Are your dashboards ready for 2018? Six questions you should ask

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“We will have one source of truth in 2018 for monitoring and measuring sales and activities. All information is in Business Analyze, but we made a few small adjustments to our dashboards. In addition to revenues, we added unit targets and gross margins, which are also used to calculate commissions. This will be an exciting year.”
Sondre Birkeland, CEO at Kaffebryggeriet AS

Dashboards don’t last forever. They may always have the latest data, but they may not stay relevant for users. As business challenges and goals change, so must dashboards.

We want to help you start off the year right, ensuring that dashboards adapt to fit to your strategy and operations. Use this list of questions to help you check whether your dashboards need an update.

1.  Are you changing strategy or setting new goals in 2018?

When business strategy changes, so do metrics and KPIs. Should this be the case, updated dashboards will help you evaluate performance and make improvements as you move forward.

Some examples of when metrics change are: focus on new markets or customer segments, increase sales of a particular product(s), reach a new volume or revenue target, encourage a specific type of activity or behavior, sell through a new channel.

2.  Have you undergone a re-organisation?

If you have new roles, teams or processes, it’s a good idea to plan a review session to see how current dashboards are used and identify opportunities. By discussing information needs, goals, activities and team workflows, you will be able to identify new ways dashboards can help alert someone that action is needed or make the work flow smoother.

3.  Have you hired new people?

All new hires need a good introduction to the way performance is measured and the analytical tools that are available.  Is everyone set up with login and password ?  Have they the right level of insight and do their managers? What was their feedback? This is good input to revising or redesigning dashboards.

4.  Have you changed systems or added a database?

If you have created a new database or purchased software systems there may be a good opportunity to gain insight from that data by combining it with other data. For example customer feedback with CRM or support data, or revenue information with invoicing.

In our own company, for example, we set up a new database when we launched our cloud analytics service. Dashboards pull out data so we know when a free trial is activated and can follow other SaaS metrics.

5.  Have you added new fields to SuperOffice?

When you change fields or add new ones in SuperOffice, your users may want to create a report with that field. This is easy to add into dashboards and self-serve analytics.

6.  Have you changed commission rates or plans?

Anytime there is a change in the way commissions are calculated, this should be reflected in commission dashboards so there is high level of transparency.

 Make updates easy

How can we help you update dashboards? Contact ann@businessanalyze.com

Contact us to discuss your dashboards

About Kaffebryggeriet

Kaffebryggeriet AS provides premium coffee and coffee machines to offices and organisations in Norway.

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    Glunz and Jensen applies innovative data management and self-serve analytics to product sales

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    To best serve customers, Glunz & Jensen, the world’s leading supplier of innovative, high-quality solutions for the global prepress industry, has more than 7000 products and parts. At any given time, the company needs accurate and fast insight into product purchases, revenues and gross margins.

    Information about global sales is stored in 4 ERP systems, including Microsoft Dynamics AX. Data is lifted up daily from the databases to the data warehouse and from the warehouse pulled into spreadsheets.

    Spreadsheets contain large amounts of data and potentially more than 75 different views of product sales across businesses, countries, districts, customers, product type, item type and more.

    • 7000 products and parts
    • 4 separate systems with sales data
    • >75 ways to view product sales

    Like many organizations, the global management team uses input from sales analysis to make plans and decisions. With so much data, however, it was difficult to quickly get a view of the complete picture. Leaders needed to review up to 6 sub-levels of data to understand the top level results. Some people made their own analysis but this led to different views of the same figures.

    The company looked for a new, faster way to group, analyze and present information to answer specific business questions.

    From spreadsheets to a totally new way to access data

    The IT team decided to pull data from the data warehouse and offer the organization self-serve analytics. Instead of spreadsheets, users see graphs, and charts on dashboards.

    Picture: Self-serve analytics provide quick answers to specific questions – in all levels of detail.

    Speedy, effective technique to analyze business activities

    – Self-serve analytics give us a totally new way to access and use data. We now have a consistent, fast and readily usable way to analyze and present sales data across the entire business. Users see exactly what they want,” says Steen Tommy Rasmussen, Group IT manager.

    – We also saw improvements in data quality because this way of looking at data makes it much easier to spot errors. That is a win all-round for us and customers.

    With Business Analyze we have an intuitive tool to analyze our business activities across data sources. We can do custom analyses and it is easy to drill down in the data, all the way down to the invoice.” Henrik Blegvad Funk, CFO

     

    Glunz and Jensen at a glance:

    • World’s leading supplier of innovative, high-quality solutions for the global prepress industry
    • Customers in the media and packaging industry including Agfa, Asahi, DuPont, Flint, Fujifilm, Heidelberg, Kodak and MacDermid
    • Listed on Nasdaq OMX Copenhagen A/S
    •  www.glunz-jensen.com/

    Our role: data structure, transformation, analytics and dashboards

     

     

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      How to find forgotten customers – and grow sales

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      Sales results are driven by sales activities. That’s why successful sales teams set activity goals and measure activities  – and why activity reports are pre-defined in our analytics for SuperOffice.

