With the availability and affordability of tools like unified CRM solutions, the measurement of many metrics is automated. Plus, these tools provide dashboards that compile the metrics you need to see in one easy-to-access location.

Unfortunately, many businesses still don’t have a formal metrics and reporting structure established within their organizations. Moreover, those who do report on various metrics, do so in a siloed way and miss opportunities to extract valuable insights and act on them in a timely manner.

Marketing might be reporting on email open rates, but what does that mean for the rest of the business? How does that impact revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and company growth? If all marketing does is pat themselves on the back for increasing email open rates, they end up with what are referred to as “vanity metrics.”

Vanity metrics don’t provide much actionable insight. However, certain metrics provide significant insight into business health and drive the smartest growth decisions. We’ll call them “golden metrics.”

• Productivity metrics
• Sales metrics
• Marketing metrics
• Marketing SEO metrics
• Customer metrics

Golden productivity metrics

Internal teams’ productivity levels are key to business growth—that’s common sense. But it’s easy to mistake the activity for productivity. Let’s quickly touch on that before diving into productivity metrics as it’s an important distinction.

Activity vs. productivity: an important distinction

Excessive meetings provide a great case study through which to distinguish activity from productivity.

Let’s say an employee often schedules meetings to discuss X, Y, or Z. However, during those meetings, little is accomplished, no one is engaged, and the information shared could have easily been conveyed through an email.

On the surface, that person may be seen as a proactive and productive colleague who brings people together to drive initiatives forward. But, more often than not, all they are doing is activelywasting time.

With that important distinction out of the way, let’s look at some key productivity metrics you can start measuring today.

Employee experience: The overlooked key to business success

Employee experience (EX) is one of the important variables that dictate employee productivity and a business success. If your employees aren’t happy, inspired, engaged, and motivated (all parts of the overall EX), the quality of their work product will decline. Plus, employees in these states of mind deliver a poor customer experience, further damaging your bottom line.

The challenge of measuring employee experience

It’s challenging to measure EX because there are too many variables involved. Most companies use surveys. But surveys don’t paint an accurate picture of EX for a variety of reasons, key among them are:

1. Many employees are hesitant to answer survey questions honestly for fear of retribution and this skews results. (You may tell them it’s anonymous, but many employees won’t believe you.)
2. Most companies design their own surveys. However, they are rarely designed by psychometric specialists with the expertise to develop an unbiased survey that produces reliable results. For a survey to be effective, it’s best to outsource it to the experts.

Fortunately, you can maintain insight into the quality of the employee experience without using surveys. You do so by analyzing additional metrics that are directly or indirectly connected to EX. These additional metrics, in addition to being an aggregate representation of EX quality, are themselves great ways to measure productivity.

Employee turnover rate

Turnover is natural and happens in every company. But if your turnover rate is significantly higher than industry benchmarks, it’s a strong indication that productivity is down, and your employee experience needs improving. The average national employee turnover rate in the US (as of 2019) was 22%. (1)

What’s the main driver of employee turnover? The graphic below says it all—82% of respondents to a recent survey cited better job opportunities as the leading cause.(2)

Employee engagement

You can measure employee engagement by looking at their usage rates of the technology you provide to make their jobs easier. Participation in employee engagement programs such as employee volunteer initiatives is another way to measure engagement. And you can use surveys, of course. Just be aware of the points mentioned above about using a psychometric expert to design and administer the survey.

Why is employee engagement so important? Consider that disengaged employees in the United States cost businesses between $450–550 billion annually. (3)

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Golden sales metrics

Fortunately for businesses, it’s much easier to measure sales performance than productivity. Below we lay out the golden metrics for sales, many of which can be measured by the powerful reporting productivity tools of a unified CRM.

Sales revenue

Sales revenue is a simple metric to measure and can provide much insight into the health of your business. This metric can tell you how sticky your product or service is, how competitive you are in your market, whether your marketing initiatives are producing results, and a lot more.

Plus, it’s easy to calculate. There are two types of sales revenue: gross revenue and net revenue. While both are easy to calculate, they provide quite different types of insight.

Gross sales revenue

Gross revenue is simply the amount of money your company brings in through sales. If you sell 100 widgets at $10 each, your gross revenue would 100 times 10, which equates to $1,000. That would be your gross revenue.

Net sales revenue

Net revenue considers expenses as well as incoming cash flow. To calculate net revenue, simply take gross revenue and subtract all the expenses in producing and selling that product or service.

