Whether you’re a new Klipfolio user or you’ve been building dashboards for years, here are five things that you should know to help you build some amazing dashboards.

1. Customize your Klip colors

There’s nothing quite so impressive as presenting a dashboard to your boss and coworkers with all their relevant and up-to-date data. But one more simple step can polish your dashboard and bring it to new heights. You can customize the colors of the components in your dashboard and even use your own company colours.

Go from this:

To this:

How to do it:

1. Edit your Klip

2. Go to the Properties panel for the component

3. Choose override default color, choose more options, enter your custom color code

2. Copy all the things!

Want to copy something in Klipfolio and not sure how? Here’s a short primer to save yourself loads of time!

1. Formulas: Use Control+C to copy, Control+V to paste. Or Command+C and Command+V for the mac users out there.

2. Klip Components: Right-click on the blue component menu and choose Copy. Navigate to another Klip and right click in the preview window and choose Paste.

3. Copy a Klip: In the dropdown next to Save and Exit choose “Save as copy...”

4. Duplicate a Data Source: In the data source, choose the blue “Duplicate” button

3. Changing the date range for a Klip from the Klip Gallery

Have you ever looked at one of our Klips from the Klip Gallery and said “Yes! That’s exactly what I need. But I just want to make one small change - the timeframe”. Guess what? You can! You’ll need to get under the hood of Klipfolio and change a data source, but this is a great lesson on learning how Klipfolio gathers data and how to change your data sources. Let’s walk through the steps of how we can change the start date date for a Google Analytics Klip from the gallery:

1. Select the Klip menu at the top right of your Klip and hit press Edit

2. Find the data source (from the Klip Editor). This is the data source that is being used to drive the visualization in the Klip. Clicking the “i” icon next to the data source name will open the data source in a new tab.

3. Reconfigure the data source. This lets us modify the query in the data source that specifies the data we’re getting from Google Analytics and, most importantly for this case, the time frame for the data.

We may prompt you for authentication for the data source at this point. Click “Next” if we do.

4. Modify the data source query to change the date range. Google Analytics uses start-date and end-date parameters in their queries. In this case we’re going to change the start date to 15 days ago (-15 instead of -30). Once you’ve change the date range, choose “Get Data” and save the data source.

5. Update your Klip title. Go back to your first tab where you have the Klip Editor open. Make sure you update your Klip title to reflect the new date range. Save and Exit from your Klip (don’t worry if the preview doesn’t show you an updated date range yet).

And Voila! Back on your dashboard you’ve changed the date range!

Note: All data sources are different so your ability to do this depends on the Klip and the data source. Check the documentation for your data source to understand how to modify the dates and if there are any limits on how far back in history you can go.

4. Share your dashboard in under five seconds!

Have you created an amazing dashboard and want to share it with all your coworkers? It takes five seconds to create a URL that you can use to share your dashboard.

5. Start a discussion

Is everyone viewing your dashboard but no one taking action? Start a discussion about the latest data in one of your Slack channels!

Note: You must have the Slack integration enabled in your account.

Hope you enjoyed these tips and feel free to share your own in the comments section below!

KPI Management 101

As a manager, you have the responsibility of achieving performance targets, reaching higher performance levels and ensuring that people’s work supports and furthers the organization’s goals. In order to fulfill these expectations, managers must create a cohesive and motivated team.

When you manage your team with KPIs, data is always at the forefront of every decision you make. What this means is that you are able to adjust your work based on real time data that clearly visualizes your team’s impact on the organization. This blog will provide you with an overview on what a KPI is, and how implementing KPI management will improve not only your performance as a manager, but your teams in general.

KPI Definition

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate their success at reaching targets.

How can KPI Management Improve Your Organization

A KPI is only as valuable as the action it inspires. Too often, organizations blindly adopt industry-recognized KPIs and wonder why that KPI doesn't reflect their own business and fails to affect any positive change.

A lot of people overlook one of the most important aspects of KPIs which is that they are a form of communication. Therefore, they abide by the same rules and best-practices as any other form of communication. When information is succinct, clear and relevant, it is much more likely to be absorbed and acted upon.

How to Start KPI Management

If your team is finding it challenging to develop a strategy for formulating KPIs, start with the basics and understand what your organizational objectives are, how you plan on achieving them, and who can act on this information.

Selecting the right KPIs for your team should be an inclusive and interactive process that involves feedback from analysts, department heads and managers, you! As you dive deeper into your analytics, you will gain a better understanding of which business processes need to be measured with KPIs and with whom that information should be shared.

KPI Types

Selecting the right KPIs will depend on your industry and which part of the business you are looking to track. Each department will use different KPI types to measure success based on specific business goals and targets. High-level KPIs may focus on the overall performance of the enterprise, while low-level KPIs may focus on processes in departments such as sales, marketing or a call center.

KPI Management Reports

The chain of communication is most organizations situates the manager as the go-to person for executives to ask: So, how are we doing? Simple question, right? So why not give a simple answer.

KPI management on a data dashboard let’s you pull KPI visualizations from different campaigns and departments to answer this question with real-time data. Utilizing a dashboard, managers can share links to KPIs with executives or their team with published links and email reporting. Maybe your executive prefers print, KPIs can be converted into PDFs without the hassle of formatting.

KPI Management Presentation

KPI management means performance presentation all the time. When you manage your team with KPIs, you are able to use a TV dashboard to display data in your office all the time, or if you prefer, cut down on the hours spent creating a slide presentation for your weekly meeting, and just put you dashboard up on the screen. Keeping KPI presentations visual is a great way to foster conversation, particularly questions.

Questions are important for KPI management because it means you are continually challenging your team, and yourself, to ask how and why in terms of performance and improvements.

KPIs for Different Types of Managers

Depending on your industry and the specific department you are interested in tracking, there are a number of KPI types your business will want to monitor. Each department will want to measure success based on specific goals and targets. Take a look at the departmental KPI examples below to learn more about the KPIs you should be measuring:

KPIs for Marketing Managers

It's important for marketing managers to be as cognizant of the organization's sales performance as they are for marketing initiatives. In many cases, sales, which can include anything from lead breakdown to customer location, is a reflection of marketing efforts.

For example, are your webinars generating leads for the company? Questions like this interweave sales and marketing because besides creating awareness, the bottom line is that marketing is meant to generate customers for the company. Learn more about Marketing KPIs.

1. Cost per Conversion

Compare your cost-per-conversion to typed-in targets, or delete targets to compare to the previous period.

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2. Marketing Expenses and Traffic

Mash up your QuickBooks and Google Analytics data to see how your marketing expenses affect your website traffic within the last 30 days.

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3. Conversion Funnel

Combine the power of Google Analytics with Salesforce! Gain insight on how prospects advance through your marketing funnel over the past 30 days.

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4. ROI

Compare conversion values and costs to see ROI. Calculations will be dependant on having conversion values in Google AdWords.

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KPIs for Sales Managers

The best way to keep your sales team on top of their game in today’s ultra competitive business ecosystem is to cultivate a data-driven culture by sharing the right performance indicators and business metrics with your team. Track these sales KPIs to ensure your team has the confidence to ensure your business continues to thrive. Learn more about Sales KPIs.

5. Quartley Metrics

Track your most pivotal metrics for the current quarter.

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6. Revenue and Wins by Type

Make reporting easy by comparing revenue and wins amongst existing and new business.

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7. Open Opportunities by Stage

Monitor how many leads you have at each stage of the sales cycle.

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8. CAC (last 30 days)

Mash up your Quickbooks and Salesforce data to measure your Customer Acquisition Cost over the last 30 days.

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KPIs for SaaS Startups

Every SaaS startup needs to monitor and track customer success. Understanding your customer churn and customer retention numbers are essential for growing and scaling your business. KPI management, no matter the size of your SaaS company, will keep your entire team thinking about how to make your customers successful. Learn more about SaaS KPIs.

9. Customer Lifetime Value

The longer customers stick with you, the more valuable they are. Monitor Customer Lifetime Value, and at the same time, compare with the historical trend.

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10. Opportunity Pipeline

View opportunities at each stage of the pipeline, and track bid values.

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11. Monthly MRR / Expansion Rate

Monitor the health of your business as it grows and retains customers, and at the same time, compare with the historical trend.

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12. Lead to Win Conversion by Month

Use a line chart to track your lead to win conversion rate over time.

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KPIs for Social Media Managers

How do you measure the success of your social media campaign in a landscape populated by dozens of platforms and sites, each with their own set of analytics KPIs. As a social media manager, you need to define the metrics and KPIs that show how your team's efforts are resulting in more leads, increased web traffic, and higher ROI. Learn more about Social Media KPIs.

13. Social Media Convesions

Compare conversion rates from various Social Media platforms during the time period of your choice.

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14. Facebook Ads Campaign Performance

Make sure your message is reaching the right audience by measuring your Facebook Ads campaign performance for the date range of your choice.

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15. Social Media Followers

See where you stand on all of your social media platforms!

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16. Social Sentiment

Understand the sentiment behind mentions of your brand across all media channels worldwide (social networks, news, forums, blogs, etc.) in all languages.

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KPIs for Call Centers

To effectively operate in the stressful environment that is a call center you need to be dialled into the latest metrics and KPIs such as current service level, call volume and call resolution rates. The responsibility of managing thousands of calls each hour while maintaining a high standard of customer services can be hectic, which is why business dashboards allow you to keep an eye on everything. Use these call center KPIs to track your team’s performance through the busiest and most hectic days. For more call center metrics, check out of the Desk.com Integrations page. Learn more about Call Center KPIs.

17. Today's Calls

Monitor your daily call metrics and always know where you stand! (Up to 1000 calls)

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Start your KPI management with a business dashboard

Use real-time data to make important business decisions with KPI management on a business dashboard. As a manager, it can feel like you need to be everywhere at once. On a data dashboard you can keep an eye on the metrics that matter most to you, while managing and motivating your team with a data-driven mindset.

If you’ve ever ordered a meal from a fast food restaurant, chances are you’ve chosen your meal from a shiny digital signage menu board hanging above the cash. We’re seeing digital signage pop-up in more and more places as the capabilities of signage software grow and costs decrease. As an easy, effective way to share a message with an audience, many institutions are leveraging its reach. It’s being used by everyone from elementary schools, to banks, and we’re seeing more and more digital signage in corporate offices.

Meeting Room Signage

Corporate offices are constantly caught up in the jumble of organizing meeting rooms. Clients and business partners alike are wasting hours trying to figure out if a meeting room is booked, when it will come free, or if the people who are supposedly occupying it will ever show up. But this chronic wild goose chase is being solved using digital signage.

Using digital signage, you can put up displays in front of every meeting room showing when the room is booked and when it will become free. This way people can easily see when and where they are able to book out a room for their next meeting, and if all goes well, maybe you could end up saving $500 million dollars.

If you’re interested in setting up your own booking room signage, you can try it out easily and inexpensively using Rise Vision’s Google Calendar widget. All you need to get up and running is a google account, a media player, and a display. Once you’re set-up, have your employees input their bookings into a google calendar which will be fed live to displays set up outside your meeting rooms.

Office Communications

Modernize your office communications using digital signage to notify employees of events, workshops, maintenance in the building and even the most mundane information like the weather and traffic. Sharing information on office gatherings or birthdays not only up’s attendance, but it also boosts morale and in-turn, productivity.

Spotify is using digital signage in both their New York and Stockholm campuses to share news around the office. They have set up Google Presentations which they use to build the content for their displays. Then they stream these presentations through Rise Vision using either the Webpage widget or the HTML widget. Check out this post in our Community for more information on using Google Slides with Rise Vision.

