Build Better Dashboards Across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success

Transform your data into the power to make better decisions.

Analyst perspective

Imagine sitting in your monthly company meeting, surrounded by reports filled with numbers and percentages. Without good analytics and reporting, these figures are just numbers, detached from any real story. Many companies are missing a critical step for value delivery on this data because it stays at just numbers, without insight into why they are collecting and building reports in the first place.

When analytics are done well, they answer a business question and support the company's business goals. These goals cascade down to each department and each person. However, collecting data alone won't get you to your goal, because without business context, data is just meaningless numbers. The magic happens when you start with a clear goal, understand how each department contributes to it, and see the individual roles within that vision. This approach transforms a dashboard from being merely interesting to genuinely insightful.

Despite all our technological advances, many companies still struggle with the quality of their data. Unstructured and disconnected systems often obscure a single view of the truth. Building a good dashboard requires a detective's mindset with a storyteller's knack for crafting a compelling story that turns the basic numbers into insightful reporting and analytics.

Terra Higginson
Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Pain Points

Even very experienced teams often build the wrong dashboards. Often, they build what they can build instead of focusing on a business goal. As a result, these dashboards fail to drive strategic decision-making and improve company performance.

• Data without insights means analytics often aren't tied to specific business objectives.
• Business goals aren't clearly tied to the metrics, and KPIs are built into a dashboard that each employee sees for themselves daily when they log in.

Obstacles

Many companies lack a single view of a customer; this single source of truth is due to bad data and unreliable or non-existent connections. Building a great marketing dashboard is like piecing together a wonky jigsaw puzzle. You must decide how to connect the data to tell a meaningful and actionable story.

• Disconnected data sources.
• Lack of a single view of the customer.
• Outdated and inaccurate data.
• Poorly defined requirements lead to a bad design, which leads to bad decisions.

Info-Tech's Approach

We work with marketing leaders to build better dashboards and analytics that transform data into true business intelligence.

• Create unified sources of data
• Align KPIs with department goals and create clearly aligned metrics and dashboards.
• Update data in real time so that changes can be made to optimize even in evolving market conditions.

Data without context is worthless. It is just noise. Noisy data leads to poor decisions and missed opportunities. It is only when analytics are tied to business goals and crafted into powerful dashboards with a story that empowers leaders to make better decisions.

The importance of dashboards for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success

Without a good marketing, sales, and customer success dashboard, businesses lack the ability to make data-driven decisions with accurate and up-to-date data.

Great dashboards are foundational in building a great marketing department, as they allow a business to:

• Get real-time updates and track performance.
• Visualize massive amounts of complex data and create a "story" about what's actually happening.
• Make data-driven decisions.

Tip: Don't just build a dashboard to build a dashboard.

Build a dashboard to support a business goal.

Investing in analytics

Become an organization that has the data to make revenue-driving decisions. Investing in data and analytics is essential to moving from the unstructured and chaotic data stage up to predictive and prescriptive analytics.

• Predictive analytics provide us with models that forecast future performance and ROI.
• Prescriptive analytics tell us what should be done with actionable steps based on data insights. This includes target audience recommendations, personalized recommendations, and AI-driven insights on the next best actions for marketing sales and customer success.

How far are you from being able to provide dashboards with prescriptive and predictive analytics?

Harness AI for predictive analytics

How does AI help us build better analytics?

AI allows businesses to connect and query data in new ways. We are looking at new tools like Polymer and Poly AI or existing tools like HubSpot, Zoho, Adobe, or Salesforce, which lay AI on top of their existing applications.

Want to learn more about AI tools for building data visualization and analytics dashboards? Visit the AI marketplace.

Artificial intelligence is capable of querying large data sets using natural language in a way that was previously impossible. This data processing capability allows us to anticipate the most effective problem-solving approaches. For instance, AI can transform raw data into actionable insights, enabling businesses to outperform their competitors and comprehend the constantly changing market.

Visit softwarereviews.com to learn more about the latest AI analytics and dashboard tools.

Connecting data to business outcomes

Don't just pick random data; choose the right data to connect to an important business outcome.

1. What are you trying to do?
   Identify the business goals and time frames.
2. What do you need to measure?
   Identify how marketing efforts support that business goal. Keep this to 1-4 metrics.
3. Where do you need to collect data from?
   Select how often you will collect that data and how you will measure it.
4. How often do you need to update the data and reporting?
   Build the story around the data at set intervals for executive reporting.

Analyst Tip!
Analytics and dashboards should support business outcomes. If your employees are checking their dashboards daily, then you need to use them to the full effect to drive activities that support business outcomes.

Use the Dashboard Workbook for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success published with this research to ensure that you build the right dashboard for the right audience to drive the right business result.

Case Study: Marketing Dashboard
ARR growth strategy dashboard

Increasing ARR by 2% over the next 12 months.

1. What is the business goal and timeline?
   Increase ARR by 2% in the next 12 months.
2. What metrics influence this goal?
   Customer acquisition cost, MQL to SQL conversion rate, customer churn rate.
3. Where do you need to collect data from?
   CRM (note that we need to establish tags for MQL and SQL).
4. How often do you need to update the data and reporting?
   Quarterly reports to C-level (audience) to refine strategy.

Storyline and Strategy
Our competitors are beating us, and we need to improve our ARR to stay in business. How will we do this?

1. Decrease customer acquisition cost (CAC) from 1.5 to 1.4.
2. Improve MQL to SQL conversion rate from 15% to 25%.
3. Reduce churn rate from 5% to 3%.

Reduced CAC and churn leads to 2% increase in ARR

Identify your key metrics for success

What are your SMART goals for the year, and which metrics support these goals?

How will building an analytics dashboard support these goals for each department leader and each employee?

Marketing activities commonly support these metrics:

• New ARR Growth
• Win Rates
• New Customer Acq. Cost (CAC)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• SaaS Quick Ratio
• Pipeline Ratio
• Sales Cycle (in Days)
• Logo Churn Rate (Annual)
• Marketing Influenced Opportunities
• LTV to CAC Ratio

Learn more about key metrics in the Optimize the Right Metrics to Scale Your Business blueprint.

Source: Optimize the Right Metrics to Scale Your Business