For example, let’s say to produce one widget, you pay $1 for parts, $2 for an employee to produce it, and $2 to rent the space and pay the utilities needed to keep your shop open. Your expenses per widget are $1 + $2+ $2, which equals $5. When you subtract that $5 from the $10 in gross revenue you made from selling it, your net revenue would be $5.

What does each tell you?

If gross revenue is increasing, you can ascertain that sales are up. However, if, at the same time, net revenue is dropping, it means the costs of producing and selling your widgets are increasing. And that means less profit for your business. These are important distinctions that inform different types of forward-looking business growth decisions.

Customer acquisition cost

This is another helpful sales metric that sheds helpful light on the effectiveness of your sales team and the overall health of your business.

This golden metric is calculated per month, quarter, and/or year. To calculate customer acquisition cost, start by calculating the amount of money spent on acquiring new customers: marketing spend, sales technology subscriptions, sales team travel costs, etc. in a given time frame.

Next, divide that amount by the number of new customers acquired during that same time and you have your total customer acquisition cost. This metric is best used in tandem with customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV), when used with customer acquisition cost, is one of the most important metrics to measure. In short, it is the total monetary value your average customer brings to your business.

It’s a bit more complicated to calculate. You start by calculating the average value of a single sale for a given time frame—typically one year. For subscription-based businesses, this isn’t limited to average annual subscription cost per customer—you must consider upsell transactions as well.

Once you calculate the average cost per sale, you then multiply it by the average number of purchase transactions you process per year (again, don’t forget to include upsell purchases). Finally, take that number and multiply it by the average customer lifespan (the amount of time the average customer remains a customer before leaving). That’s your CLV. It’s a particularly important business intelligence metric that all businesses should measure. If this is new to you, read this comprehensive piece on customer lifetime value.

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Golden marketing metrics

Let’s turn our attention to marketing metrics and reporting. Metrics are especially important for marketers. Proving the impact of marketing via metrics and reporting is one of the only ways marketers can justify their worth within an organization.

Marketers measure all sorts of metrics—open rates, click-through rates, new leads generated, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), etc. However, many of them don’t shed any light on overall business health and some don’t even help marketers themselves.

Why measuring MQLs isn’t golden

New leads generated and leads qualified don’t mean much because there’s no telling what will happen to them after they are generated and qualified. Many marketers revel in their ability to generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

The problem with that metric? The marketers using it to measure their own performance are the same people who define what it means to become “qualified.” It’s a subjective metric that many marketers spend way too much time focusing on and celebrating.

Sales measures lead-to-customer conversion rates (how many leads they convert into customers). It’s a helpful metric for sales teams but it doesn’t tie back to marketing because sales teams find many leads on their own.

MQL-to-customer conversion rate: Where the gold lies

The golden marketing metric in this mix is MQL-to-customer conversion rate, which measures the percentage of MQLs that sales convert into customers. Why is this important? It tells marketers how precise their criteria for qualifying a lead is. You can send MQLs to sales all day, but if only two out of 50 of them convert into customers, you’re not qualifying them properly and should sit down with sales and discuss your lead qualification criteria and revisit your lead disposition process.

What matters is that marketing is sending sales the right leads—those that are sales-ready. Quality wins over quantity here. The MQL-to-customer conversion rate will tell you whether you’re sending the right leads at the right time, or if your process needs to be refined. If your ratio is low, you are qualifying leads too soon. If it’s high, congrats, you should be promoted.

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SEO metrics

Among the most important elements of a successful business in the digital era is a healthy website. It’s crucial that your site can easily be found and is engaging enough for visitors to stay for a bit and return later. To drive traffic to your website, you need to constantly tend to search engine optimization (SEO) tactics—both on-page and technical SEO tactics.

Marketing is typically charged with SEO and website design. In the 80s, the physical brochure was your brand’s public face, and it was incredibly important to make yours shine and stand out from the rest.

Websites are today’s brand brochures and it’s equally if not more important that it shines. Why? There are exponentially more websites today (more competition) than there were brochures in the 80s.

How do you ensure your site’s visibility and high engagement? A few golden metrics will give you a constant sense of how well your site is doing, as well as inform you when something needs to be fixed. Let’s break them down.

Total organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to site visitors that find you via search results. Organic traffic doesn’t include visitors that arrived on your site by clicking an ad result—that’s pay-per-click traffic and is a separate tactic and metric altogether.

It’s easy to measure organic traffic. If you have a website, you can connect it to Google Analytics for free and easily grab loads of real-time data about site health, visitor trends, and more. Logically, you want to see a steady uptrend in traffic per week and month over time. Ideally, you want your traffic chart to resemble Berkshire Hathaway’s stock share price chart.

