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Agency Dashboards

By April 18th, 2019 No Comments

Everyone is talking about dashboards. It seems to be the latest buzzword for agencies but although the idea of having live, relevant information in your view is solid, the implementation is not so easy.

You’ve been to the conferences, read the books, looked at other businesses, and you’re convinced that there is value in having a dashboard in your Agency, you’re just not sure what one actually looks like or how to get the data working.

What do you track?

First of all, what do you track? The whole point of a dashboard is that it provides the most important metrics in your business. But how many should you track and which ones?

What should my sales team see vs my operations team and what about the board?

If you track sales conversion rate, you need to understand won and lost sales. But when is a sale lost? Obviously if a prospect outright says no they reject your proposal, but what about if they have just gone quiet on you, does it come lost after a week, a month, 3 months?

Even if you get agreement on what constitutes lost, how do you get the dashboard to work that out so that it can report accurately to you?

Getting this stuff working isn’t easy, it takes a bit of work. But if other agencies have managed to get it working then you can too.

Step into the shoes of an investor

It starts with working out what questions you should be asking of your business – forget about dashboards, about data and work out what you would be asking if you were an investor in this company, and not an owner operator getting caught up in the passion and baggage of the business.

Questions I’d be asking of a business I’d invested in for example would be:
How is profit measuring up against budget?
How much more revenue do we need to make and by when in order to achieve budget?
Which areas of the business are the most and least profitable?

You can then build cascaded metrics on sales actives, financial and operational KPI’s but you know why you are tracking them – to drive the ultimate company objectives.

We take agencies through this process all the time and actually manage to get their dashboard live and working, giving them insightful information that they can trust.

If you’d like to plan and build a dashboard to implement effectively into your agency then book a discovery call and we’ll arrange to meet up.

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