“We configured RV with a Google presentation and we gave access to it to the teams that are responsible for the information showed in the screens (our Social team). They just need to update the Google presentation every time they want to add / remove something and the changes will be applied on the displays within a few seconds. We use digital signage to announce all kinds of social events in the office: afterworks, concerts, discounts in bars nearby, announcements regarding football games, swedish lessons, among others.”- Daniel Vásquez, IT Engineer at Spotify.

Spotify is running 30 displays across the two campuses and have no issues to report. They love how easy digital signage makes spreading word around the office.

Dashboard Signage

For a business to make the right decisions, they need to be able to back them by real data. They need to be able to track a KPI or key metric at a glance and know exactly how far they are from hitting it. Dashboard software is allowing teams to visually depict their performance through streaming kpi’s, key metrics, and any other relevant data in almost real time.

The smartest decisions are undeniably the ones we can track and validate with Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and key-metrics. But in order to derive meaningful, actionable insights, this data needs to be communicated visually and immediately so that a team learns how to react to a change just as quickly as they see it come in.

Having your data visible at all times is an easy action towards transforming a business into a culture of constant learning and improvement. When a team is able to watch their progress each day, they can see the effect of changes they make to their strategy. This reinforces good decision making and motivates teams to move a metric through improvement.

Using performance dashboards, teams can customize data to show live charting, key metrics and key performance indicators (KPI’s). They can also set up warning notifications- triggered by a falling target, so if the team is failing in any respect, everyone will know instantly.

Sharing this information with your team is easy. Curious to try it? Check out these step-by-step instructions.

July 2015 was not a good month for us. I didn’t write about it then, but a year later I can. We acquired fewer new clients than we were expecting, and a frightful number of existing clients cancelled their accounts.

When we analyzed the data - and trust me, we did - we were not able to come up with a solid reason why we had such a bad month.

You might be inclined to say it’s normal for things to slow down in summer.

I was always resistant to the idea that there were seasonal fluctuations to our business, to the point where it got to be a running joke inside the office. To my mind, blaming disappointing sales results on a supposed summer slowdown was just an easy excuse. Where were the statistics to back up that statement?

One year later, I’ve changed my tune. But only somewhat.

With more data to compare, I can see evidence that there are seasonal fluctuations in our business. For example, this summer, organic traffic to our website was flat. And perhaps most telling, the percentage of daily active users (%DAU) of our dashboard was down. It makes sense … people are on vacation.

Likewise, seasonality is evident at Christmas and New Year’s. There is a precipitous drop in activity on both those days. It’s clear almost nobody’s working.

It’s also clear that activity picks up during the first quarter, and also in September, as soon as school starts again. For example, as of today, September 9, with our users back from vacation, I can already see an increase in %DAU. It’s back to normal levels, or up by about 6% over summer rates.

Seasonality is just one factor

What we found, though, is that seasonality is just one of several factors affecting performance, and for us it’s not the dominant one at that.

For example, winning a few larger deals can colour the whole month. So can losing a few big ones. Make sure to recognize these big wins and losses when analyzing your month.

I think you have to acknowledge seasonal fluctuations though, and be smart about building them into your budget. (We did this year – we expected July and August to be flat.)

So how did it come to be that both July and August 2016 are record-breaking, with sales that are three times higher than summer 2015?

Here’s what we did to help make that happen.

Three tips to counter seasonality

First, we began increasing our paid advertising spend in July with the idea that it would gather steam and reach cruising speed in September. And that’s working. In August, we generated about 14,000 leads, up massively from 6,000 earlier this year.

Second, we hired two new salespeople late June, again thinking they would find their feet during a slow period and be ready to go full-tilt in the fall.

And third, our marketing team painstakingly worked through every page on our website, every form, and conducted countless A/B tests in an effort to optimize on-page lead conversions. And again, it worked in a big way. Across our entire website, the number of people signing up for a trial, a webinar or a newsletter has doubled.

Summer in fact was busy. And yes, seasonality slowed growth a touch, but our efforts countered much of this.

The lesson for us is to both step on the gas as we head into summer, but also realize it’s a great time to ramp up new sales and support talent and to optimize the efficiency of our funnel.

I would advise entrepreneurs to not accept the concept of seasonality at face value. Take the time to understand your business and learn what else impacts your particular business model … and fight back.

Allan Wille is a co-founder of Klipfolio, and its president and CEO. He’s also a designer, a cyclist, a father and a resolute optimist.

Every startup needs capital – money it can use to either get off the ground or ramp up growth.

The most important and the most valuable way to fund the business is to sell your product or service. And for the vast majority of companies, this might be the best way to grow. But if you want to grow quickly, funding your business through sales may take too much time.

There are different ways to raise money, and each method usually comes into play at different stages of a company’s growth. First you use your own money (yours and your partners’). Next, it’s usual to call on friends and family to invest. Then you look for outside investors – angels or VCs – and after that, private equity. And once you really take off, you sell shares through an IPO (initial public offering of shares).

At each stage, the pot of money available is bigger.

For startups, the big hurdle – the one you need to overcome if you are to get on the path to serious growth – is convincing people who don’t know you personally to invest in your firm. This means venturing into angel investor/VC territory.

Unfortunately, too many startups don’t know enough about how the VC investor system works. Here’s what I’ve learned – and what I think every startup entrepreneur should know.

1. Understand what a VC is, and how a VC is different from an angel investor

In its early days, if a startup raises any money, it’s from people who know the entrepreneurs personally. These people - friends and family - will be happy to get a return on their investment eventually. But chances are, they are not investing solely to make a profit. The money they provide is what I call “love money.”

Moving up a notch, angels and VCs want a return on their investment.

However, each comes at it from a slightly different angle.

Angel investors - most often past entrepreneurs themselves - have an interest in a particular city or industry, and because of that are driven to take a chance on companies “closer to home”.

An angel can be an individual or a syndicate (a group of angels, coordinating as one group).

Individual angels will generally invest from $10,000 to $250,000, while angel syndicates have a bigger pot of money available – usually between $250,000 and $1 million.

Venture capitalists are in it to make money, period. And they want that money over a certain time period – usually about seven years.

Venture capital funds are larger pots of money, raised from various sources – wealthy individuals, corporations or pension funds, for example. VC funds are generally bigger than angel funds. A small VC fund might contain $50 million, a big one $1 billion.

Nobody, angel or VC, is going to put a significant amount of money into your firm and walk away. In exchange for investment money, the early-stage entrepreneurs have to agree to let the new investors have a say in how the company operates. That means giving up a portion of your control and ownership.

If you are dealing with an individual angel investor, realize also that you will be dealing with an individual – a person who has a stake in your company.

While angels are generally more founder-friendly, there’s a downside to having an individual on your capitalization table. It’s their money, and if things go bad, psychologically, they will act differently than angel syndicates or VCs, who are managing an investment - and are therefore are one step further removed.

That remove can sometimes make VCs more attractive than individual angels.

2. Know how VCs make their money

VCs make their money by helping a young company grow and gain in value, and then cashing in a few years later when the company is sold or goes public.

They expect a huge return on their investment – two to 10 times or more of what they put in.

Why so big a return?

Because not every firm with VC money succeeds. As a matter fact, of the companies that fail, more are VC-funded than not. The investors need impressive returns from some firms to offset the inevitable losses elsewhere.

It’s estimated that of all the firms VCs invest in:

• 65 percent fail and return less than the capital invested
• 25 percent barely give a return on the investment (i.e. a 1-5X)
• 6 percent give a good return (i.e. a 5-10X)
• 4 percent give a spectacular return (i.e. a 10X or higher)

It’s also important to remember that VCs don’t make their money as they go. They make it in one lump sum, years after the initial investment. This mindset affects how they view their investments.

There are two basic ‘exits’ that allow VCs to make their money: either the company gets bought out (the acquisition exit) or it goes public (the IPO exit).

As I wrote earlier, VC investors expect the ‘exit’ to happen in about seven years – give or take a year or two. Most companies on their own expect it will take 10 years to get to the point where they can be bought. So that means companies with VC money will face extra pressure to come to an exit sooner.

3. Know how VC funds work

A VC fund is a pot of money that is raised from wealthy individuals or institutions, locked in place, and then placed into “fundable” companies.

Each fund contains a set amount of money, so that the investors can calculate the IRR (investment rate of return) on that amount. No new money is added to an individual pot. As a result, a venture capitalist will often have several active funds in its portfolio.

The money in a fund is not doled out all at once; the fund’s managers decide where and when. There is constant pressure to make investments in new and promising companies, because with each passing day the IRR is more difficult to achieve.

Suppose a $100 million fund is raised and the money is ready to be placed. Part of this fund will be allocated to initial investments, and the balance will be reserved for follow-on investments. Remember that for the IRR to be properly calculated, if your company receives an initial investment out of this fund, then the VC will want to continue to invest out of this fund for all subsequent follow-on investments.

So, your company might get an initial $2 million investment, followed by two or three subsequent follow-on investments as your company grows.

But keep in mind that when the time comes for the next round of investment, the fund’s managers can decide to cut off poorly performing companies – no point in throwing good money after bad.

And so on through the next rounds of investment. With every round, they will focus more and more on the companies that are succeeding, while abandoning the poor performers.

You also need to know the stage the fund is at when it invests in your company. How “fresh” is the fund? Are you part of its first round of investments? If so, good – you have a lot of lead time before you and the fund need to show returns. But if you’re being brought in at a later stage – as a new investment three years after the fund first started placing investments – realize that the investors may be looking for a return in five years instead of eight. And there is a lot less money left in the pot for further investments. In these cases, where the fund is a few years in, investors generally look for later-stage deals, where your company is closer to an exit.

You also need to have an appreciation for whether you can move a particular fund’s needle. If you get $5 million from a $50 million VC fund, you will be more important to that fund than if you get the same amount from a VC fund worth $1 billion. In the first case, you will bring a huge benefit (proportionately) to the fund if you do well; in the second case, you’re more like a drop in the bucket. In the first scenario, there will be more pressure on you to perform.

4. Understand that you are giving up some control

When the VC signs the first cheque, the investor is given shares in the company in return – usually preferred shares, which among other things will help the investor reduce their investment risk.

If there are several investors, the one who wrote the biggest cheque is the generally the lead. The lead’s lawyer negotiates the terms, and the secondary investors follow along. The terms are often overlooked by entrepreneurs, who commonly focus more on getting the highest valuation possible. I would consider friendly terms to be far more important than a huge valuation. The more you push valuation, the more the terms will be written to protect any downside. More on this topic in a future post.

The lead investor usually gets a seat on your board.

The lead may negotiate that board seat for him or herself, but the secondary investors may want observer status. Don’t worry too much about having an odd number of board members - if there is discourse on your board, you have bigger issues to worry about.

5. Understand that the VC investor will be your partner

Having a VC partner on your board offers a wonderful opportunity to tap into the skills and network of an individual who moves in business circles outside your own. Use your partner well, and you’ll be on the road to growth.

Because so much is at stake, it is critically important to pay attention to who that person is. Choosing a VC partner is kind of like hiring an employee - except that you can’t fire them! Whether it works depends to some extent on whether you click. So it’s important that you choose someone with whom you get along and with whom you can build a good, trusting relationship. That partner is going to sit across from you at the board table for five to eight years.

There are advantages to different kinds of partners.