How to interpret organic traffic

You’ll see traffic dips here and there, but you should expect to see more and more visitors to your site as you grow. If your traffic plateaus, it could be caused by any number of things, including backend technical SEO issues that Google and other search engines see as negative factors and penalize your site’s ranking for.

The other usual culprit that causes traffic to stop growing is a drop in the quality of your content. Google’s algorithm keeps getting smarter and can increasingly differentiate high-quality content from fluff and clickbaits. But content quality is better measured by the next metric on our list: average session duration.

Average session duration

This metric can also be pulled from Google Analytics. It tells you the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. If this metric is hovering around one minute, it’s an indication that your site is not engaging visitors and needs some work. If session duration is, on average, three minutes or above, you’re looking good. When you reach five minutes, it’s time to bring out the champagne.

Bounce rate

We’re still in Google Analytics with this one. A “bounce” refers to a visitor who lands on a page, takes no action such as scrolling, clicking anything, etc., then leaves. In other words, they did nothing on your site. They came, took a peek, didn’t like what they saw, and left.

Alternatively, it wasn’t that they didn’t like what they saw but rather they realized they were in the wrong place. That results from your site’s rankings not aligning with search intent, a topic that’s broad enough to deserve its own article.

Quality backlinks

Backlinks are links on other sites that reference information on your site, then link to and send their visitors to your site to learn more. Google sees this as a powerful sign that your site is authoritative and thus ranks it higher.

Backlinks are an important metric to track but beware of one tempering yet self-destructive temptation. Don’t purchase backlinks. You must generate them organically by publishing amazing content that people want to consume. If you buy backlinks, anyone who clicks on them is likely to bounce and/or skew your other website metrics in a negative direction. Also, make sure that your backlinks are from high-ranking, relevant, and quality sites, otherwise they’ll affect your SEO negatively.

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Golden customer-focused metrics

We round out our guide to golden business intelligence metrics with some important customer-focused key performance indicators (KPIs). We’re now in the age of the consumer and customer expectations are higher than ever before. Catering to customers’ needs has never been more important. The metrics below are vital to maintaining a healthy business and insight into your future growth trajectory.

Customer churn and retention

These are two separate metrics but tie into one another. They provide the same type of insight but from opposite ends of a spectrum.

Customer churn

Calculated as a percentage, customer churn rate is the proportion of customers that you lose in a given month or year. It’s a great metric for keeping an eye on how quickly your business is growing and reflects the performance of every team in your business. It’s particularly helpful for subscription-based businesses.

It tells you if you’re losing more customers than you acquire and vice versa. Churn rate is easy to calculate. Simply take the number of customers you lost during a given time frame and divide that by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that timeframe. Then represent that number as a percentage.

For example, if you started the year with 100 customers but lost 15 that year, you would divide 15 by 100, which equals 0.15. As a percentage, that’s 15%. So, your customer churn rate would be 15%.

Customer retention

Customer retention is also most helpful for subscription-based businesses. Customer churn shows you one side of the coin while retention shows you the other. Customer retention tells you the percentage of customers who stick with you and renew their subscription to your product or service.

To calculate retention, you need three numbers: the number of customers you started the year with (A), the number you acquired during the year (B), and the number of customers you had at the end of the year (C). The formula looks like this: ((C – B) / A)) x 100.

For example, let’s say you started the year with 100 customers, acquired 20 new ones, and ended the year with 110 (because you lost 10 during the year). You could subtract 20 from 110 and have 90. Then you’d divide 90 by 100 (the number of customers you started the year with) which gives you 0.9.

Viewed as a percentage, 0.9 is 90%, which would be your customer retention rate. Now, is 90% a good retention rate? That depends on your business model. However, in most cases, it’s a high retention rate that means your business is stable with reliable recurring revenue. If this metric is new to you, learn more about customer retention and strategies to keep your rate high.

Customer effort score

Customer effort score (CES) is a simple metric that measures customer satisfaction and customer experience at the same time. There are various customer satisfaction metrics out there. Many businesses rely on net promoter score (NPS) as the holy grail of satisfaction metrics. However, using NPS as an end goal is misleading both for employees and businesses. NPS should be used as a beginning point, a way to learn and track customer satisfaction for ongoing improvements and building better customer relations.

Now, back to CES. CES measures the amount of effort a customer had to put into a specific interaction with a company. Many businesses use CES to assess the effectiveness of their customer support function, but you can use it to measure any interaction your business has with a customer.

