Sales and marketing dashboards nobody has to maintain
We build reporting on top of the systems the work already happens in, so a number is calculated the same way every week rather than reassembled by hand each Monday. Pipeline, cost per lead, cash collected. On a recent build, days sales outstanding fell from 41 to 22.
What this looks like before we arrive
- Every dashboard is really a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds on Monday morning
- Two reports of the same number disagree and nobody knows which one to trust
- You find out a campaign stopped working a month after it stopped working
How we build it
Numbers from the source, not from a copy
Every figure is calculated from the system it lives in, on a schedule, with its definition written down next to it. If two people disagree about what qualified means, that gets settled before anything is built rather than argued about afterwards.
Few enough that someone reads them
Three to six numbers a person will actually act on, reported as often as they can act. Weekly if the decision is weekly, daily if it is daily. A dashboard nobody opens is not reporting, it is decoration.
Built on the plumbing underneath
A dashboard is only as honest as the data feeding it, so the reporting comes after the pipes. On the outbound build, measurement was the whole point: 4,820 requests, 41% accepted, 960 conversations, 214 calls booked. Before it, neither founder could tell you which message was working.
Related work
Where we have shipped this
Questions we get asked
Have you built dashboards for a client?
Not as an engagement of its own. The build below was process automation, and days sales outstanding falling from 41 to 22 came out of it. The reporting we do sits alongside work like that, on the same data, rather than being that project. We would rather say so than let a case study stand in for something it was not.
Why not just use the reporting inside our CRM?
Use it if it answers your question. It tends to stop at the edge of the CRM, and the numbers people actually argue about, like cost per closed deal or days sales outstanding, need two or three systems joined up first.
Do I need a data warehouse for this?
Usually not at your size. Most SMB reporting can be built straight off the CRM, the payment processor and the ledger on a schedule. If you genuinely need a warehouse we will say so, but we will not sell you one to make the build look bigger.
What goes on the dashboard?
Whatever changes a decision. On the outbound build the useful ones were acceptance rate, real conversations and calls booked: 41% of 4,820 requests, 960 conversations, 214 calls. Everything else was noise dressed as insight.
Which part of your operation eats the most hours each week?
Tell us. You get a written answer on what to automate first, free, whether or not we ever work together.