We have one of each on our board – a past operator who is very supportive, and an accountant who is good about introducing me to people who can help.

If you get a good partner, hope that person stays.

If a partner who is your champion leaves the VC fund he or she is with, that fund will send in a replacement – someone who may not know you as well, someone who may have less of a stake in your success.

So it’s good to discreetly check out partners before they come in. Do they have a history of fund-hopping?

And while you’re checking, see if you can find out how a potential partner reacts when the company hits a rough patch. Look for someone who is patient and even-keeled.

One other thing: Ask how your VC partner gets compensated. Are they getting paid as you go? On what basis? Do they get a bonus if you achieve certain metrics? Will they get paid once you make it to the next round of financing? Or do they only get compensated once you get bought out? This will influence how they behave with you – and help you understand what motivates them.

6. Understand the current VC environment

Despite fears earlier this year that the VC market would dry up, it hasn’t. I know that because in the last few months I have fielded phone calls from several dozen of them. There is a tremendous amount of money in the system, and I think this is a very good time to be looking for VC money.

If you compare this year’s Q2 activity to the same period a year ago, VCs closed roughly 100 new funds (the same as 2015). However, they raised more money, with the average fund size now at $103 million, up from $78 million last year.

The bigger story is in the number of deals being done - and it’s noticeably down from last year. According to Pitchbook, there were 2,800 deals in Q2, 2016, compared to a staggering 4,400 in Q2, 2015. But, each deal this year is receiving a bigger cheque.

For the top tier companies, this is good news. This combination, where there is heaps of fresh capital but a more cautious investor, means bets are being placed on only the best. Quality over quantity.

Next time, I’ll be taking a look at VC math – the calculations venture capitalists make as they decide whether you’re worth investing in.

Allan Wille is a co-founder of Klipfolio, and its president and CEO. He’s also a designer, a cyclist, a father and a resolute optimist.

When it comes to startup funding, too many entrepreneurs don’t know enough about how the system works.

As I explained in my previous posting, VCs won’t place their money just anywhere. They want to make a good return on their investment. That return has to be big enough to more than offset losses that will inevitably happen because the vast majority of companies they invest in will not make it.

Entrepreneurs need to understand the transaction from the VCs’ point of view – what they are looking for, the calculations they make before deciding whether to invest in a startup, and the terms they are likely to impose.

Here, based on my own experience, are four things entrepreneurs absolutely must understand if they want access to startup funding from VCs.

1. You need to know what VC math is

Very simply put, VC math is the set of calculations venture capitalists make before investing in a company. Those calculations help determine how much they will invest, which in turn is directly related to how much ownership they acquire.

And because ultimately they are looking to make a return on that investment, VCs will also factor in the amount of risk they are exposed to.

These initial calculations aren’t complicated, but VCs won’t write a cheque unless the numbers suit them.

Three interconnected levers each play a part: Figuring out how much your company is worth, determining how much money you want to raise, and working out how much ownership the investors want (and how much dilution you’re willing to live with).

VC math: What your company is worth

This is a tricky question to answer, and one that can bruise an entrepreneur’s ego. Nevertheless, it is an important number to calculate.

Companies operate on a continuum. At the startup end is a company with a vision, an idea, a concept – and not much else; at the other is a mature, profitable firm with a solid history of sales and the metrics to prove it.

The closer you are to the startup end, the more difficult it is to place a value on the company. Valuation is tricky if you’re too new to have metrics. You are selling a vision, and how much is that vision worth, anyway?

The further along you are in your growth, the more metrics - evidence - you have. You know what your sales are, and you know how much and how quickly they’re growing. The more evidence you have, the more easily you can come up with fact-based figures - figures that can be compared against other private or public companies.

How do you know you are in the ballpark for your valuation?

If you have revenue, VCs will usually calculate the value of your company by putting a multiple on the annual revenue; for example, if you are a SaaS (software-as-a-service) business with regular recurring revenue, that multiple is usually between three and ten times the annual recurring revenue, or ARR.

So if you did $7 million in ARR, your valuation would be between $21 and $70 million. That’s a huge range, so let’s try and be a little more precise. If you’re above $2 million in ARR, your business is growing at 100% year over year, your unit economics show a picture of a healthy, scalable business, and you’re targeting a big market, you might be between a five and eight times multiple on ARR.

The bottom line: Be realistic when putting a value on your company.

That’s easier said than done. Time and time again, I meet entrepreneurs who have never raised capital before who overstate the value of their company.

Overstating has lots of negative consequences. If you are able to raise money at an over the stated valuation, it usually comes with onerous terms to protect the VC. Also, you put a tonne of pressure on the company to reach your next valuation, which is generally three to five times multiple on your current valuation)

Ultimately, it all boils down to one of the basic rules of economics. You are worth what someone is willing to pay for you, nothing more, nothing less.

VC math: How much money you want to raise

The amount of money you raise should get you to the next round of financing within 12 to 24 months. For example, that means that if you raise $2 million in seed financing, you will have to have at minimum doubled the value of your business within 12 to 24 months to achieve a series A funding.

Using VC math again, the amount you raise is directly related to your value and vice versa. That’s why you have to have a good idea of your value first.

The VC investor (and a lot of what I am saying here applies to angels as well) will want to end up owning between 20 and 35% of your company, at least in early rounds of financing. There is not much flexibility here; that percentage is pretty much cast in stone.

For ease of calculation, let’s use the figure of 25% ownership as an example.

If you need $1 million, then your company is worth $4 million after the VC money goes into it. ($1 million is 25% of $4 million.) In VC parlance, that’s $4 million post-money (after the VC investment). The ‘pre-money’ value would be $3 million.

If the entrepreneur does not have a realistic idea of how much his or her company is worth before looking for money, they may be in for a rude shock.

For example, if they think the company is worth $10 million, and they are looking for $1 million from a VC, it likely won’t fly. That’s because the VC who puts $1 million into a $10 million company (bringing its post-money value to $11 million) would end up owning less than 10%. Either the VC is going to put in enough money to own about 25%, or the entrepreneur is over-valuing the company.

These simple equations hold true for seed or series A money, usually the earliest rounds of outside investment. With further rounds, the percentage of VC ownership generally drops.

By the way, expect the VC to want a detailed analysis of what you plan to use the money for – how much you plan to allot to sales or marketing or resource development, for example. You will need to prove you have a functional plan to grow your business.

Neeraj Agrawal of Battery Ventures has talked of getting to $2 million in ARR and then having a plan to triple annualized recurring revenue, or ARR, in the first year, triple it again in the second year, and double it in each of three following years. His “triple-triple-double-double-double” has a Tim Hortons kind of ring to it that makes it easy to remember – but not necessarily easy to achieve.

2. You need to realize all the implications of giving up part of the ownership

There’s no way around it. By accepting VC funding you will be giving up some control of your company. But you are doing so to accelerate your company’s growth, and ultimately make more money for yourself. If things go well, you will get a bigger return, more quickly, than if you go it alone – even if you own less of the company.

Bottom line: Don’t get hung up on giving up some control. If it’s about control, you’ve got much bigger problems.

That said, there are nuances to consider.

You will probably want to set aside a pool of share options for employees (generally 8% to 15% per round depending on your hiring and retention needs). Be mindful of the fact that those share options will not be coming from the VCs’ pool – they will be coming from the entrepreneurs’.

Suppose you and your business partner each start out owning 50% of the firm. When you bring in a VC who takes 25%, your individual shares fall in theory to 37.5% each (37.5% X 2 = 75%).

I say ‘in theory’ because if you are setting aside share options for employees, those options will be coming out of your pool. So in actual fact, the VC will own 25% and you and your partner each own 32.5%, with the remaining 10% set aside for your employees.

3. You need to find a VC who is the right fit

As I explained in my previous posting, VC funds come in various sizes. A small VC fund might have $50 million, a big fund $1 billion. As I also explained, VCs become active partners in the firms in which they invest.

A VC fund will usually want to invest in a relatively small number of companies. It is easier to keep an eye on 30 startups than 300 of them.

For that reason, bigger VC funds tend to invest larger amounts in individual companies. So don’t go courting a big firm if all you need is $1 million. You may be too small for them to invest in.

Instead, find someone your size.

As I also explained, you also need to know the stage the fund is at when it invests in your company: Has the VC just started their fund, or have they already been investing out of it for four years? If you’re being brought in at a later stage – as a new investment three years after the fund first started placing investments – you must realize that the VCs may be looking for a return in five years instead of eight. And there is a lot less money left in the pot for further investments.

Bottom line: If you’re pitching a VC, ask how big the fund is and how fresh it is. That will let you figure out if that fund is a fit for you.

4. You need to understand the terms of any deal before you sign it

When they first start talking to venture capitalists, a lot of entrepreneurs worry about losing control of their company.

It’s the wrong way to think about it; instead, they should look forward to bringing on a valuable partner. (If you’re worried about losing control, you should not be raising money in the first place.)

What they should worry about, though, is what kind of terms they get when they do sign up with a VC.

Some terms are fair, and some are not so good for the entrepreneur. And the bigger the risk for the VC, the tougher the terms they will impose. Here are two very common terms that will protect the investors if things go south.

One example of a ‘tough’ term is an anti-dilution provision.

Simply put, it protects the VC against a fall in value of their ownership because of the addition of new investors or the issuance of additional shares. This kind of term can be made fair by adding language that allows the anti-dilution provision to expire after a year or so.

Another ‘tough’ term is liquidation preference.

This means the VCs get paid first in the case the company gets liquidated. Commonly, this is expressed as a 1X liquidation preference, meaning the investors have a guaranteed return of 1X their investment. I’d argue that seems fair as well - what’s not is when you see 2 or 3X liquidation preferences.

Terms like these protect the investors and leave the original owners and employees with less money in the event of trouble.

The bottom line: Pay attention to the terms of your VC deal, and try to get terms that are simple and fair - for both parties.

Three final comments

• Startups should only seek VC money if they know it can accelerate their business. If the money won’t make an immediate difference, don’t go for it.
• It’s important to choose the right venture capitalist. It’s not just about seeking out money, it’s about looking for a supportive, patient partner who can help you grow.
• And, unless you’ve built and left a successful company before, don’t go looking for VC money until you have solid evidence of growth.

Next time, I’ll talk about what VCs want to see in an opportunity.

Allan Wille is a co-founder of Klipfolio, and its president and CEO. He’s also a designer, a cyclist, a father and a resolute optimist.

Ever feel like your content marketing is as good as it's going to get? We did. Then we were shown what we were missing.

Here I’ll tell you the story of how our small digital marketing team went from thinking we were nailing content marketing, to realizing that we were out to lunch and missing some BIG content marketing opportunities, to taking advantage of those opportunities.

And I’ll show you 5 ways we’re now tracking our content marketing, to improve our performance.

Frankly, we thought we were hot shit

We were (and remain) a small team of four digital marketers driving more than 100,000 people to our website every month, with organic content. We had content ranking in the top 3 for over 1,300 search queries.

Content marketing plan? Check. Tracking key marketing metrics like reach, engagement and conversions? Check. We were happy with the results we were seeing, and critically, we were satisfied.

Then we started talking with Andy Crestodina, an SEO and content marketing guru of the first order, though you’ll never hear him admit it.

On a call, Andy took us on a stroll through Google Search Console and showed us a few content optimization tips and techniques he’s picked up over 16 years as a Web strategist, speaker and writer. Turned out we’d been missing some big opportunities, and Andy’s tour was raising all sorts of questions like:

Are we investing too much energy trying to optimize the wrong content?

