A Sample Corporate Sales Dashboard

Monitoring your Sales team performance is very important for the growth of your company whether it is an infant startup or a tenured enterprise.  If your company is using a CRM solution, such as Salesforce.com or SugarCRM, you already have a wealth of data to leverage.  The trick is to get the right level of actionable data in front of the stakeholders who need it to make a decision.

A Sample Sales Team Dashboard

The dashboard’s purpose below is to communicate the health of a sales team for a company based in Canada.  The stakeholder required a view of sales by region and product category.  In addition, they wanted visibility into product returns and profitability. We used Tableau Public to create the dashboard below with a Canada Superstore data set available for free.  So let’s dive into the dashboard and some of the insights it gives us.

Sales Team Performance

The first three charts on the dashboard illustrate which regions and product categories are driving the most gross revenue.   The first heat map shows Product Category against Region with the darker green color indicating more revenue.  The conclusion is the West drives the most revenue of the regions, with Nunavut bringing up the rear.  However, technology sales are highest in the West, whereas other regions have a more equal distribution.

The second heat map shows Customer Segment against Product Category.  Corporate customers tend to drive the most revenue, with technology and furniture being the highest revenue generator.  The lowest generator is Consumer Office Supplies.

Confidence In Metrics

Metrics are the individual numbers that relate to other numbers that tell a story. Often, these are the numbers that people of all levels of the company use to make decisions.

If a company has a firm grasp of their metrics, fully understand their engine, and have reporting in the right places, there can be some pretty impressive looking dashboards available that tell the health of business at a glance.

However, those fabulous looking metrics and dashboards might be completely meaningless if the there is a broken link between the customer touch point and the data server.  As companies grow, data grows exponentially and marketing landing pages pile up on the server, there is more and more potential for something to break.  Undetected breakage can kill a company!

The best way to resolve this is to assume that the entire system is broken and one must test, test, and test again.  Keeping records at the major data transfer points is one way to keep track of records dropping out and why.  Doing routine quality checks on the data is also a way to keep confidence levels up.

Knowing the data, the trends, and the engine is a great way to detect breakage.  If sales from search take a dive and they have been consistent for the past three years, maybe something broke… maybe your campaigns need a refresh.  A good analyst usually has great instinct on the issues.

Patience in drilling down, slicing and dicing, and becoming intiment with your data is the only way to understand it, make sure it works, and that the story is non-fiction as opposed to some strange, poorly written fiction novel.

How confident are you in your metrics? Is it fiction or non-fiction?

Building Confidence in Your Customers

One of the most important qualities to companies is that their customer have confidence in their product.  So, how do you build confidence in your customers?  Simple, honest, heart-felt interaction.

Selling
When you interact with a customer, whether it is online, via email or phone, remember that you are NOT selling a product.  You are selling a relationship built of trust from human to human.  Discussing the customer’s needs and your product’s abilities in common terms is the best way to the customer’s heart. Throwing in some simple compliments too won’t hurt.  Even if the customer does not buy, you still want them to walk away with warm fuzzy feelings that you helped them

CRM
Remember, customers are human and do not like unexpected occurrences. Communicate with your customers frequently regarding product upgrades, changes, service windows, and even outages.  No one likes being left in the dark.  Look at it as an opportunity to have fun and communicate in creative ways. When something goes wrong, be creative with your apology. Heck, who can get angry at Twitter’s whale or Cox’s Digi. The more effort you take to talk to the customer and inform them, the more they know you care and that is confidence inspiring!

Retention
Let your customers go, but be sad about it. Holding a customer hostage is not going to help them or your business. Allowing your customers to leave when they want, opens up the front door and builds their confidence.  No one will buy a car that they are going to be stuck with.   When they cancel for reasons within your control, listen, listen, listen. While you lost them now, making it clear that you heard them loud and clear during cancellation gives them confidence in returning later.  Let them leave on a heart-felt, positive conversation.

By following some simple rules, you can build an overwhelming amount of confidence in your customers.  So much so, referrals may some drive more business than your outbound marketing campaigns.  If so, this is the best compliment a business can have… you know your customers are confident in your business, interactions, and product.

YouTube Is For More Than Laughs

When I saw this article by Medical News Today, I did a classic double take of the headline:

Clues To Brain Injury Symptom From YouTube Videos

When I talk about patterns and collecting data, finding new, cheap, and creative sources of data is often what separates the truly remarkable from the ordinary research projects.   Conducting brain injury sympton research via YouTube’s “funny” videos is certain a cheap and creative way to help save someone from sustaining further injuries:

“Their findings could have immediate value in helping coaches make educated, objective decisions about whether to return an athlete to play after a blow to the head.”

You can read the rest of the article at the headline above.

This is further proof that social media has a growing value, not just in terms of marketing, sales and collaboration, but in helping our society make smarter decisions.  Since patterns, creativity, inspiration and data are four of my lenses, I might start taking another look at Twitter; not as a marketing tool, but as a resource for learning more about human behavior patterns.

Cheers!