In many ways, higher levels of customer satisfaction depend on reducing the effort a customer must put forth when interacting with a business. If their issue can be solved in a few minutes without putting much of the burden on their shoulders, they will come away satisfied. That indicates a satisfied customer who just received a positive customer experience. Checkmate.

CES tends to be more reliable than other satisfaction metrics. CES is calculated by asking customers to rate the amount of effort they had to put into an interaction, on a 5-point scale, with 1 being “very low effort,” and 5 being “very high effort.”

Collect a number of scores and calculate the average. A score of 2 or lower means that a company is making life easy on its customers, and they are happy. A score of 4 or 5 means that the company should rethink how they support their customers with a mind towards taking some of the burden off their shoulders.

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Connecting the dots

We just covered some of the most valuable metrics businesses today—metrics that provide real, actionable insight. That insight is necessary to make data-driven decisions today.

It’s important that your leadership team gets behind business intelligence and reporting efforts. After all, we have the data at our fingertips. Why would we not use it to inform the decisions we make that will dictate the future survival or failure of our businesses?

Good luck, and may the data be with you.

If you’d like to learn how Insightly CRM can help you to align teams around key metrics, reduce data silos, and create a data-driven culture and decision-making, then request a free demo.

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Sources:

1-2. North American employee turnover: trends and effects, Mercer, 2020

3. DNA of Engagement: How Organizations Can Foster Employee Ownership of Engagement, The Engagement Institute, 2017

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As marketers, we’re charting new territory and are forced to constantly experiment with new, innovative tactics to remain competitive.

Luckily for us, the marketing automation (MA) systems we use provide tools that facilitate this experimentation. An effective way to evaluate new marketing tactics is through A/B testing.

A/B testing lets us deploy two variations of the same marketing tactic, side-by-side, and compare results. In this way, we discover which of the two is more effective. This removes part of the guessing element from our disruptive marketing experimentation and allows us to determine which new tactics to focus on based on data rather than intuition.

Below we dig into A/B testing, discuss when you should use it, and delve into a few best practices for mastering A/B testing in your marketing organization.

What exactly is A/B testing?

With A/B testing, we leverage marketing automation to execute two approaches to the same marketing tactic simultaneously. The best marketing automation solutions let you get pretty granular with A/B testing.

How does it work from a technical perspective?

We can use email marketing as an example to explain the process. When testing two versions of the same email, your MA system will send a sample of each version to two subsets of your overall targeted audience.

Your system will then wait a specified amount of time to measure how each of the two performed. Which had the highest open rate? Which saw the most click-throughs? Which resulted in the most unsubscribes?

Once it has enough data to determine which version is more effective, your system will push that version out to the rest of your target audience.

Why should you use A/B testing?

It’s important to know which marketing tactics best engage your audience, attract new leads, and drive the most lead conversions. If you’re testing an email campaign, A/B testing will tell you which email versions generate the highest open rates, click-through rates, and which generate the most marketing qualified leads.

Experimenting with an email campaign

When applying A/B testing to an email campaign, you can experiment with the subject lines of your emails, the copy of the emails, or the images you use. You can experiment at a more granular level by testing two different font types, font colors, email template designs, headers, sub-headers, names in the email “from” line, and so on.

Testing elements of a marketing campaign

You can also use A/B testing in various parts of a digital marketing campaign. Compare the results of two different landing pages, lead generation forms, or calls-to-action. Moreover, you can test two different marketing campaign sequences to determine the optimal cadence for campaign touchpoints.

Don’t forget statistical significance

When you’re A/B testing new tactics, be sure to apply your test to sample sizes large enough to produce statistically significant results.

If your target audience is 3,000 leads and you only send your initial test versions to subsets of 10 people, your results won’t be reliable enough to represent your entire audience. Sample size (n) is key to effective A/B testing.

Need a quick refresher on statistical significance? Brush up on the subject.

How do you plan & execute an A/B test?

The point of A/B testing is to generate data that leads to actionable insights and empowers you to confidently apply the tactics that are most effective with your target audience. What works for one industry may not work for another.

When planning an A/B test, it’s helpful to follow a set process and stick to it. This produces consistency in your results and strategies. Here is an example of an effective step-by-step process to follow:

1. Define your hypothesis

Determine the question you’re trying to answer. For example, should I send this marketing email from “The [Company Name] Team?” Or, does it make more sense to send it from individual sales executives? You’ll have an assumption of which will be more effective, but that’s just a hunch. Your A/B test will (or won’t) validate your assumption.