Are we wasting high ranking content?

Who is consuming our content? How? And what are they doing next?

I remember walking off that call with Jon, our Digital Marketing Manager - a longer than usual trip down the street to grab a coffee.

We were thinking, our shit’s not hot, and we have a lot of work to do to improve our content marketing.

But we were also feeling energized. We couldn’t wait to jump in.

Andy helped us see that a few adjustments to content, and to descriptions of content, promised huge gains in traffic, engagement and leads. And our experience creating custom marketing metrics and dashboards had us excited about tracking these new opportunities in real-time.

Here are the top 5 content marketing improvement opportunities we came up with in the weeks that followed. They’re a mix of live reports, metrics and processes we’ve put in place to continually monitor and improve our content marketing performance.

Top 5 Content Marketing Improvement Opportunities

In the past, we were all about new content. We were always looking for opportunities to add new content to our KPI library and our blogs, so that we could rank on ever more keywords and queries in our space.

That strategy was working. We were ranking on a growing number of keywords, and reaching more of the long-tail each week.

But our work was inefficient. We were spending a lot of time writing brand new content, and not all of it was reaching or engaging the right audience. Sure, some of the new content was ranking highly on the keywords and queries we were targeting. But some of it was ranking poorly (like page 3, 4, 5 or worse). In fact, some new content was driving zero traffic.

In our heads down quest to pump out as much new content as we could each week, not only were we often sacrificing quality, but we were missing lower hanging fruit. The lower hanging fruit was previously published, moderately performing content. We’ve learned that optimizing this content can provide huge gains in visibility and traffic, with low-moderate effort.

Here’s why: The difference in value between ranking on the first page of organic search results, and any page thereafter, is huge. Research suggests that only 8.5% of search traffic makes it past the first page. But the effort it takes to push a result up many positions can be high, especially in competitive keyword categories.

Focusing on improving top-of-page-2 content is a quick way to get value from your content optimization efforts. Getting those listings bumped to the first page of organic search rankings will earn the greatest ROI because it takes a lot less effort to move a result from #11 to #10 than to move it to the first page from #15 or #20.

Here’s how:

1. View the average search rank position of your Web content in Google Analytics (Acquisition > Search Console > Queries).

2. Filter the results to display only the listings with an average position of 11 or 12 (Advanced > Add a Metric > Avg Position). This is probably the content that currently sits in the top two positions of page two of the search results.

3. Review the data. You can do so directly in GA, or export to Excel. We automated the retrieval of this data in Klipfolio and created this data visualization to give us a quick view to our performance:

This data visualization helps us prioritize what content improvement opportunities will provide the highest ROI: moving content from page 2 to page 1 of search rankings.

Looking at this visualization, we could quickly see that making small adjustments to certain content could yield huge dividends if we moved that content up even just one position in search results. In this example, we’d look to improve the content ranking 11th for “seo dashboard” and “facebook metrics” because those queries seem to be somewhat popular (based on the impressions they are receiving at position 11) and we’re seeing a decent CTR.

Back to our power trip.

Months ago we were feeling pretty good about how our organic content was ranking. We were ranking top three for looooads of the keywords we were targeting.

But so what? Who cares if your content’s ranking highly if its not pulling in relevant traffic?

On our little jaunt with Andy we learned that our number-one ranked blog for a given query was only capturing 10% of all clicks for that query. Ten percent (!)(!!)(!!!). It was click-through Teflon.

That our high ranking content was crap was a tough pill to swallow, but swallow it we did.

Actually, as we’ve discovered with a bit more research and some therapy, it wasn’t necessarily the content that was crap, but the description of the content in the search results.

Here’s why: According to a CTR study by Advanced Web Ranking, on average, content that is ranked first on an organic search query draws about 30% of all clicks for that query. Content ranked second tends to generate a CTR of about 15%, and third ranked content usually achieves a CTR of 10%.

This research, which is also supported by a study done by the online ad network Citika, confirms what we all intuitively know: the higher your organic content ranks, the higher your CTR should be. Just as importantly, it gives us content marketing benchmarks to strive for:

Here’s how:

1. View the average search rank position and CTR of your content in Google Analytics (Acquisition > Search Console > Queries).

2. Export the report to Excel, and add a “Benchmark CTR” column next to the actual CTR stats as reported in GA (write a formula to pull in the correct benchmark CTR based on the average search ranking). Then in a new column, write a formula to find the difference (positive or negative) between the benchmark CTR and the actual CTR. We skipped Excel and created this real-time data visualization in Klipfolio to give us a quick view to our performance:

This data visualization gives us quick visibility into how our top ranked content is performing or underperforming based on actual and benchmark CTRs

Measuring the CTRs of our higher ranking content against benchmark CTRs, we could quickly see where the biggest opportunities to improve were. Improving the CTRs on these high-ranking queries would vastly improve the flow of traffic to our site.

Another mistake we used to make with a lot of our content, and especially our high traffic, top-of-the-funnel content, is that we’d make the wrong ask(s), or we’d make no ask at all.

To exemplify our first mistake, we’d drive a lot of traffic to a blog post like Best Practices For Picking The Right KPIs For Your Business, which appeals to a wide segment of our target audience, and then embed a variety of product CTAs (Calls To Action) in the post like “Add This Data Visualization to Your Dashboard” or “Start Your Free Trial”.

These CTAs disrupted the natural flow of information in the post, which reduced engagement (average time on page and scroll depth). And because a large majority of the visitors to the post had little to no knowledge of our company, product or value proposition, the CTAs were completely ineffective (click-through-rates were abysmal).

The disruptive CTAs also broke the bit of trust that web visitors had invested in us when they clicked the blog title in the SERP, so a lot of them bounced, never to be seen by us again.

A second mistake we used to make was in producing a whole bunch of top-of-the-funnel content with no direct CTAs of any kind. We’d publish content defining various metrics and KPIs relevant to our target audiences, and hope visitors clicked links to middle of the funnel content that we placed in and around the post.

Most read what they wanted, took what they wanted, and left, and we didn’t know who they were or how we could reach them.

These mistakes cost us, especially where we had really high traffic generating content that wasn’t generating any leads. But we’ve learned from the experience, and from content marketing experts, to do the following:

Here’s why: If you’re attracting visitors to pages from which people tend to flee, what’s the value of drawing them there in the first place? As Andy Crestodina says, “it’s like constantly refilling a leaky bucket instead of just fixing the leak”.

At the same time, and as suggested above, many viewers of your top-of-the-funnel content will know next to nothing about your company or your product. This is likely their first time to your site. They may not even know they have the pain or desire you’re trying to tap into. They’re in discovery mode.

That said, trying to sell them something at this early stage of their buying journey will not be effective. In fact, as content marketing expert Barry Feldman notes, “only 2% of first-time website visitors make purchases—and that applies to carefully crafted websites optimized for conversion.”

It’s all about context, says James Ellis, VP of Inbound Marketing at TMP Worldwide. “Everyone thinks the problem is quality of content. It's not. It's usually more about context. Offering pizza to someone who isn't hungry won't get you many pizza sales.” More on James perspective on effective content marketing here.

So think about your audience and their motivation for visiting your top-of-funnel content, and don’t try to serve up bottom-of-the-funnel CTAs before your audience is motivated to consume them.

Instead, work to drive to complementary content that’s a bit further down the funnel, making relevant offers along the way (as we’ll discuss below). Then, once you’ve won the trust and consideration of your target audience, you can start to weave your solution and your product into the content, and make your ultimate ask.

Building your content funnel to work like a funnel is the key to driving high volume, highly qualified leads down to purchase. To do this well, you have to know what your highest traffic generating content is, and what content is producing the most product related conversions (demo sign-up, trial start, purchase etc.), so you can sync them up.

If you’re like us and have a lot of content out there already, here’s how to get your head around an effective internal linking strategy.

Here’s how:

1. View pageviews and conversion rates in Google Analytics (Behaviour >Behaviour Flow > Site Content > Content Drill Down).

2. Evaluate the data. What content is receiving the highest pageviews? What content is producing the most product related conversions (demo sign-up, trial start, purchase etc.)? We created the interactive data visualization below so we don’t have to go fishing for answers in GA. This example uses Subscriptions as the conversion metric we’re watching, but you can use any goal you’ve set up in GA.

This data visualization enables us to quickly toggle between top performing content by page views and conversions, so we can think through a logical linking strategy.

As we took a harder look at our top traffic generating content, and our top converting content, we started thinking more about the journeys people were taking through our content and our website.

How many pages were people exploring after that initial content experience?

What path were people taking through our content?

Were people diving deeper into our site and our product with each successive piece of content they consumed? Or were they just skimming the top-of-the-funnel content and then leaving?

We wanted to find out.

Here’s why: understanding what visitors are doing after their first content interaction will tell you more about who they are, which will help you serve up more relevant content to drive deeper engagement. It can also alert you to a misstep in your audience targeting - if you’ve published content that you think should resonate with your target audience, but your bounce rate is high, maybe the description of your content in search results is misleading, and attracting the wrong audience.

Tracking what visitors are doing after their first content interaction should also give you a read on how well your content format/layout, internal linking strategy and site navigation are working. If it's working well, engagement and conversions should be up.

Here’s how: Google Analytics’ Behaviour Flow Report can help you understand the path that users travel through your content and, more specifically, how effective your top-of-the-funnel, high-traffic content is in attracting the right audience and drawing users deeper into your site.

1. Access the Behaviour Flow Report in GA (Behaviour Flow>Pages and Events).

2. In the second drop-down list, next to ‘Pages and Events’, select the Web page you’d like the report on.

3. Review the data. While this GA report gives us a lot of useful information, it’s not readily accessible in GA, and it’s not the most intuitive visualization. We built out this data visualization to help us get to actionable information faster.

This data visualization shows us what top-of-funnel content is driving the deepest engagement with our site based on how many internal pages are viewed after the first page visited.

A low “Avg # of interactions” (highlighted in red) tells us where users are checking in and then checking right out again. These are clearly points we need to address. It also points out what content (highlighted in green) is driving engagement.

Another question that soon came up in our disrupted state of satisfaction with our content marketing was:

How are people interacting with our content?

Are they reading it? Skimming it? Opening it only to leave it to collect dust on a shelf of forlorn browser tabs?

We were already using standard page tags in GA to get a bunch of useful content metrics like bounce rate, page views, and time on page. But reading Rob Flaherty, Simo Ahava and Justin Cutroni, we knew we could learn even more about what our visitors are doing by setting up scroll depth as a custom event in GA.

Knowing how much of the page visitors are viewing might seem like a ‘nice-to-know’. But as Rob Flaherty points out (he developed the Scroll Depth plug-in we point you to below), the true magic happens when you correlate this insight with other metrics.

Which areas of your site tend to be read more thoroughly?

What’s different about how certain types of visitors (first-time, repeat) explore?

Where do these different readers tend to come from?

Before we looked at scroll depth, we didn’t really know.

Now these combined metrics are giving us important clues for optimizing content topics and length, navigation, linking and more.

Here’s why: knowing if and how people are consuming your content will help you create the right content, for the right people, to drive specific goals.

Maybe your long-form content is driving traffic but it's not being read: s it worth the time to write more long-form content?

Maybe people are visiting your content for a specific snippet of information and they’re jumping to the middle of the page to get it: should you move it to the bottom?

Are readers more likely than skimmers to jump to a second or third piece of content on your site? What segments are more likely to convert?

