InetSoft Webinar: Example of a Dashboard Telling a Story

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Dashboards for Marketing Departments. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Here's another great example of a marketing dashboard that tells a story. This is with a partner of ours, one that works on lot of marketing automation systems and here's the dashboard they've built that shows sales won and estimated in pipeline. So, what I love about the story of this particular dashboard is the idea that the sales goal, our goals, our revenue goals, is like a mountain to climb, and that is exactly what this is showing.

So, it's showing how over time this organization has had a particular sales goal, and in particular had sales opportunities in different stages and how over time that mountain is getting climbed.

It's dark blue color if it is closed won business. The blue is in some paperwork. The green is in commitment, and so and so on, up to even the point of a sales accepted lead which is for a lot of us in the marketing world this is where sales team picks up on the work we do.

So this is a great dramatic point about how we're climbing the mountain of sales, where are we. We are almost there. We are nearly to the place we want to be with our funnel. And in fact over here it has expressed the funnel in a more traditional way rather than a cumulative way which is of course a great way to look at it.

Love This Particular Dashboard

So what we see here is the number of leads coming in, the number turning into qualified opportunities and so on all the way down to paperwork approval and closed won for this last quarter and quarter four. So, again this is not our data, but a great example of a funnel and of a story that has real drama about how we're climbing this mountain and how we're going to achieve this goal. So I love this particular dashboard for the natural emotion it shows and the emotion that it demonstrates and unifies. It unifies people.

Another great example, this is a great story that I wanted to show because it also inspires action. So, this is a story of hot accounts. So, if you are a sales rep, in this case you are Daisy, right here, you're able to specify your name or it will identify you and it's going to help you identify all of your accounts, and you're going to be able to actually look at your accounts in a visual way and start to uncover a story of action here.

So she's got a couple of accounts that are very active in terms of website visits, email responsiveness, and marketing campaigns. She's also got some people down here that are in support cases which she might be very concerned about, and she's got a couple here that have opportunities to support cases. So that's another one that she might be wondering gosh maybe I have a hot issue there too that I might want to get involved with.

By clicking on any one of these it will tell her who her hot contacts are in that account, and it will show her some activity that's going on within the account. But not just that, by clicking on a particular account and clicking on a particular person within that account she will see through a tool tip a lot of information about that contact, about that lead, about what's happening, about what that campaign was that they read, what did they do, they visited the website. This is good stuff.

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Drill Down CRM Dashboard

As you can see here, she's got a link so that she can actually drill from the dashboard story of what's happening in her account, where the drama is, to the part that she's concerned about. She can drive to action. She can literally click right on that and see the click stream, and see what the person has been looking at, which is great.

And then she can take it even a step further and launch right into the salesforce.com account and actually see, get into the salesforce.com account, try the phone number, drop off some emails, and start some business processes that help her take advantage of the information and the story that she's uncovered in this dashboard. This dashboard that has led her to action, and that's an important outcome of a good dashboard.