2. Determine which & how many tactics to test

Are you going to keep it simple and test two email subject lines? Or are you going to also test send dates to see which day of the week generates the most email opens? If you’re new to A/B testing, we recommend starting by testing one variable, such as an email subject line. It’s best to ease your way into the process and learn as you go.

3. Calculate a statistically significant sample size

Do the math and determine the appropriate sample size for each subset of your test so your results can reliably tell you which tactic to deploy. If you don’t, you’ll be wasting your time because your results won’t accurately predict the results you can expect when you push your tactic out to your entire target audience.

4. Test your test

Quality assurance (QA) is vital to effective A/B testing. Run a test drive of your experiment with some test leads in your CRM database. Be sure you are in that group of test leads so you can walk through the process yourself and ensure everything is set up correctly.

Click every link, complete every form, open every email, and so on. Then check the results to verify that the actions you took are properly represented. If there’s a broken piece of the process, you want to identify it before you execute your test on actual leads or customers.

5. Set your timeframe

How long will you wait, while the test group data is being compiled, before you determine the effective tactic and push it out to your entire audience? The answer is that there is no definitive answer.

The amount of time you should wait depends on how long it will take to accumulate enough data for your results to be statistically significant. That depends on your audience size and how quick they are to act. It’s important not to push out either tactic to the entire group prematurely.

6. Deploy, measure, & analyze

Once you push out the winning tactic, wait an appropriate amount of time, then measure the results. You may find that although Tactic 1 was more effective during your trial test, the results it generated when deployed to the entire audience varied significantly.

If that happens, you might want to run another test, comparing that same tactic with another one, to confirm that it is an effective approach to engaging your audience. There’s no harm in re-testing a tactic because you must understand why a particular tactic was successful.

When should you use A/B testing?

Don’t A/B test any random tactic out of curiosity. You need to set a goal when A/B testing because it is most helpful when you’re trying to solve a problem or improve upon something that’s not working as you need it to.

For example, if conversion rates have been dropping, it’s time to start A/B testing new tactics. If customer retention rates start to fall, pull out your A/B testing playbook. If you simply can’t generate new leads, it’s probably time to experiment with new tactics.

What do you need to conduct A/B tests?

First of all, you need the ability to measure specific metrics—the majority of which can’t be measured without technology. You can’t measure email campaign click-through or open rates without software that automates those processes.

In short, you need a CRM that stores customer and lead data as well as a marketing automation solution with the ability to conduct A/B testing. Some CRMs, like Insightly, include built-in MA capabilities to form a unified CRM system. These are the best kind of solutions to conduct effective A/B testing.

Final thoughts on A/B testing

Now that you understand the basics of A/B testing, as well as why, when, and how to conduct A/B tests, it’s time to get to work. Start thinking about when you might want to run your maiden A/B testing voyage.

If you don’t have the right technology in place to run A/B tests, now’s the time to start thinking about implementing new software—such as a unified CRM—in your organization. Such software does a lot more than allow you to test new tactics. It automates loads of manual processes, ensures data integrity, and allows you to deliver a better customer experience, along with many additional benefits.

If you need to learn more about CRM and MA software, feel free to schedule a free demo with Insightly. We’ll walk you through the benefits you receive from using a unified CRM with built-in marketing automation.

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It happens to everyone. But why?

Let’s explore how bad CRM data happens to good teams—and how to fix and prevent it.

What is “bad data” and why does it happen?

What exactly is “bad data” in the context of your CRM? Defining bad data can seem like a rather subjective exercise. That being said, from a marketing consultant perspective, bad CRM data usually comes in one of the following forms:

Errant records

Example: A lead record contains the wrong email address and/or phone number.

Incomplete records

Example: An organization record contains zero relationship links to related contacts.

Inconsistent records

Example: Some lead records use proper capitalization, while others are all lower case.

Overlapping records

Example: One customer relationship is being tracked across duplicate contact or organization records.

Valueless records

Example: Your company runs an online ad campaign that generates dozens of non-business email addresses that are clearly fakes.

As illustrated by the previous examples, bad data does not originate from a single source. Rather, bad data usually creeps in over time as a result of lax business processes, broken systems and integrations, and subpar decision-making. In short, bad data comes in many forms and from many places, which is why fixing it can be such a challenge.

Fixing bad CRM data

There’s not a magical solution for fixing bad CRM data. There are, however, several steps that you can take to improve your situation:

1. Identify good data and its sources

Before you get bogged down with negativity, it may be wise to first identify the success stories in your CRM. For example, is there a specific advertising campaign that consistently produces large amounts of highly qualified leads with zero (or minimal) data discrepancies? Or, perhaps the use of drop-down menus has streamlined data entry and minimized oversights. Carefully study what works and plan to do it more in the future.