      Activity reports give insight into how many activities, like telephone calls, meeting booked, or offers are carried out, and how much value is created.  By analyzing activities, sales managers get detailed information they can act on and use to influence results.

      You can compare different periods and see which activities the sales rep made that led to a difference in numbers,, and decide next activities to drive more business.

      Which customers should we follow up?

      Consider another scenario. Instead of asking “What activities are we doing?” why not ask “Which customers do NOT have activities?  What companies have we not been in touch with during the past 6 months? Where aren’t there any planned activities during the next 6 months?

       

      Number of planned sales activities = Zero (0)

      Number of completed sales activities = Zero (0)

      By clearly identifying ‘Forgotten’ customers, you avoid losing customers and can put a more effective follow-up strategy in place. There is enormous opportunity to boost sales by reaching out and taking care of customers.

      Follow these steps:

      1. Create a list of ‘Forgotten customers – use Selections in SuperOffice or generate list automatically with Data Optimisation Dashboards
      2. Structure a process for sales to follow up  –   includes who, when and what activities
      3. Monitor the results – keep track of progress and share results with the team

      Do you use SuperOffice CRM?

      Get your own Forgotten customers report and optimse your use of SuperOffice data with Data Optimisation Dashboards.

      Interested in learning more about sales analytics and reporting? Contact us

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        Tinde grows revenues 50%. Big jump in use of business analytics.

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        The Norwegian company, Tinde, is a well known designer and builder of turnkey cabins. Their models are available in many styles at prime mountain locations.

        During the past 3 years, the company has experienced significant growth, doubling their revenues. This year they are building 30% more cabins compared to this period last year. The company employs 100 people and recently opened offices in Stryn in addition to their main office in Ringebu.

        Can’t effectively manage projects with spreadsheets

        Four years ago Tinde started using Superoffice CRM to manage customer information. Like many other project-based organisations, however, project members stored lots of information in their own spreadsheets: Tasks, activities, prices, style, model, size, location, design, owners, materials, permits, milestones and deadlines.

        When the number of projects doubled in a short time,  the traditional way of working didn’t scale. There was:

        • too much time spent looking for information – leaders need faster answers to specific questions
        • too high risk – deadlines or deliverables weren’t clear enough for managers
        • lack of visibility – designers needed a clearer overview of upcoming tasks

        Changed to combination of CRM and business analytics

        Tinde moved all project information into SuperOffice CRM.  They added fields to capture information that was previously in Excel and they set up helpful guides to organize sales and project activities. Then they set up digital dashboards to present select sets of essential information for each user and role.

        Above: Tinde CEO Audun Skattebo checks today’s sales and project reports on digital dashboards.

        Different dashboards allow users to see exactly what they need at a glance. All  information that is entered into SuperOffice, is organized and structured with Business Analyze.

        Project dashboards for example, highlight activities, tasks and deadlines for each person. A construction manager, for example, sees when materials have been delivered on-site for all his/her projects, or where there is a delay, and can get specific details in one click.

         The company has been through an incredible growth spurt. We simply couldn’t manage using the old methods of spreadsheets. CRM software combined with business analytics keeps us closer to what is important and we move faster.  Audun Skattebo, CEO at Tinde

        More than 45 people use dashboards daily. Some examples include:

        CEO Dashboard

        • List of top 10 sales for closing
        • Graph showing all projects sorted per phase
        • Sale last 3 months
        • Activities in organisation
        • Sale vs budget
        • And more specific details about sale/projects

        Designers

        • ‘To-do-list’ of upcoming tasks for the team
        • ‘To-do-list’ of a person’s own tasks
        • List of individual tasks that are overdue
        • List of all tasks that are overdue

        Smoother workflows. Greater efficiencies.

        The company estimates 20-30% savings in terms of efficiencies and upwards of 50% time saved creating weekly and monthly reports. The next phase is to connect information from  ERP system into dashboards. Then sales reports will also contain invoicing and payment details.

        More about Tinde: www.tindehytter.no

        Our role: Business analytics and dashboard software

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          Ann Kristin Søraa joins Business Analyze to lead Customer Success team

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          Warm welcome to Ann!

          Ann is well known for her expertise in implementation and adoption of CRM systems and analytics. She has more than 17 years experience as a consultant in leading CRM companies including SuperOffice and CRM Insight, both Business Analyze partners.

          Now she will lead our Customer Success Team, helping large and small businesses grow by taking advantage of data in their business systems, databases and other apps.

          “We are thrilled Ann has joined our team,” says Einar Gynnild, CEO at Business Analyze.  “She will be a great resource for customers. There are so many way’s companies can use their data and she will help them realize their potential. This can mean a range of activities from modifiying existing reports or dashboards to a strategic review of data optimisation across functions.”

          “I’ve worked with many companies that use Business Analyze. Analytics go hand in hand with CRM. Even though I know Business Analyze well, this is still a major career shift. Now I will work with many more data sources in addition to CRM. The more data companies connect to CRM data, the better picture they can get of customers and opportunities. That’s exciting.

          If you are one of our customers and would like to meet Ann, please feel free to contact her directly.

           

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