, the focus is now on finishing the year strong and getting ready to kill it in 2019. This is the perfect time to look at how you’re using scorecards and dashboards and reworking your metrics tracking package to provide more insights in 2019.

What gets measured gets done. Today, it’s easier than ever to track almost anything and then present that data in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-analyze and easy-to-act-on format.

If you don’t feel like you have access to info, if you don’t feel like you’re making decisions based on data or if you don’t feel like data is driving your ongoing optimization adjustments, you need an upgrade to your dashboard game.

Here’s how to use dashboards and scorecards to improve the performance of marketing, sales and customer service tactics.

Consider Stage Dashboards Instead Of Tactics Dashboards

Tactical dashboards reflect the legacy thinking from years and years of marketing execution. Email dashboards, website dashboards, search dashboards or social media metrics dashboards don’t tell you how your tactics are impacting your revenue cycle.

Knowing how tactics are working is important, but knowing how your tactical execution is driving people to move through their buyer journey is more helpful today.

This approach means blending tactics by buyer journey stage to get a full picture of how your tactics are working together to drive revenue. It’s a different, more progressive approach, but it’s one that makes uncovering insights much easier.

Use the Cyclonic Buyer Journey™ and build eight sets of dashboards that show you the complete efficiency insights across a variety of tactics in marketing, sales and customer service.

Build, Analyze, Review, Respond To And Act On Processes Around Your Dashboards

You’ll find out pretty quickly that building dashboards and scorecards is not heavy lifting. Today, dashboard tools and software like Databox make it easy to pull data from different sources and create the presentation layer everyone is looking for.

But that’s just 20% of the task. Now you need to look at the data, analyze the data, derive insights from the data, turn those insights into action and then execute those optimization tactics that should drive improvements in the data.

This is hard work. It requires a specialized skill set and people with experiences pulling insights from the data and then creating action plans to take advantage of the data.

The best way to build this at your company is to set up the processes and methodology to deliver the ongoing optimization.

Who does the review? How frequently? Do you have the right people? Are they properly trained? Do you have the team and infrastructure to execute the action plans in a quick and efficient manner?

Set the rhythms and meetings that require your team to show up with the data, insights and action plans. The more you demand they come prepared and the more you start expecting them to talk data, the smarter they’ll get and the faster they’ll get ready to improve the performance of your marketing, sales and customer service programs.

Make It Everyone’s Responsibility To Get Into The Data

If this is going to be the new normal, the data has to be everyone’s responsibility. The dashboards make it easy for everyone to see the same numbers. But if you’re the CEO, don’t expect your lower-level marketing, marketing operations or sales ops people to be the only ones in the data.

You have to be looking at the data. You have to come to the meeting with questions and observations. The more people are looking at the metrics, the more people will have ideas about how to improve the numbers.

Plus, the more you talk about metrics, the more you work with metrics and the more you come up with optimization, experiments or tests to improve the numbers, the smarter your entire organization will become.

Being data driven is going to be a competitive advantage if you can activate this kind of thinking across your entire company.

Practice, Practice And Practice More

Like any new skill you’re working to improve, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. Using data to drive marketing, sales and customer service revenue is no different.

The more you build dashboards, the more you review dashboards and the more you pull insights out of those dashboards, the better you’ll be at this critical skill.

Challenge your team to practice working with data, do it yourself and start encouraging the key behaviors your company needs to make it a data-driven revenue growth company.

Borrow Dashboard Templates From Other Experts

Technology is great, and it means you can get your hands on the dashboards or scorecards from other companies and other dashboard experts.

Instead of recreating these from scratch, you can download or borrow dashboards that already include best practices, smart thinking and designs from industry leaders.

No, this won’t help with insights, process or even knowing what action to take, but at least you’ll have your dashboards ready to go with little or no work on your part.

One of the best places to find amazingly insightful and helpful dashboards is the Databox template gallery.

Data makes people accountable. For hundreds of years, marketing never needed to be accountable to any level of performance or metrics. We made stuff, published ads and went to events. The numbers were the responsibility of the sales team.

But that’s all changed.

Now everyone who is even a little progressive is using data to get better and make an even bigger impact on your business. Even sales teams who were held to do-or-die sales quota attainment are looking at more metrics than ever before, and the result is smarter, more efficient revenue generation.

Headed into 2019, now is the time to decide which numbers are important, set up the dashboards you need to track all this data and, most importantly, put the processes and teams in place to have people act on this data.