1. You can build a custom event to track scroll depth in GA yourself, or use Rob Flaherty’s handy plug-in: http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/.. The plug-in helps you monitor scroll points at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% and also recognizes a baseline event. You can trigger custom events to track when elements of the page—videos, visuals, sections, etc.—scroll into view.

Source: medium.com/google-analytics/hacking-google-analytics-24762924fbf8#.mbdpu0y73

By the way, Justin Cutroni discusses Advanced Content Tracking with GA at length here

We weren’t ‘all that’ and we still aren’t

Our talk with Andy Crestodina was an eye-opener. We’d been blindly barrelling down the well-worn Content Marketing Expressway, but he inspired us to take in a few smart side-trips along the way. And we started asking more and deeper questions about our content marketing.

We’ve come a long way, and we’re going strong, but we’re no longer satisfied with the status quo, and that is our status quo.

Do you have uncommon content marketing insights to share? How do you use less-common metrics to keep your content optimized? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

P.S.

Want to see how we built the metrics and data visualizations featured in this blog? Check out this article: 4 Content Marketing Metrics You Should Be Watching Carefully - Here’s How

Quick List: External links used in this post

• 24 experts list their must-watch content marketing metrics in this slide show.
• InFront’s detailed SEO research, including the finding that only 8.5% of search traffic makes it past the first SERP
• Mitch Joel’s blog
• Mitch Joel’s book,CTRL ALT DEL,
• LinkedIn’s this great content marketing eBook
• Comprehensive multilingual list of stop words
• Andy Crestodina, SEO expert, thought leader, speaker, Most Popular Speaker at CM World, and Founder of Orbit Media Studios
• …on content to include on your site
• …on how to get the most from internal linking
• …on 131 Words That Increase Web Traffic
• …on how to optimize content for lead generation
• CTR study by Advanced Web Ranking
• Content marketing expert Barry Feldman
• Content marketing expert James Ellis
• Writing and content expert Ann Handley
• Readability and grammar tool the Hemingway App
• Grammar checker Grammarly.com

We have some big and exciting news to share. Klipfolio has closed its Series B round of financing. We raised $12 million (Cdn) in a pre-emptive insider’s round led by OMERS Ventures and with the participation of all our existing investors. This is the third equity round for the company and it brings our total funding to $19.6 million.

OMERS Ventures is one of Canada's largest pension funds, with more than $65 billion in net assets. They understand all things SaaS (software as a service), and this is exemplified by their portfolio that includes enviable SaaS companies such as Shopify, Wattpad, Wave and Hootsuite. Like us, those companies are also focused on disrupting established markets with an affordable, self-serve, consumer-focused approach.

The Series A investors from our February 2015 round – BDC Ventures, Boldstart, CommonAngels (now Converge Venture Partners), Mistral Venture Partners, FundFire and Acadia Woods Partners – are all participating in this Series B round. We could not be more honoured to have their support and confidence. With the backing of our equity partners, and the Series A investment from early 2015, we have grown to over 7,000 customers worldwide, and increased our monthly recurring revenue by over 3.5X.

This is really good news for you as a customer or partner. We know you want us to make it easier to build dashboards. We know you want more pre-built content and connectors. We know you want improved performance and stability. We know you want us to make it easier to build dashboards for your clients. We know you’d like more guidance on what to track and how to build your dashboards, and we know you’d like a better mobile experience. This funding will be a big part of making all these things happen.

With just over 70 employees in Ottawa, Canada, as well as in Pune, India, we will continue to grow our team – adding developers and data scientists, expanding our quality and operations teams, hiring UX specialists and digital marketing staff, and building our support and success teams to be available to our customers throughout the world. There’s lots to do – but we’re all on board and excited to make it happen.

I send a heartfelt thank you to our investors and advisors for their continued confidence, to our customers and partners who continue to amaze us with their passion, support and feedback, and of course to the entire team here at Klipfolio (oh BTW, we’re hiring).

Now back to working on our mission: Helping small and mid-sized organizations get control of their business by giving them super-simple, real-time access to their metrics, everywhere they want to see them!

As I’ve been saying in recent posts, too many entrepreneurs looking for funding from venture capitalists don’t know enough about how the venture capital investment process actually works.

This isn’t a glitzy, larger-than-life process. It’s slow and requires lots of time and trust. Taking on VC investment is taking on a partner – a partner who will want an active say in how you run things.

Before they give you a cent, VCs will do due diligence and ask you some hard questions. You will need to be ready and have the answers.

Although you need to showcase your passion and commitment when sharing your vision and the opportunity before you, this is not a time for selling the sizzle. This is a potential partner you’re talking to. The best approach is to be truthful and authentic.

Here are the six things VCs will want to know before they invest in your company:

1. VCs want you to demonstrate that there’s a big market for what you’re selling, and big bucks being spent in that market.

VCs will want to know about the market for the product or service you’re selling. More than that, they will want to know that it’s a big market.

Why? VCs are in it to help you grow, and big markets support growth.

Not only are big markets more stable and less inclined to volatility, they are also able to support the operations of multiple growing companies. And if the market is growing, even better. That will give you a tail wind.

On the flip side, if the market you work in is too small, there may not be room for enough growth for the investor to get a return on his or her investment.

What is a big market?

There’s no firm definition, but generally speaking we’re talking about $1 billion globally.

Within that, it may make sense to look at what’s called the ‘addressable market’ – the part of the market you serve.

For example, when we talk about our market, we point to 50 million small and mid-sized businesses globally, of which we consider 10 million to be addressable. These are businesses that have a need for what we sell and match our target company size, profile, and geography. They currently spend $10B annually, and are growing at a cumulative annual rate of 8%. Once we can show VCs that, they listen.

2. VCs want you to show how your product is different from what’s out there. What makes it unique?

A unique product or service will be attractive. A product or service that is not somehow different – that becomes a commodity – will not attract. ‘Unique’ means not only different and new, but also hard for a competitor to replicate. Your product or service needs to include a ‘secret sauce’ that will prevent a competitor from taking you out.

There are several ways to stand out.

• Product differentiation: You’ve got something completely different (and hard to replicate).
• Process differentiation: You are selling a new, more efficient way of doing things.
• Price point differentiation: You have found a way to sell a product or service for less or for more (i.e. premium pricing).
• Super niche differentiation: You’ve found a market that’s a particularly good fit for you.

If you’ve got several differentiators, all the better.

Klipfolio, for example, stands out because of our process and price point – we have an incredibly efficient business model – and the niche (small and medium-sized businesses) we are targeting.

Differentiators change over time. In the past, for example, holding a patent was a good differentiator. But today patents are less effective because technology moves so quickly and it is often quite easy to get around them.

The important thing is to have and keep developing strong differentiators.

3. VCs want you to prove that you have a solid management team in place.

A VC about to invest in your company will want to know that the money will be well-managed. So having a top-notch management team – a team with experience – is crucial.

Don’t try to hide a weak link. The VC will ask for details about everyone on the management team, and will want to meet the players.

In fact, if there are any weak players on your management team, I would recommend holding off on the search for VC financing until your A team is on the ice. If you have a weak player, coach them to improve their abilities – and if that does not work, replace them.

It’s actually better to be missing a key player on the team than to have the wrong player. That’s because it’s perfectly acceptable to tell a VC that some of their money will be used to hire a solid A-level player.

So be aware, and be up-front.

In addition to vetting your management team, the VC will also want to understand your company’s culture and your management’s philosophy – how the management team handles problems and challenges.

The VCs will spend time in your office, and they may test your management team by throwing some difficult questions their way or organizing whiteboard sessions – asking how your team would handle such and such a problem. If your team has a dysfunctional approach, it will disqualify you. Your team should be used to working together – and work well together.

The VCs will also put a lot of value on the CEO – to the point that I’ve sometimes heard it said that VCs don’t invest in a company, they invest in a CEO.

The VCs will put a lot of effort into understanding how the CEO operates – how he or she deals with issues, motivates and listens, and inspires and drives the business forward.

4. VCs want you to show how your company is a good fit for their investment philosophy.

Every venture capitalist has a philosophy that underlies their approach to investing.

Some VCs are strictly in it for the return. Others take a strategic approach, looking to support startups that will benefit their parent companies.

For example, Intel Capital is the investment arm of Intel. Intel is a major maker of semiconductor chips. Intel Capital invests in developers and providers of hardware, software, and services in areas and industries that (as a general rule) use semiconductor chips. In other words, they help create future markets. This is a strategic approach.

Investors simply looking for a return often develop a philosophy nonetheless – usually around their past ability to pick winners.

For example, one VC might decide to focus only on startups that sell into Fortune 500 companies, because that is where there’s big money to be made. Another VC may focus on green technology or social enterprises.

A VC who specializes in a certain area – say green technologies – will come to know that area very well, and be able to understand the playing field, competitors, trends and buying behaviours. They may also want to invest in companies that have synergies with each other.

So whether they’re in it strictly for the return, or whether they are doing it strategically, most good VCs will have a thesis or area of interest.

And if you are looking for their money, you need to know what their thesis is.

5. VCs want you to be able to back up whatever you tell them with metrics and solid evidence.

A VC who is interested in you will take the time to get to know you before investing. If you chat about your projections for growth, you can bet your bottom dollar that the VC will be taking notes. And if your growth falls short of projections the next time their analyst calls, they will ask why.

So be aware that you will need to back up everything you tell VCs with metrics and solid data. For your own firm, that means having solid evidence of progress.

What VCs look for won’t be the same for every industry. For a SaaS (software as a service) company there are many well-known metrics on which a company is evaluated. For example, you may have heard of the Five Cs of Cloud Finance. (It’s Number 5 of the 10 laws of cloud computing put out by Bessemer Venture Partners.)

The Five Cs are:

1. CMRR, ARR, & ARRR – Committed monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, and annual run rate revenue;
2. Cash flow – Start with gross burn rate and net burn rate, then hopefully turn to free cash flow over time;
3. CAC – Customer acquisition cost payback period.
4. CLTV – Customer lifetime value.
5. Churn & renewal rates – Logo churn, CMRR churn and CMRR renewed.

As Bessemer Venture Partners says, “we recommend EVERY cloud business track and report on these as a starting point, plus additional metrics that are relevant to your teams and functions.”

Investors will be able to tell a lot from these metrics, but not every VC will react to them in the same way.

For example, if you’re cash positive, an investor may be OK with putting in money if you are projected to grow by 50% in a year. But if you’re not cash positive – in other words, if you’re still burning cash – the investor may demand 100% growth in a year before putting in any money.

The important thing is to have the data.

There is an interesting “Rule of 40” that Brad Feld published a year ago, where for a healthy SaaS business the sum of your annual growth rate and your EBITDA (Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) profit margin should equate to roughly 40%.

And you’ll need evidence for things outside your business as well.

For example, earlier I mentioned how investors want you to operate in a big market. You need to be able to provide figures to show how big the market is. And if the market is growing, you need to be able to show the rate of growth.

And evidence doesn’t just come from facts and figures: It also comes from ‘soft’ sources like customer testimonials.

Our VCs have always talked to our customers before signing up with us, and chances are they will want to talk to yours.

So you want your customers to be able to say things like "I love this!" or "I’d be lost without this product/service" or "We have no qualms about paying for this product/service, and we recommend it."

6. VCs want you to be able to explain how you are going to use their money.

It sounds self-evident, but it really needs to be spelled out. A VC investor needs to know – in some detail – how you intend to use their money.

Will you invest in advertising? Will you hire new talent, either a top-flight executive or new sales staff? Will you use the funds to acquire a small firm that provides something you need so you don’t have to develop it in-house?