2. Identify and fix largest sources of bad data

We’ve already established that bad data comes from countless sources. But, is it possible that a few sources are responsible for the largest chunk of your problems? If you struggle with duplicate records, perhaps your web-to-lead integration is misconfigured and requires an adjustment. Or, perhaps your CRM administrator does not understand how to properly import trade show attendee lists and could benefit from additional training. Spend time investigating the situation and look for easy fixes that could eliminate hundreds or thousands of issues with minimal effort.

3. Identify and fix less frequent sources of bad data

After correcting the largest issues, it’s time to move on and address the myriad of other less obvious causes of bad CRM data. Here are just a few examples and fixes:

Sales reps don’t have time to worry about entering clean data: Sales reps are very busy people and not everyone is always “detail-oriented.” On the other hand, good data is essential for modern sales teams. Data integrations can simplify the collection of key business information, thereby freeing up sales staff to focus on what they do best—sell.

Customizations are out of control: There are many stakeholders to keep happy when your CRM is your central source of truth. Sales reps want to know everything possible about their leads and contacts. Support agents need a way to track customer satisfaction and prevent churn. Accounting wants the ability to flag problematic accounts. These wants and needs can often manifest themselves as CRM customizations, which can clutter your CRM with unused or misused data fields. Unused and misused data fields lead to bad data. Therefore, be strategic and selective when agreeing to implement a stakeholder’s request for CRM customization. Consider all possible use cases of a customization feature and find a solution that will stand the test of time.

Lack of structure for free-form text fields: VP of marketing. VP Marketing. Vice President, Marketing. These variants essentially mean the same thing, but, when expressed differently, can create confusion and muddy your reporting and segmentation data. Look for ways to standardize the assignment of job titles or consider using tags to categorize contacts by persona.

Deduplication is too complicated (or risky) to mess with: Deduplication can seem like a scary thing, especially when you do not have a formalized lead disposition process. In reality, deduplication prevents staff from wasting time by keeping your data clean. Deduplication workflows vary by CRM provider, but, if you’re an Insightly user, be sure to check out the SmartMerge guide.

No one is validating the data: Banks hire auditors to ensure their financial data is in compliance. Your CPA reviews your business and personal financials to help you file an accurate tax return. But, who is auditing your most valuable business asset, i.e. your CRM data? Ongoing data validation in your CRM is a key step for maximizing business insights and identifying new sources of bad data.

Preventing bad CRM data

In addition to ongoing data validation processes, what other steps can you take to prevent bad CRM data? Here are a few ideas:

Rely on data-driven indicators, such as MQL-to-SQL: What percent of your MQLs (marketing qualified leads) are actually accepted by sales? If the number is low or on a downward trajectory, you may be dealing with an underlying data issue. Does sales have the information it needs to accept a certain type of lead? Is marketing attracting leads that are in the wrong stage of the buyer journey? Sales and marketing metrics, such as MQL-to-SQL ratios, can serve as leading indicators of data-related issues before they become bigger problems. Check your lead disposition process. Use Insightly’s quick guide to learn how to set up and/or improve your lead disposition.

Leverage AI in your CRM: It’s easy to get overly excited about your CRM’s sales and marketing features at the expense of lesser-known technical capabilities. For example, Insightly users will be glad to know that their CRM automatically checks for duplicates each time contacts are added or a data import is performed. Be sure to fully understand and use your CRM’s duplication prevention safeguards.

Frequently reinforce data cleanliness: Your teams can play a pivotal role in maintaining data cleanliness, but only if they understand how to do so. Create standard operating procedures for entering data into your CRM and distribute them to staff. Keep these procedures up-to-date and require managers to ensure their staff have read and understand them. When you hire new staff, make the CRM data management training a mandatory part of onboarding. Look for other ways to make data and data cleanliness an essential part of your company culture.

Out with the bad

No doubt, bad CRM data is a real problem for businesses of all sizes. However, with the right approach, it’s a problem that can and should be resolved. By proactively rooting out bad data and implementing sound business processes, you and your team can maximize the usefulness of a CRM and, as a result, make better decisions, align teams, and grow business faster.

Learn more about the importance of proper customer data management and pick up a few best practices from Insightly’s data management blog series:

• Why customer data is increasingly important (Part 1)
• Top 3 roadblocks to effective data use (Part 2)
• How to accelerate revenue growth with data (Part 3)

To learn how Insightly CRM can help you solve your customer data management needs, request a demo.

