Each division (or department) deserves specialized dashboards that best serve its operational needs and performance monitoring. Divisional (or departmental) dashboards serve the specific needs of a division or department within an organization. Therefore, deployment of divisional dashboards requires focus and subject matter expertise from the specific department the dashboards will serve. In this issue of Dashboards 101 we will focus on identifying components of Sales and Marketing dashboards.
Marketing
A marketing dashboard contains all relevant metrics required by the Marketing department. Typical marketing metrics might include current marketing campaigns, media purchase, promotional effectiveness, budget versus expenditure, Web page traffic metrics, insight into competitive landscape, pricing, cross-buying analysis, as well as industry trend summaries.
Metrics would be presented depending on the area of an individual's responsibility within marketing. The following are some of the analytics that may be included in a marketing dashboard:
- Customer Analysis
- Promotional campaign analysis
- Marketing budget versus spending
- Marketing programs by region and territory
- Web trends and click-stream analysis
- Market competitive analysis
- Product mix and cross-buying analysis
- Leads and ROI by marketing channels
- Sales and market share trends
- Promotions versus sales analysis
We will focus on identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and discussing further in detail the following marketing specific dashboards:
Campaign Analysis
If you are a marketing manager, dashboards can help identify where you need to pay the most attention to improve your marketing by measuring and improving effectiveness. Sample campaign analysis metrics include:
- Campaign costs vs. revenue increase
- Penetration by demographic
- Redemption rate
Marketing Division Scenario
In order to measure the success of a campaign reaching the target audiences in marketing and advertising campaigns many organizations will issue coupons and measure the number of coupon redemptions made. This allows an organization to track which advertising mediums lead to the greatest response from the initial investments that have been made.
Therefore, the Director of Marketing requires the monthly trend of redemption metrics. Furthermore, the dashboard must show a summary of both interactive and non-interactive marketing campaigns, which include TV, radio, trade shows, magazine advertisements, and so on.
The design of an effective dashboard in this scenario would require the application of appropriate chart types such as trend line, pie charts, regional maps, and column charts. For example, the past twelve months of redemptions are broken out by Web and Print properties are represented through a trend line chart.
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Campaign Analysis Dashboard (Courtesy of iDashboards)
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Sales
Sales dashboards contain all relevant metrics required for sales management. The following are some of the sales analytics that may be covered within a sales dashboard:
- Sales Planning
- Regional and territorial sales by product
- Actual versus forecast
- Sales funnel and pipeline
- Sales quota versus actual (aggregated and by sales representative)
- Sales by customer
- Inactive customer tracking
- Channel sales
- Sales promotional calendar
- Promotional response analysis
Sales Planning
Dashboards are a great tool for organizations who are interested in streamlining their sales planning processes, and allowing sales representatives to convert estimates into orders. Sample planning metrics include:
- Incoming orders, shipped orders, and backlog
- Real-time shipping statuses
- Delivery cycle times and customer satisfaction
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Sales Planning Dashboard (Courtesy of iDashboards)
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Sales Division Scenario
There are four regions, and under each region there are several geographic sections to be managed. The product is divided into various categories. Regional sales managers require the sales quota and actual sales numbers for the overall region, as well as for each of the sections within their region in various categories. They also require different category scorecards for their regions as well as alerts when certain metrics go out of acceptable ranges.
The design of an effective dashboard in this scenario would require application of appropriate chart types such as trend line, pie charts, and bar charts. For example, the past three to six months of sales could be represented through a trend line; pie charts would indicate the monthly aggregated contributions of various product categories, stacked charts would show relative contributions by the sections within a region, and column charts would compare current versus year-ago numbers for the various product categories as well as for the sections within the region.
Each of these charts in the exhibit can also be clickable to drill down into more detailed charts and reports. Color can be used to indicate the relative performance against preset benchmarks for the respective metrics.
Finally, alerts could be built on each of the categories within sections. If the sales unit or dollar goes below or above predefined thresholds for each of the section-category segments within a region, an alert would be visually presented on the regional dashboard. Moreover, clicking on such an alert could link to a more detailed chart or report about the alerted section.
The aforementioned dashboard could also be extrapolated to lower levels of sales management, all the way down to the individual sales representatives to help them track their individual performance against the corporate benchmark.
By identifying the pertinent KPIs, dashboards provide pertinent information to the individuals regarding their operations. Dashboards are a simple tool for both sales and marketing executives to gain real-time insight into their data.