The investor needs to know what you plan to do with the money, and how your plans mesh with your goals.

Ready to find a VC? Get introduced.

As I’ve said many times, a VC will speed a company’s growth. Bringing in the right VC will increase the likelihood of things happening. A top-tier VC is inherently valuable, because winners deliver winners. The top five venture capitalists in the United States produce a disproportionate percentage of the capital returns in the VC market. In addition, the top VCs have better, deeper relationships with the bankers who produce the IPOs.

If you understand what VCs are, how they work, how they make their money, how they can help you grow and what they’re going to ask you – you’re ready to go out and look for one.

A few final pieces of advice: Don’t cold-call a VC.

And don’t rush to take part in those public pitchfests in which entrepreneurs get five minutes to wow a room full of VCs.

If they cold-call you, be friendly and take the time to talk. I regularly get calls from young analysts hired by VCs to search out companies that might fit their investor’s thesis.

But the best way to meet a VC is to get introduced by someone you know.

And once you have been introduced, try to find a VC whose values and objectives are a good fit with yours. After all, this could become a long-term relationship.

Allan Wille is a co-founder of Klipfolio, and its president and CEO. He’s also a designer, a cyclist, a father and a resolute optimist.

The Google Analytics Query Explorer is a fantastic way to retrieve raw web analytics data for your website. You can export data from the tool as a TSV (which you can format into a CSV) or using an API query. Exporting Google Analytics data via the API is beneficial because you can rerun the query any time you want to refresh the data. In this in-depth post, I am going to teach you how to use the Google Analytics Query Explorer to export data.

What is the Google Analytics Query Explorer?

The Google Analytics Query Explorer is an interface that lets you construct API queries which you can use to retrieve data from your Google Analytics account. You can build queries that collect data from a specific account, property, and view. The query tool lets you specify data based on pre-defined metrics and dimensions. More advanced users can even apply custom filters and segments to craft powerful queries.

Why use the Google Analytics Query Explorer?

The Query Explorer allows non-technical users to craft a URL endpoint that can be used to export data from Google Analytics. As you construct your query using the menus in the Explorer interface, it will automatically build your URL endpoint with the proper syntax, parameters, and URL encoding. You can even apply advanced operations (like Filters, see below) to export rich data sets from Google Analytics.

Why export Google Analytics data in the first place?

You might be wondering, why go through all the bother of exporting data from Google Analytics using the Query Explorer in the first place? The answer is that the Query Explorer provides unfettered access to the raw data in a way that isn’t available in the Google Analytics reporting interface. I personally like this method because I can export the data to create custom dashboards and reports.

Our customers use the Query Explorer to build rich web analytics dashboards for themselves and their clients. The benefit of this method is the ability to automate data refreshes. After configuring the dashboard, you can essentially set it and forget it.

You can also do some interesting things with the raw data that you can’t with the Google Analytics interface. For instance, we built the Google Analytics Daily Overview dashboard. What makes this dashboard unique is the expected values, which helps folks gauge whether their website is performing within norms. Here’s what it looks like:

The Google Analytics Daily Overview Dashboard is an example of using the API to build custom reports.

It’s useful to export Google Analytics data with the Query Explorer if you’re creating a custom report that requires additional data. Again, we see a lot of customers use this functionality to do things like analyze lead conversions by combining Google Analytics and Salesforce data, as just one example.

The Conversion Funnel visualization combines data from Salesforce and Google Analytics. Another interesting use-case.

Tutorial: How to use the Google Analytics Query Explorer

In this tutorial, I am going to walk you through the steps of crafting an API query that will retrieve data from your Google Analytics account. The best way to learn is to follow along in the Query Explorer. Here’s how to export data from Query Explorer:

1. Select a view
2. Select a date range
3. Select metrics
4. Select dimensions
5. Run query and export data

Step 1 - Select a view

To start, you will need to select the View you’d like to use to export data from. For most users, a View is analogous to a website. If you’re the administrator for your Google Analytics account, you’re probably familiar with the terms Account, Property, and View.

It may be important to review how your organization has structured your Google Analytics account, since each of these can have unique properties which may impact what type of data you can retrieve.

Step-by-step

1. Click the Account menu to bring up a list of accounts.
2. Select an Account
3. Click the Property menu to bring up a list of properties associated with your account.
4. Select a Property
5. Click the View menu to bring up a list of views associated with the selected property
6. Select a View

Step 2 - Select a date range

You will need to select a start date and end date for your query. You can select a static date range using the calendar option or you can use date values to customize your range. I recommend checking out the documentation for date values. You can basically use 3 types of date values:

• Calendar date such as 2017-01-01
• Relative date such as today or yesterday
• NdaysAgo value such as 30daysAgo or 7daysAgo

Playing around with start date and end date combinations can give some useful and common reporting ranges.

Step-by-step

1. In the start-date field, enter the value: 7daysAgo
2. In the end-date field, enter the value: today

Step 3 - Select metrics

Every API query you craft with the Query Explorer needs to include at least one metric. This brings us to an important question:

What is a metric in Google Analytics?

Metrics are quantitative measurements that supply the statistics for user activity on your website, such as goals completed, number of users, or page sessions. When requested using an API query, metrics are presented as aggregate metrics. For example, if you made a request for users for the past 7 days, your result would look like this:

Step-by-Step

1. In the Metrics field, select one or more metrics
2. You will want to test your query to ensure the metrics you selected can be queried together
3. Click the Run Query button
4. If the query runs smoothly, move on to Step 4. If the query returns an error, swap out incompatible metrics

Step 4 - Select dimensions

Dimensions are optional when crafting an API query, but I highly recommend including them in every request you make. If you’re data needs have matured enough to require you to go directly the core reporting API via the Query Explorer, you’re going to want to use dimensions.

What is a dimension in Google Analytics?

Dimensions are qualitative values that describe the data or metrics you’re retrieving for your website, such as date, source/medium, or user types. For example, if you made a request for users for the past 7 days and applied the date dimensions your results would look like this.

Step-by-Step

1. In the Dimensions field, select one or more metrics
2. You will want to test your query to ensure the dimensions you selected can be queried together
3. Click the Run Query button
4. If the query runs smoothly, move on to Step 5. If the query returns an error, swap out incompatible dimensions

Step 5 - Run query and export data

The Query Explorer is an interface used to craft an API call in the form of a URL endpoint. Technically, you could craft the URL endpoint by hand and successfully use that endpoint to retrieve data. What’s nice about the Query Explorer is that it reduces error by appending the correct parameters to your URL endpoint.

The last step in your process is to validate the query and export the data.

Step-by-step

1. Double-check all fields to make sure your request is complete
2. Click the Run Query button
3. Export the query using one of 3 options:
1. Optional: Share a direct link to this Report so others can run it against their own data
2. Optional: Export the API Query URL using a 3rd party tool such as Klipfolio by copying and pasting the URL to your clipboard.
3. Optional: Download the Results as TSV, then export to Excel or Google Sheets

Tips and Tricks for the Google Analytics Query Explorer

The benefit of exporting data using the Query Explorer is the flexibility you get in crafting your API query. I’ve done some interesting things using the Query Explorer such as:

• Analyzing traffic from a single traffic source such as Twitter or Reddit
• Looking at hourly traffic patterns to determine best time to push website updates
• Analyze and bucket visitors based on average time on page and by number of visits (check out this dashboard to see this in action)

I use two features of the Query Explorer to export this type of data: Filters, and Segments. Let’s review some tips and tricks for each.

Using Filters in the Query Explorer

Applying a Filter to a query is useful for refining the data you get back in your call. You can apply Filters to Metrics or Dimensions. It’s important to note that there are 6 unique operators for Metrics and 6 unique operators for Dimensions. Check out the filter operators documentation for more information.

Here are some examples of how I use filters.

Analyze traffic from a specific Source/Medium

This is probably the most common way I use filters. What I do is create a query like this:

Then I run that query to make sure it works and to take a look at the Source/Medium pairs that show up in the results.

Next, I will have some fun by applying a filter to do things like only include Google / Organic results:

Just as easily, I could use that to query Facebook Advertising results by looking at Facebook / CPC.

Or even look at a specific social platform like Reddit.

Trim results for larger data sets

If I’m looking at a report like top landing pages, I rarely want to see pages that have less than 10 visits. I’ll append a filter that looks like this to thin out those results.

Analyze data based on defined user groupings

I like to a run report that only looks at the most qualified visitors to my site. I often use visits that last more than 10 seconds as a benchmark. This is a useful report because it segments out a lot bounces that come from unqualified traffic sources, such as display advertising.

Here’s an example of how I’d apply that filter:

Using Segments in the Query Explorer

You know all those segments you have in Google Analytics? Well, they are all accessible within the Query Explorer tool.

This includes custom segments, too.

I think the most powerful use-case for applying segments is when you’re combining a filter that qualifies visitors (eg: time on page > 10 seconds) with a traffic segment (eg: organic search visitors).

Of course, that’s only the beginning of what you can accomplish. I’m sure your head is swimming with new ideas that I couldn’t possibly cover in this post.

Getting familiar with the Query Explorer and marketing APIs

Digital marketers are becoming more technical by the day. The Google Analytics Query Explorer is a gentle introduction to using APIs for a practical purpose (eg: extracting data) but also to the value of APIs. Even if you don’t plan on becoming an API whiz, being familiar with the language of APIs is important as you tackle technical projects like app integrations, data exports, and website upgrades.

If you liked this post, you may also like this tutorial: Using Facebook's Graph API Explorer to retrieve Insights data

As I was waiting for the first session to begin at SaaStr Annual 2017, a guy asked me if I thought he could use the outlets near me to charge up. That guy turned out to be Ardi Iranmanesh, co-founder of Affinio, a brilliant marketing intelligence platform that uses an algorithm to find relational network connections.

As Ardi described to me, Affinio can pull data from a single Twitter handle to answer questions it would have been difficult to even think of, such as:

“What airline do our Twitter followers have a particular affinity for?”

The app is used by marketers everywhere, including those at major media companies such as the BBC.

Here’s a visual glimpse into how Affinio breaks the data it pulls into clusters:

As Ardi was showing me the ins and outs of his product, our conversation caught the interest of Andre Lavoie, CEO and co-founder of a goal-based talent management software company called ClearCompany.

As Andre and I introduced ourselves and our companies, he told me:

“Our platform sources over 180 million profiles, and instead of being built around a typical org chart, ours is built around a goal chart.”

ClearCompany is a gorgeous product, but beyond that it’s a glimpse into the future of how fast-growing SaaS companies will conduct performance reviews. In the app you are able to set goals, track progress on them, and comment on progress toward them.

Never again will there be surprises in a performance review. Never again will an employee be unsure of what goals they need to go after.

And so this is how it works at SaaStr Annual 2017: In the few minutes waiting for a session to begin you can bump into the founders and CEOs that are changing how the world thinks about data, marketing, and teams at work.

By the time Lauren Vaccarello, VP of Marketing at Box, took the stage, I’d already been blown away by my experience here. Somehow, Lauren took it to another level.

In her talk, How To Market to Customers Small, Medium, Large and Extra-Large: All at the Same Time from the Same Budget, Vaccarello broke down the challenges of having a product or service that has a wide-ranging user base.

Rather than dish out the trite advice of how important it is to narrow your focus, Vaccarello took a different route: It’s entirely possible to maintain this wide-ranging user base, but only if you radically focus on segmenting who those users are and building segment-specific messaging for them.

This slide in particular stood out to me, and what she said about it stood out as well:

“Don’t simply get a group of your marketers to answer these questions. Go talk to actual customers and other departments on your team.”

After Lauren’s talk, I made my way back to our booth (we are bronze sponsors of this event) and it was there that I ran into my old colleagues at Flow—a project management solution. After a quick catching up their CEO filled me in: “We’re now using Klipfolio. When we saw they hired you we tried a bunch of dashboards and it’s the one that stuck.”

That’s when it washed over me: Everything is marketing. In graduate school, a poetry professor told me that “everything is political.” In other words, every action we take has political undertones, whether we recognize them or not.

I couldn’t help but think this applied to marketing as well. Marketing isn’t everything, but everything can be marketing.

As this was my first time attending SaaStr, I also made sure to step back and observe the event as a fly on the wall. What I saw wasn’t what I expected: Authentic relationships blossomed. Conversations between strangers weren’t merely quick introductions followed by aggressive pitches; they were initiated out of genuine interest in each other’s product, and they were driven by a kind of mutual deep curiosity as each person thought up potential ways to work together.

Again, in this spirit, every connection made and conversation had was marketing—even if it didn’t feel like it. Even if the conversations weren’t fueled by a marketing mindset. Authenticity and curiosity ruled.

And this was all before lunch. After lunch, Jason M. Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, gave his opening remarks.

Lemkin spoke about the journey of SaaStr Annual, how three years ago they were simply hoping people would show up, and now… 10,000 attendees. Coupled with this, he made some heartfelt comments about President Trump’s travel ban, and how over 47 SaaS industry leaders couldn’t be at this conference because of it.

This wasn’t just a loss for those that couldn’t make it; it was a loss for all of us. We all benefit from the collective swirl of each other’s thoughts and experiences.

With that, Lemkin said all those who couldn’t make SaaStr Annual this year because of the ban would be VIP guests of the event in 2018. The entire crowd roared in approval.

This energy dovetailed rather beautifully into Lemkin introducing Michael Pryor, the CEO of Trello. The session was a 1-1 interview titled When a Product Everyone Loves is Worth $450 Million.

While the brunt of the conversation was on Atlassian’s acquisition of Trello for $425 million in January, Pryor’s words on the “softer” side of business resonated with the audience.

In one response to Lemkin’s question about what it took to get Trello this far, Pryor said:

“I don’t want to underplay luck and privilege.” He went on to say how his privilege of being a white man having access to certain people and circles is important to mention.

In general, Pryor came off as an empathic, socially-aware SaaS leader confident enough to recognize the impact he’s made while humble enough to lend credence to the help he’s had along the way.

That interview moved into another 1-1 interview, this time with Lemkin and Chris O’Neill, CEO of Evernote. The session, titled The Second Ten Years (At One of the Web’s Most Iconic Companies), felt like it lost a bit of steam as most of the audience had now been there for over an hour—but both Lemkin and O’Neill delivered.

O’Neill’s work at Evernote has helped the company strip away the excess and reign in its focus. He went so far as to say he “wanted to build a culture of focus.”

This was profound, and was made more profound when he followed up by saying “The team you build is the company you build. Period.”

Though O’Neill hadn’t been around for most of those first ten years, it was clear that he has a grasp on where the company needs to go—and on what it will take to get it there.

The final session I attended was titled The CEOs Role in Marketing: How To Hustle, Build Momentum, Sell Your Company - and Yourself.

Left to right: Greg Schott, CEO of Mulesoft; Kathryn Minshew, Founder & CEO of The Muse; David Kellogg, CEO of Host Analytics; and moderator Stacey Epstein, CEO of Zinc.

Each panelist brought a different perspective to the mix, including Epstein of Zinc who served in the dual role of both asking the question and offering up her own perspective before handing it off to the panelists.

For Greg Schott, a standout moment was when he said it’s important for companies not to force the CEO to be a certain type of marketer. Many companies, he said, try to force their CEO into being that classic extrovert who can throw the company on her back and create buzz. Schott spoke to a few of the problems that can arise as a result.

For Kathryn Minshew, it was clear that content has been key to growing The Muse. When LinkedIn was announcing Influencers, for example, she made a push to get introduced to the right people—and eventually did. She now has almost 200,000 followers reading her work at LinkedIn as a result. In addition, she’s had fantastic success with guest writers, creating a site in The Muse that these writers feel proud enough to mention in their public profiles.

For Kellogg, blogging has been key to both his personal growth and the growth of Host Analytics. A key point he drove home was this:

“Everything marketers do should be geared towards making it easier for sales to do their job.” That’s a lesson many marketers fail to embrace, and Kellogg’s statement hung in the air like few others as the crowd full of marketers took it in—likely reflecting on whether or not they bring that mindset to their own work.

As Lemkin essentially grew SaaStr through writing on Quora and elsewhere, it’s perhaps fitting to end on Kellogg’s words about writing. These were especially poignant:

Stay tuned for our recap from Day 2. And if you’re a SaaStr Annual attendee—swing by Booth 2. We’d love to see you!

Unconscious bias training. It wasn’t a string of words I expected to hear at a conference focused on SaaS metrics and startup growth, but Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz went there in Day 2’s keynote session and I’m glad he did. More on that in a bit.

First up, Quintly. I met their CEO and founder, Alex Peiniger, and was impressed by what’s possible in the product. In the veritable sea of social media analytics solutions represented here, Quintly stood out to me for their competitive benchmarking feature.

Alex was also a pleasure to chat with. It was like we’d known each other for years. Regarding the product, I was most intrigued when he said:

“It’s not just about seeing what your competitors are doing; It’s about learning the social media best practices of others.”

So it’s basically like this: If there’s a brand out there who you admire and want to emulate on a particular social media channel, say, Adobe on LinkedIn, Quintly allows you to easily see when they post and what type of posts generate the most traction. It’s definitely a product worth checking out.

By 9am the majority of SaaStr Annual attendees had worked their way toward the Strategy Stage for Jason Lemkin’s opening remarks. And most of us were glad we arrived early as the Americano Social Club woke us up with their eclectic (perhaps Brazil-inspired?) up-tempo mix.

While listening to the music I ran into the team at Rhythm Systems that I’d met the day before. The genuineness of their connection tempered the sheer magnitude of this event with a sense of friendship. Sure, many people here are fierce competitors. But an obsession with learning (even if from our competitors) is the overwhelming attribute we all share.

After quickly mentioning the after party and what to expect on Thursday, Lemkin leapt right into a 1-1 interview with Jeff Lawson of Twilio.

The session, titled Twilio: The Inside Story, was a highlight of the day. For starters, I came to see Lemkin as a journalist. As he would also showcase in the interview following this one, he consistently asked the right questions, probed (respectively) when he wanted a bit more in a response, and always made the interviewee feel like this was their time to shine.

And Lawson, in my opinion, did shine. I don’t have the statistics to confirm this, but his quotes, which seemed to come one after another, were lighting up both the DoubleDutch SaaStr app and Twitter.

Here are a few gems that did especially well:

“Customer experience is going to be king.”
“Companies need to blend agility with resiliency.”
“I’m a believer in small teams.”
“There must be mutual respect between the engineering culture and the sales culture.”

Lawson’s high energy level stood in contrast to the more relaxed energy of Veeva CEO and co-founder Peter Gassner, who Lemkin interviewed next in a session titled Veeva: The Biggest Vertical SaaS Success Story of All Time.

Again, Lemkin showed an impressive array of skills as an interviewer.

Rather than force his own pace, he mirrored Gassner’s style, which allowed Gassner the space to muse on a range of topics that struck a chord with the audience—such as how revenue grows from the quality of people in your company and about how thinking outside of the box is naturally met with resistance by those inside the box.

This quote in particular was shared widely:

"When 99/100 people think your idea is bad, that's where you have an opportunity. Don't be discouraged." -Peter Gassner #SaaStrAnnual

— SaaStr (@saastr) February 8, 2017

Following this I attended a session I was especially excited about: SEM for SaaS - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Loretta Jones of Delighted and David Rodnitzky of 3Q Digital co-led this session.

It was the most packed of any session I attended (in part because of the space size), and people continued to pile in even 10 minutes after the session began.

Unfortunately, although there were some great anecdotes about the importance of creating content for a searcher’s intent and not simply a keyword—the example given was NPS serving as both Net Promoter Score and National Park Service—the session didn’t seem to resonate the way many attendees had hoped.

Talking with several people after the session confirmed this feeling. Like me, they were hoping for a more tactical “here’s how to do this” session rather than a basic level “here’s why to do this.” The audience at SaaStr, for the most part, knows why—they came to learn what’s new on the “how” front.

From here I received a crash course on “Funnel Hacking” from Audrey Melnik of Funnel Ventures.

In essence, Funnel Hacking is a strategy to reduce the cost to acquire and retain a customer. Audrey broke it down like this:

“In the same way that growth hacking has helped unlock new ways of getting a ton of eyes on something, Funnel Hacking is about unlocking the repeatable series of processes to convert as many of those people as possible.”

Similar to the point Gassner emphasized in his talk, Melnick is a proponent of thinking differently—and in doing so she’s found many glaring weaknesses in the traditional ways most of us approach marketing funnels.

Like Alex of Quintly—plus growth marketing extraordinaire Sujan Patel and Mattermark Daily mastermind Nick Frost, both of whom I’d run into later in the day—I felt my chat with Audrey could have went far longer than it did. These were top-of-funnel connections on the journey to friendships.

As I was thinking funnel thoughts, I grabbed a seat for a session titled 12 Key Levers of SaaS Success by the brilliant David Skok of Matrix Ventures. Little did I know I was walking into a nuanced glimpse into funnels and micro-funnels.

It was fascinating, and David was kind enough to post all of his slides from the presentation on SlideShare. Dive in:

Funneled out for the day, I caught the best panel I’ve attended so far at SaaStr Annual 2017: Three Non-Obvious Lessons Learned Selling to SMBs.

Left to right: Matt Rissell of Tsheets.com, Amit Mathradas of PayPal, Alex Fala of Vend

Led by moderator Keri Gohman of Americas at Xero (who proved by far to be the best moderator at this event), the panelists touched on everything from how crucial it is to have empathy for the customer’s lives (not just empathy for their use of your product) to the importance of testing everything from button placement to colors.

It was a wide-ranging talk, but was always steered back to center.

Lastly, the final session of the day was Forbes’ Alex Konrad interviewing Dustin Moskovitz of Asana. The session, Fast Growth, Mindful Business, was the most focused 1-1 interview of the event.

Konrad was clearly prepared, and his mix of questions enabled Dustin to speak on everything from his personal mindfulness practices to his philanthropic global health endeavors to his broader thoughts on how a company should respond to contentious events in today’s political climate.

Yes, Asana is implementing unconscious bias training. For a deeper exploration on this, check out the University of California’s resource page.

On a question about how CEOs can fix the culture of overworking that can run rampant in startups, Dustin delivered what I took to be the line of the day. It’s a simple but fitting quote to close this recap:

“The best fix is you making the change.”

***

Stay tuned for our recap from Day 3, the final day at SaaStr Annual 2017. In case you missed it, here’s our recap from Day 1.

“Nobody likes going to customer support.”

That was the fundamental friction that led Zendesk’s CEO and founder Mikkel Svane to ask himself two questions years ago:

Was it possible to create a well designed web-based customer support solution capable of handling millions of tickets? And was it possible for that solution to create a sense of tranquility, rather than frustration, for the customer?

The answer to both questions? Yes.