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All your CRM data front and center

Built from the ground-up on Insightly’s Customer Relationship Platform, the newly released reporting and dashboard rich analytics feature allows businesses to view critical information directly within the CRM. By building data visualization tools right into its CRM, Insightly provides a powerful out-of-the-box solution for uncovering valuable business data. Customers now have the option to place a dashboard on their home screen so key information is always front and center.

Track performance and find hidden opportunities for growth

With a single view of your CRM data, you can track team performance and quickly make decisions to make a positive impact. Insightly’s dashboard engine includes a calculation tool to crunch numbers and show metrics like “Win Rates” and “Average Sale Price” to measure performance. Plus, with better structured data in Insightly’s dashboards you’ll uncover more opportunities for growth.

Build your own dashboards without IT help

With a simple, intuitive drag and drop interface you can create dashboards in minutes. Easily build individual cards with specific categories and values to add to any dashboard and display them in a variety of visualizations like bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts and more. Personalize the dashboard layout to your preference – resize cards and drag and drop them anywhere on screen – all without needing to be a technical whiz.

Key features include:

• Expanded Chart Types: Insightly provides +40 chart types for sales reps, business leaders and other collaborators to visualize everything from leaderboards and pipeline summaries to project updates and productivity goals
• Custom Field Support: In addition to a wide variety of standard business data, Insightly also supports critical custom fields in dashboard to view segmented data such as lead source, top industries, premier accounts and other criteria.
• Project Insights: Teams can now visualize not only sales information and individual projects organized by status, owner or client. By flagging at-risk projects early, companies can allocate resources to ensure successful on-time completion

Dashboards for any role: Executives, Sales, Marketing

Whether you’re a CEO, sales leader, marketing manager or another role, Insightly’s dashboards provide insight into the overall health and trends you need to make smarter, more informed decisions. Using data drawn from Insightly’s underlying Customer Relationship Intelligence Platform, CRM users can surface rich, customizable dashboards to display dozens of different reports filtered by role, industry, customer profile and other attributes.

Easily share key information

Your business has questions. Insightly CRM has answers. Dashboards are an effective way of organizing report information in one place for insights into key metrics at a glance. Insightly’s sleek dashboards allow companies build KPIs to view insights about their business, track important projects and share information seamlessly within their company.

Availability

The new customer data visualization features are available March 1st across all Insightly CRM plans.

The post Data visualization redefined with dynamic dashboards appeared first on Insightly.

February can sometimes serve as a hard dose of reality. This year was finally going to be the year you realized all those ambitious resolutions. Unfortunately, with January being a month filled full of budgeting, accounting, and other year-end obligations, you probably haven’t had a spare moment to think strategically.

Don’t feel too bad – you still have the better part of the year to make progress.

With January now a distant memory, it’s time you finally sat down and refined (or built) the strategic plan for your business. In this post, I’ll share seven questions to get your strategic juices flowing.

1. What worked?

You probably have a gut feeling about what worked last year. Take, for example, that email campaign your marketing team deployed in mid-July. It was so successful, in fact, that you’re already planning several more like it this year.

Looking beyond the “big wins” of last year, what else worked? What was your seventh-best or eighth-best initiative? How did these programs impact to the company’s bottom line? Without the right data, it’s difficult to know for sure.

Smart business decisions are based on reliable information, which is precisely why you need to connect with your leadership team as soon as possible. Challenge them to identify their five to ten most impactful initiatives, complete with budgeted and actual results. If you receive pushback about data accessibility, you may have identified an issue to solve in the new year (see question #3).

2. What didn’t work?

While you’re at it, go ahead and ask the team to also identify the biggest disappointments of last year. Again, don’t just settle for anecdotal evidence. Ask for specific evidence that something was a failure.

Here’s a classic example. As a marketer, I’m routinely asked to measure the performance of various advertising campaigns. Before I do any analysis, the client will often have a preconceived notion about what didn’t work. However, this opinion may be based entirely on a single KPI, such as number of leads or revenue impact. While these metrics are important, they may not tell the whole story. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that I brought the following numbers to you.

Based on the table above, which campaign was the biggest loser?

If we base success (or lack there of) purely on lead volume, then campaign #1’s meager budget was destined to fail from the get-go. Looking at the data holistically, we learn that this campaign actually had the best conversion rate and most affordable cost per lead. In other words, face value failures can sometimes represent your greatest opportunities for growth!

3. Is anything broken?

The skeptic in you might be tempted to ask what isn’t broke.

