Marketing Dashboards & You Part I

The problem with rental cars is that right about the time you figure them out, you have to give them back. It’s just not obvious how to move the seat, adjust the mirrors and open the little gas door. For reasons I have yet to understand, the rental companies don’t throw the manual into the glove box, they just leave you to work it out for yourself in some dark, cold airport parking lot.  The most mysterious thing about rental cars, however, is the dashboard. To the new driver, they are a confusing mix of unexplained blinky things, ringy things, beepy things and illuminated symbols that might or might not be summoning a superhero.  Add to that gauges for things like volts which don’t seem able to tell you whether you have volts, need volts or just ran over some.

Rental car dashboards are a lot like marketing dashboards. They are mysterious, helpful and widely variable. But they are also quite unlike automobile dashboards in that they are rarely designed by anyone who really knows what they are doing.  Plus they pull information from other peoples’ cars and now and again a mechanic shows up and squishes another little dial or symbol thingy into the already crowded space. In my experience, marketing dashboards have a useful life of about a year and a zombie afterlife of about another year. Here are my tips for building something that might see its second birthday.

Figure out who the dashboard is for…

You’re building the thing either because you need it to justify the vast amount of money you spend, or you’re building it because your boss told you to build it. While we should never discount the creative power of resentment, we do need to make sure that the information we’re pulling is what is relevant to the users, not just what is easy for us to find.

It’s also helpful if the metrics on your dashboard are things other groups care about and not just you. Finance cares about spending (a bit too much in my view), revenue, run rates and discounts, while sales wants to know call volumes and leads and the creative group wants to know if they’re still popular.

I think the best dashboards are those with data that can be slapped onto other people’s dashboards. This makes them both relevant and more likely to be supported with decent data.

…and what they are doing with it

We also need to look upstream and downstream at who is using the data. Beyond your boss, is anyone else using this? Are they, heaven forbid, basing decisions on it? Is your compensation in anyway affected by the content of this dashboard? You probably need to spend a little time asking other groups if they will be using your dashboard data for anything and if so, what. You may also need to update your resume.

If you’re lucky your dashboard may roll up to a bigger dashboard. The lucky part is that if people way up the foodchain will be seeing it, someone is likely to take seriously the task of gathering decent data and reviewing it for accuracy first.

Like your weekly reports, quarterly outlooks and semi-annual strategic plans, your dashboard may be subject to the 3G treatment: Glance, grunt and garbage. This is where the thing you missed Masterpiece Theatre to produce is looked at for about 35 seconds, grunted at ambiguously and then cast aside like big-girl panties on prom night.

3G is disappointing but not as scary as the prospect that someone will take your dashboard data away and do things to it — like include it in a quarterly earnings statement. If there is even the remotest possibility that your dashboard data will enter the public domain, you need to have a chat with the Data Elves and make damn sure it’s absolutely bullet-proof. You may need to update your resume.

Don’t make dashboards a Frankenjob

According to Sirius Decisions, 75% of dashboards are pulled together manually. What that means is that someone who couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way when the crap assignments were being handed out, got this thing — and with it a trip to Frankenjob Hell for the duration.

When you were innocently and ignorantly planning your dashboard and making assumptions about how much time somebody might need to spend chasing this figure and that KPI and the other spreadsheet, you were dreaming. You were thinking this stuff just rained down like fundraising chocolate bars in March. But you were wrong: the poor schmuck who got this file is now spending hours and hours begging for data, hoping for accuracy and praying for redemption.

And when they finally get what appears to be something useful from the CRM system, the sales funnel tool and the scary guy in Finance, they have to squish it into the funky graphic you came up with to represent net margin. All of which takes time and if it’s your time, you may need to update your resume.

Next week, we’ll look at how to add meaning and objectivity.

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Marketing Dashboards & You Part II

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter