Selecting the Right Technology for Your Marketing Dashboard

January 1, 2005    

Need #1: Know What You Need to Measure

Once your metrics are in place, it's time to select a presentation platform that suits the nature of those metrics. Here, timing becomes important. Consider the following.

• Daily sales figures demand an intranet-driven, browser-based platform that allows easy click-through for each user's targeted update. Based on the complexity of your organization, you'll need to build in a drill-down feature that will allow access to only relevant figures for specific products, regions, business groups, or all three. The bottom line: It's unlikely that everyone in your organization needs to see the exact same data. As we've stated before, you'll need to do some editing to make sure the right people get the right information.

• Brand performance data needs to appear, but not as frequently. At most, data from your brand scorecard (see chapter 6) might be a monthly consideration. When you do release that portion of your dashboard, shared drive or e-mail circulation might be sufficient, even if you choose to encourage a drill-down into perceptions by market segment or constituency.

• Staff skill development measurements might appear quarterly and paper reports might be just fine. In fact, eyes-only paper or password-protected computer updates might be preferable if you're providing data on specific individuals or departments below the summary level. Consider privacy issues when appropriate and match the delivery system accordingly. That's particularly important whenever you're talking about staff or individual performance.

But what if you want to report all three?

Presentation platform selection for your dashboard should always follow a simple rule: Follow the leader. Whichever one of your critical metrics requires the most frequent, most dissectible reporting structure, let that item drive your choice of platform.

As you're sorting through all the elements of this decision, don't forget how important your graphic presentation of this information will be. There are legitimate reasons to use color, charts, and other graphic elements on paper, online, or on your computer. Your goal is to get attention and immediate understanding from your audience. However, if you've ever seen a report so littered with complex charts that it left you distracted, there's a key lesson for your dashboard effort. Always make design and presentation fit the information you're trying to share.

Color, for instance, might work better in an electronic format, since multicolored printing on paper can fail unless you're using good printers and ink. You don't want people sitting at their desks trying to figure out if purple is really blue. If you're going with paper, just keep the colors subtle because that's really all traditional Microsoft color palettes can handle.

Need #2: Understand Your Audience

Successful dashboards are designed to meet the needs of their primary customers - the executives who use them. Consequently, those creating the dashboard should take into account the information absorption preferences and habits of the intended audience to the greatest extent possible. Before design, there needs to be an understanding of how key groups like to receive information.

A little ethnography might help here. Talk to the intended senior recipients. While you're asking them what they would like to see measured and what they regularly refer to now, ask them to show you. Observe the way they retrieve the information to share with you. Do they dig into their shoulder bag or briefcase to pull out a file and hand you some printouts from an e-mail attachment? Do they turn to their computers? If so, do they fumble around a bit to find the right file in the right folder or are they fairly quick to open or launch the application they're looking for? Was it on their "desktop" or nested in a menu of folders?

Watching the habits of your target audience can provide many clues to the right presentation platform. It can also help identify the possible degrees of freedom you might have when you're forced to make the inevitable tradeoffs in lieu of cost savings or other resource constraints. Even if these individuals prefer to receive printed sales reports each week, can you present them electronically in a way that allows one-button pre-formatted printouts? On the other hand, if many of your key users are Web-sophisticates, can you "fake" the Web experience through PowerPoint file design to save a bit on engineering?

The perspective you gain from this ethnography will also give you some clear ideas about how you might enhance the experience for the senior dashboard user by applying the right technology. People often act habitually, even in the face of higher-productivity solutions. You clearly don't want to let the current habits solely dictate your dashboard technology solution. But you also don't want introduce new layers of technology without thoroughly testing the receptivity of the user communities to ensure they too see it as beneficial, and not as an obstacle.

This is a crucial point. You will be forced to make tradeoffs in your dashboard presentation platform. Count on it. Be alert to identifying your degrees of freedom in the early stages of exploration so you increase the size of the ultimate solution set from which to choose.

Also, it may seem pretty obvious that a marketer of technology would probably use technology to tell their story. But what about a paper company? If you're in the business of selling copier and printer paper, shouldn't your dashboard pay homage to your golden goose? Yes, but only if none of the executives in your office have computers on their desks. If they use their computers, then it's probably safe to go electronic - with easy print-out options to use that paper!.

But seriously, if you're trying to build a company on innovation, growth, and efficiency, then your internal marketing strategy will influence your choice of dashboard presentation platform to reinforce the intended image. As long as you're using technology to enable the organization to be more efficient and not just to impress, you're probably fine.

The bottom line: If your CEO finds the dashboard confusing or tough to use, your effort will be doomed to fail. This is not a mistake you want to make.

Need #3: Consider Your Budget ... and Your Need for Speed

As we've stated, the marketing dashboard is NOT something you need to spend a lot of money on relative to underlying technology. Chances are you already have enough horsepower on your desktop computer to do the job very nicely, particularly if you are rolling up lots of data from other places into well-designed summary tables.

Driving the dashboard directly from raw transaction data, shipment data, or research survey responses raises the drill-down possibilities we addressed earlier. If you plan to install a significant amount of drill-down capability, then your choices for a dashboard platform become limited by your enterprise application. Microsoft Office applications will likely perform too slowly if you're driving them off tables consisting of tens of thousands of rows of data.

So if the vision in your head has a champagne glow but your budget has a hops aroma to it, you'll need to think about building the summary tables and feeding them into Excel and PowerPoint. You might splurge a little on graphical presentation applications like Xcelsius or Chart FX to help make your graphics pop and provide better "mouse-over" views of data points under the graphs. But there's no reason to spend big money on a technology platform just to drive a dashboard unless you want the end user to drill all the way down into raw transaction data. Your initial conversations should tell you if they're ready for that.

You can always consider a next-generation investment later, but you don't need to make one at the start unless you're really sure how you want your dashboard system to evolve.

Need #4: Provide Some Drill-Down, but Not Data-Mining

How far are you planning to let your audience drill down in your dashboard? One screen? Two? Five?

If your dashboard is forecasting sales as a function of brand preference, you might want users to drill in to a regional or product-line view. From there, you might want them to see a view by customer value segment. But do they really need to drill into a view by a time-series migration of segments, or to a view that shows them individual customer survey responses compared to transactions?

If you accept the purpose of a marketing dashboard as an executive information tool that puts critical insights at the user's disposal with minimum effort and time, then you realize that drilling down more than three levels is really turning the system into a data-mining or business intelligence tool.

Data mining can become a real danger in the wrong hands. Sure, it might be very convenient for the EVP of sales to be able to drill into a time-series analysis of coffee breaks by redheaded sales reps making over $100,000. But do they have a true need to drill in so deep, or is that something better left to others who have more expertise in query construction and interpretation of data? What makes this difficult is that if you ask them, they'll tell you they want more data. That's just human nature.

Be ready with a diplomatic response. Push back (gently) by asking how they would use it and how often. Then perhaps you can demonstrate how the cost of accommodating the request might exceed the value of the information derived. It's funny how money still speaks louder than information. Your dashboard is intended to serve executive audiences and promote marketing objectivity, accountability, and credibility. Don't confuse those objectives with data mining, which needs to be executed by trained individuals who can gather these deeper insights and interpret them for time-strapped executives.

That's why there's no justification for buying a datamart/data-mining application just to run a marketing dashboard. If you already have such an application installed and are considering adding the dashboard capabilities on top of it, great. Just keep your objectives close at hand when designing it and don't be afraid to put a stop to senseless drill-down provisions to preserve simplicity and ease of use.

Need #5: Get the Right Technology Behind Your Data

Some dashboards are intentionally broad in their view of marketing. They include metrics on brand preference and attributes from research surveys, comparisons of volume and margins from secondary data aggregators, customer transactions from the data warehouse, staff development metrics from the HR department files, competitive actions from tracking vendors, and leads generated from sales CRM systems. That's a lot of information. But it's important to consider that the more systems you are pulling basic data from, the more important it is to have a reliable data aggregation and maintenance capability. And regardless of what technology platform you choose, there could be a lot of upfront work on data integration. While you can pull many sources of data into Excel, more than a handful makes the system unstable. In general, if your dashboard is driven by more than a handful of data tables coming from different sources, you will likely need a more robust application to support it.

Need #6: Prototype, Prototype, Prototype

Let's assume for the moment that you are reading this book because you are attempting to develop your organization's first marketing dashboard. Let's further assume that, as with most complex undertakings involving many people and processes, it might not be exactly right after the first pass. It would be a shame to invest a great deal of money buying, installing, and programming an expensive data presentation system only to discover later that you didn't need that Cadillac system and, worse, that it didn't support some unique dashboard needs after the first release. So many organizations fall into the trap of letting the system functionality dictate the dashboard design while forgetting how necessary it is to have buy-in with key decision makers.

Even if you already have an enterprise system installed in your company like Siebel or SAP, you might want to consider developing your first iterations of the dashboard with PowerPoint or Excel, just to find the right blend of graphic presentation, drill-down relationships, and overall usability. Once you're confident you have the fundamentals right, you can upgrade your enterprise system license to incorporate their dashboard modules and synch both data and presentation up to a single application engine.

Source

"Marketing by the Dashboard Light." Patrick LaPointe. ANA: New York, 2005.