As imperfect as your business might seem, the simple truth is that you don’t have time to fix everything. When looking at broken things to fix, you need to cut to the chase and solve the problems that have the greatest impact.

When answering this question, it’s wise to do so through the lens of:

The customer experience: Are customers cancelling or abandoning because they don’t feel loved? Does your product or service need a refresh? Would a better CRM help your company engage more customers and leads?

Revenue-producing activities: Do your sales reps forget to follow up on opportunities? What percentage of the sales team’s day consists of administrative work rather than making calls? Is it time for an overhaul of your lead management process?

Inefficient back office tasks: Is information getting lost between your CRM and your external project management system? Could you reduce confusion simply by aligning project and sales management into a single system?

4. Where do we waste the most time?

If you can’t pinpoint any “broken” systems to fix, you might try looking for a common symptom: wasted time.

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we all do things that are less than optimal. In fact, one of my strategic initiatives for this year is to identify ways that I waste time. Each time I do something that seems like a time waster, I jot it down for future optimization.

Here are a few goodies I’ve discovered so far:

• Deleting marketing emails that I never bother to read (without unsubscribing first)
• Clicking through endless folders on my computer to find documents
• Constantly pushing out due dates on overdue tasks
• Dealing with overlapping reminders on my smartphone
• Spending time on things that I could have paid someone else to do

As the saying goes, you can’t solve a problem unless you first know that it exists. Although I don’t yet have solutions for these time wasters, I’m at least becoming aware of them.

Lead by example and begin studying your own work habits. You’ll likely inspire others at your organization to do the same!

5. What will soon require attention?

The business landscape is always changing. That’s never been more true than in today’s digital ecosystem.

You may not have a crystal ball, but you know your industry as well as anyone. By this time next year, what external forces (if any) will have changed enough to require your attention? What are experts in your field projecting? Are customer tastes and preferences evolving? How will all of this impact your company’s position in the market?

Taking things one step further, it may even be prudent to prepare a situational SWOT analysis, focusing specifically on the forward-facing aspects of the analysis: opportunities and threats.

To illustrate my point, let’s say that your company supplies injection molded parts to the automotive industry. For years, there have been rumors that your largest customer intends to bring this process in-house, thereby negatively impacting your order volume. Lately, you’re seeing evidence that this may becoming true. The threat is obvious—a significant impact to short-term revenue. On the other hand, the opportunities could be worth thinking about:

Opportunities:

• New capacity
• Expansion outside of automotive
• Greater margin potential
• Diversification of risk

Waiting around for things to happen is rarely wise. Smart business owners (like you!) are always a few steps ahead, especially when it comes to anticipating market forces.

6. What can (and should) be automated?

In today’s world of APIs and workflow automation, it’s amazingly easy to automate certain business processes. Alas, knowing what to automate first is where many business owners get stuck.

If you’re unsure of what to prioritize for automation, here are a few ideas:

Recurring tasks: The delegation process itself is a great place to start. Which tasks do your team members commonly forget to do? Do they (or should they) occur on a predictable pattern? If so, adding a recurrence pattern to your tasks might be a smarter way to delegate.

Pipeline administration: When an opportunity advances from one pipeline stage to the next, there’s typically some action required by your staff. If your pipeline has a “Quoting” phase, common sense tells us that a proposal should be prepared at that time. If only it were that apparent to everyone at your company! Stop hoping for results, and automate the assignment of activity sets.

Order delivery: The moment a deal closes, a race begins to deliver goods or services within the customer’s expected time frame. There’s not a moment to lose, which is why manually transferring information from your CRM to another system is particularly inefficient. A better approach involves keeping everything in one system and simply converting the sales record into a project.

7. Which systems align with our goals?

After digging into the prior six questions, you may begin to notice a common thread stemming back to your company’s technology footprint. Do some of your systems overlap in functionality and create more confusion than value? Or, conversely, are some systems being underutilized, thereby causing your team to do unnecessary work? Would an integration between certain applications create new economies of scale for your business and boost user adoption? These are all questions worth asking.

Remember, a software application offers minimal value on its own. To maximize the value of your company’s technology, it’s important to continuously ensure alignment with your strategic vision. As this vision evolves, so too should the systems deployed by your organization.

Get the Conversation Going

Asking the right questions can be an excellent way to launch an effective strategic conversation. As you work on this year’s strategic plan, consider asking more questions and pushing your team to collect the right answers.

Looking at the truth can sometimes feel uncomfortable, but it’s exactly what you need to do when building a more viable strategic plan.

The post 7 strategic questions to ask yourself in Q1 appeared first on Insightly.