As the house for all of your metrics and KPI tracking, dashboards are the trusty sidekick that every B2B professional needs. Dashboards will allow you to gain a real-time overview of how your business or department is performing and make smarter decisions driven by data.
Ortto spoke to a range of B2B professionals to find out what dashboards they need to ensure their business or departmental success.
Financial dashboard
Setting up a financial dashboard is one of the best ways to visualize, track and gain timely insight into the performance of your team or business.
For Michael Alexis, CEO of TeamBuilding, this is their primary dashboard. He shares, “this dashboard includes our revenue and costs for the year, organized by month and attribution. For example, we can easily see the labor costs during our busy season, or what our top three selling products are.”
The financial dashboard provides an important overview of the health of the business, or campaign activity that helps Michael Alexis and his team to, “make informed decisions, quickly. For example, based on previous years’ data we can estimate how many seasonal staff to hire. Similarly, we’ve optimized our product offerings to align with what clients want. This iterative approach helps us improve year to year, and ensure the longevity of the company.”
Top 5 reports to include:
Revenue
Costs
Attribution
Highest selling products /services
New leads / customers
Marketing dashboard
This is essential to include as part of your B2B dashboard collection. Whether you glance at it daily or go into a deeper dive weekly, you can keep track on the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Milo Cruz, CMO of FreelanceWritngJobs, “uses dashboards to track and improve various marketing initiatives. Some of the key metrics we look at include conversion rate, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. Combined, these factors paint an informative picture of how well our marketing campaigns are performing.”
“We divide each of these factors according to the marketing channels we use, which include email campaigns, social media, and website content. This lets us compare the effectiveness of each vertical, giving us better insights into improving their performance,” he continued.
With so many disciplines under the one department, this dashboard can quickly become quite lengthy, so depending on the set-up of your business, it may pay to break this dashboard down, for example:
Content - See how your visitors are engaging with the content you’re creating. Also, look at how they reach you as it will give you a great indication of where to focus your efforts or the areas that need improving or a different strategy altogether.
Paid media - There are usually many channels included under the paid media umbrella, for example Google ads or Facebook Ads. Create a specific paid media dashboard to see an overview of how all your channels are performing. This dashboard can also be used to compare the top performers, helping you to prioritize resources.
SEO / web analytics - This dashboard will give you a better understanding of your website and SEO strategy. It will highlight the areas of your website that need to be optimized while also displaying the top-performing pages and the top converting keywords.
“Aside from helping us promote our brand better, the information on our dashboard helps us prioritize our work. Since we have a lean team, identifying the best-performing campaigns lets us know what to spend most of our time and resources on,” added Cruz.
Top 5 reports to include:
Website visitors
Leads
Cost of acquisition
ROI / ROAS
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Opportunities dashboard
This can also be referred to as the sales dashboard and will provide excellent transparency on the state of leads coming in and the conversion rate. Depending on your company setup, you can also show a tally board of the sales team and the accounts that they’ve won.
As an agency, Jimmy Phan the Founder of HARO Guy uses a sales-like dashboard to gain, “a bird-eye view of my agency's performance.”
Their purpose-built dashboard tracks, "business development metrics, this includes the number of cold emails and cold calling made, meeting booking rate, and close rate, broken down by each salesperson.”
Every business will be different and have distinct sales goals, so as long as your dashboard is set up to align both your company objectives and the team then you will be on your path to success.
Top 5 reports to include:
Sales forecast vs actual sales
Sales representatives performance
Average deal size
Sales qualified leads (SQL)
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Customer behavior dashboard
The merchant-friendly technology platform Swipeby enables restaurants of all sizes to manage their orders efficiently. They use a sales and customer behavior-related dashboard, “to improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction,” shared Co-Founder and CEO of Verb Data, Dave Hurt.
Verb Data is the platform responsible for creating Swipeby’s customer behavior-related dashboard believing this type of dashboard, “helps clients (restaurant owners) to glean actionable insights in real-time.”
The dashboard collects data, “through modules like POS (point of sale) analytics- total sales/time; channel analytics - distribution of sales across ordering methods such as website order, app orders, third-party orders; off-premise vs on-premise order statistics, and so on,“ said Hurt.
This will help build a customer profile for each restaurant, where you can fine-tune and optimize the customer experience based on the data collected.
Top 5 reports to include:
Track the source of order (web, app, 3rd party)
Average ticket size per customer
Monitor the amount earned via tips
No. of visits/orders per customer
Customer profiling
Customer support dashboard
Listening and learning from your customers is crucial to the health and longevity of any business. By creating a customer support dashboard you can track the common queries or pain points raised by your customers.
By looking for common questions or trends, you can help drive product or service fixes as well as inspiration for content creation, making it a much better experience for your clients. This dashboard should also include the quantity of customer support tickets created, so you can keep an eye on the support resources needed for your business to meet demand and retain a strong support reputation.
Top 5 reports to include:
Tickets by day / week / month
Tickets by status
Chats per day vs tickets by day
Average tickets per day
Net promoter scores
Attribution dashboard
A multi-touch attribution dashboard will help you see the value of each touchpoint across the buying lifecycle. Pinpointing the exact sales and marketing effort that led to the conversion will help you make better, data-driven decisions, especially when prioritizing time and resources for future marketing campaigns.
Looking at each campaign's conversion rate, revenue, and costs across the business will help you evaluate the impact of each touchpoint.
Top 5 reports to include:
Revenue
Actual cost
ROI
Top campaigns
Revenue share by campaign type
Social media dashboard
This dashboard is great at presenting the health of each of your social media platforms. It will provide a top-level view of how your B2B social media marketing strategy is performing.
Along with vanity metrics, for example, the number of followers, engagement rate, and reach, you should also include website traffic. This will help you measure the success of your social media campaigns, along with the type of posts that drive traffic to your website.
Top 5 reports to include:
Followers
Reach
Engagement rate
Website traffic
Traffic by source and campaign
Final word
Over to you now. The example B2B dashboards provided above can be used as a base for you to start creating your own in Ortto. With templates on offer and a variety of report styles to choose from, you can build a customized dashboard to fit all the business critical KPI’s you need to keep an eye on.
Author
More by Meagan Philpot
Meagan Philpot has no more articles