Moderated by Devdutt Yellurkar of Charles River Ventures, Zendesk: From Day 0 to Today: The Lessons Learned kicked off Day 3, and Mikkel spoke much about how he worked to build into his team’s DNA an obsession with reducing friction for the customer and for the customer service reps taking care of them.

After the session, I took some time to reflect on the various frictions I’ve felt and heard about while attending SaaStr Annual.

One I felt: passing nearly 20 homeless people during my 3-minute walk to the conference, and knowing that within that time I’d moved from a community where “zero to one” or “one to ten” means dollars... to a community where it means millions of dollars.

One I heard: Jason Lemkin expressed the friction he felt at SaaStr Annual 2016 in wanting to keep the conference tactical and intimate while growing it to an event where CEOs and founders would find value in bringing their teams.

On that, Mr Lemkin, you’ve succeeded. I’ve met so many people this year, and some of the most interesting have been from departments or sectors that likely didn’t have a presence last year.

Among others, I met Michael Kae, a sales development representative for Supplyframe who hadn’t heard of SaaStr until 3 weeks ago but wrote about how exhilarating it was for him; Thalia Castro, a young professionals board member at Sunbeam Family Services who served as a SaaStr Annual volunteer so she could get the chance to network; and Oliver J. Gleeson, a legal consultant who spent three days taking it all in.

I carried these thoughts with me to a session I’ve been looking forward to all week: 7 ½ [Hard] Lessons Learned From My Second SaaS Unicorn.

In this session, the incredible Harry Stebbings (left) interviewed David A. Steinberg, of Zeta Global. I was intrigued by this for a few reasons:

1. Because Stebbings is a 20-year-old who has grown his podcast, The Twenty Minute VC, to an average of 300,000 downloads per episode.

2. Because Steinberg co-founded Zeta along with former Apple CEO John Sculley.

For perspective: Sculley had served as Apple’s CEO for ten years before Stebbings had been born.

What a treat this interview was. A seasoned interviewer, Stebbings brought the best out of Steinberg, who shared his insights on everything from the perils of entrepreneurs who try to build brands before the product is ready to this insight on building an intrapreneurial culture:

“You must have the self-confidence as a founder to empower your employees to a level that may make you uncomfortable.”

Again, I found myself thinking about various frictions—between leadership and ego, and in the judgments that often exist between the talent of youth and the wisdom of experience.

From there, I caught the tail-end of a session titled Building a Product Both CIOs and Devs Love, in which April Underwood of Slack shared how she sees Slack Bots advancing their capabilities to the point of being able to answer human business questions, such as, “When did we cross $100M MRR?”

Next, I attended a “Show Me Money” session titled De-Risking Your Startup and found myself fascinated by many points brought up by Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund.

Boom. I love this slide from @lpolovets of @SusaVentures. It's about the fit and growth channel! #SaaStrAnnual#startupspic.twitter.com/7b91k1vZlk

— Cameron Conaway (@CameronConaway) February 9, 2017

After Leo’s talk I watched as Elizabeth Yin of 500 Startups gave some fantastic advice in a session titled 11 Funding Secrets Learned From 1600 Startups.

Among those secrets, Yin spoke about creating what she referred to as “forcing functions” to create a sense of urgency and a greater sense of competition among potential early investors.

This included strategic moves like scheduling all of your meetings with potential funders into clusters rather than spacing them out over the course of weeks. In addition, Yin broke down complex startup questions into their easily understood pieces:

In the penultimate session of the event, Promise Phelon of TapInfluence blended practical insights with brave authenticity in her featured talk titled Venture-Backed CEO: Lessons Learned Inside and Outside of Silicon Valley.

Lines like, "Have you all noticed that I'm not a 27-year-old white male from Harvard?" had the audience cheering in approval, while Promise’s sharing of her productivity habits (she writes as soon as she wakes up and she records a 60-second reflection of her day immediately before bed) had the audience scribbling down notes.

In the final session, Sam Altman of Y Combinator served as moderator for a session titled The Best of the Best: YC SaaS Founders.

Left to right: Spenser Skates of Amplitude Analytics; Tracy Young of PlanGrid; Joshua Reeves of Gusto

All speakers had their moments of strength, but Tracy Young cut most eloquently to the heart of topics central to SaaStr Annual.

On building teams as a CEO and founder, she put it like this:

“Founders found the company; it takes a village to build it.”

And nobody in all of SaaStr Annual 2017 spoke with more passion than Tracy did about the importance of having empathy for your customers. She spoke about stepping into a customer’s shoes until their pain points pain you, until you actually begin to pity the ways in which they have to work.

“We know when they get up in the morning, what struggles they have during the day, and what fears they think about before bed.”

For PlanGrid, Zendesk, and many of the other great SaaS companies at this event, reducing friction isn’t merely some exercise in design; it’s empathy in action.

***

Missed the other recaps? Here’s Day 1 and Day 2.

We’re a small digital marketing team at Klipfolio, which means we have to focus on staying lean while growing traffic and leads for the business. Of course effectively advertising on Facebook has long been on our minds, and over the past few months we gave it our best shot (Inbound.org even featured how we did it).

As with every advertising initiative we’ve tried, we monitored performance each day to ensure this would be a cost-effective avenue for us (SPOILER: it totally was).

We tracked overall spend, cost per action (CPA), number of trials, and quality of trials. All was running smoothly, until we ran into a big problem.

We found a discrepancy between what we saw in Ads Manager, Google Analytics, and Marketo—and this meant our reporting was inaccurate. We couldn’t allocate more money into our Facebook Ads program without having a better view into our performance.

Turns out, the solution to eliminate the discrepancy between Facebook Ads and Google Analytics was simple: create URL parameters. Along with that discovery we learned a few other important lessons along the way.

Use the steps below to get off to a great start, and become the Facebook Ads rockstar you were born to be.

How to track Facebook Ads in Google Analytics

Tracking your Facebook Ads in Google Analytics allows you to improve attribution from an individual ad or ad set all the way through to a conversion. And it couldn't be easier. Here are the steps to track your Facebook Ads in Google Analytics:

1. Use a URL builder to create parameters
2. Define your parameters based on ad, ad set, and campaign
3. Generate a new URL for your ads
4. Track performance in Google Analytics

Step 1 - Use a URL builder to create parameters

Start by finding a URL builder tool that works best for you—I like to use Google’s own URL builder. This is where you will create the URL parameters that you’ll be able to track in Google Analytics.

Note: While I prefer using a URL builder, Facebook also offers parameter tracking within Ads Manager and Power Editor. You can manually insert parameters to track ads, ad sets, and campaigns.

Step 2 - Define your parameters based on ad, ad set, and campaign

This is where all the magic happens. Within the URL builder tool you will:

1. Type in the destination URL you want to use for your ad
2. Use “facebook” as your Campaign Source
3. Use either “cpc” or “cpm” as your Campaign Medium depending on how you are tracking conversions—either by click or by impressions.
4. Use your Facebook Ads campaign name as your Campaign Name. This is where you will be able to monitor performance across all your Facebook campaigns.
5. Use your Facebook Ads ad set name as your Campaign Term. This will allow you to track performance across ad sets.
6. Use your individual ad names as your Campaign Content. This will allow you to track performance down to an individual ad.

This is what the end result should look like:

Step 3 - Generate a new URL for your ads

Now that you’ve created your parameters, you can generate your unique URL. This is what you will use to track your performance in Facebook. Simply copy and paste this link into the destination URL section when building out your ads.

Step 4 - Track performance in Google Analytics

Now that you’ve got your parameters created and your new URL in your ads, you can start tracking your Facebook Ads performance in Google Analytics. To do this you’ll want to:

1. Go to Acquisitions

2. Click on All Traffic

3. Click on Source/Medium

4. From Primary Dimension, select the parameter you want to track by using the Other drop down and choosing the Acquisition group.

Using these steps, you’ll be able to do a deep dive into your digital advertising performance from the Campaign level all the way down to the individual ads just by adjusting the Primary Dimension. If you followed along during Step 2, Define your parameters, use the following Primary Dimensions for your reporting:

• Campaign: this will allow you to track your Facebook Ads Campaign performance
• Keyword: use this to deep dive into your ad set performance
• Ad Content: this will allow you to analyze individual ad performance

How excited are you for your next Facebook Ads report?

As many of us digital marketers know, Facebook Ads can generate a high number of qualified leads. Unfortunately, even slight discrepancies in data can make it difficult to understand whether Facebook Ads is a cost-effective channel for your team.

By refining your process and accurately creating URL parameters, you’ll be able to eliminate data discrepancies and determine the value Facebook Ads can bring to your business.

***

If you also need to make sure your YouTube account is properly configured in Google Analytics, check out my colleague Jonathan Taylor’s step-by-step breakdown.

For several weeks now I’ve known the agenda for Day 1 here at Social Media Marketing World 2017. I may have even had it memorized.

But watching a particular string of two sessions come together (beautifully, I must say) still felt shocking.

Here was the world’s greatest gathering of social media strategists and thinkers, and yet futuristic discussions about how virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and new algorithm updates will impact particular social media platforms had to wait its turn.

Because today, the first day, focused a great deal on the art and science of putting words together—to write compelling, action-oriented copy for everything from demo videos to landing pages.

Here’s a quick breakdown of both sessions, followed by what I took to be the take-home points:

How to Write Copy That Sells

Ray Edwards, whose clients include Tony Robbins and Jack Canfield, among many others, had the audience captivated with a mix of humorous but effective video clips—including the sales scene from Tommy Boy, after which he spoke about why a lack of truly believing in your product is often why salespeople (and copywriters) can’t close…

He also spoke about how the copy in this viral video from Chatbooks tapped into the pain point parents feel, while using humor to be “an aesthetic that numbs” so the copywriters could drive the solution to that pain home:

Here are Ray’s tips for being a more effective copywriter:

• Creative writers (including novelists) have the skills but must find how they transfer.
• It’s important to make the audience also feel the pain of not having your product/service.
• As mentioned above, humor can be an aesthetic that points to the pain while numbing it.
• Stories are the oldest form of communication. “Jesus didn’t have a Twitter account.”
• Believe in your product—this can save you from failing in the closing stages of your copy.

How to Write Landing Pages That Sell

Robert Bly, who has worked with IBM, Intuit and Forbes and been dubbed "America's top copywriter" by McGraw-Hill, shined in his humility and tactical slide-by-slide approach to copywriting.

Having started as a copywriter in the 1970s, Bly was able to pull old-school techniques—including the A/B testing he did back when direct mail was the way—and bring them into more modern examples of gated content.

Here are Robert’s takeaways for writing (not just building) better landing pages:

• Do not rely on rules and best practices. Testing everything is the only way to find the truth.
• Comb through your copy to ensure it’s conveying some sense of urgency.
• Understand that creativity and cleverness are tools, not ends.
• “Free” and “you” are the most important words in copywriting.
• Build landing pages, and the copy for them, with action or exit as the only two options (no menus).

Note: A session after these, which I missed, was also about writing. The title: How to Create Quality Blog Posts Consistently.

***

We’re giving demos of our social media dashboards at Social Media Marketing World 2017. Here’s the landing page we built for it. Based on what you read here… how’d we do? We’d love your feedback and thoughts.

ICYMI: Here’s a glimpse we shared about how this event came to be, and here’s our Day 1 recap.

On the surface, the agenda for Day 2 here at Social Media Marketing World 2017 shimmered with the individual rockstars of social media marketing.

Just take a look at the following three speakers, and then consider that their sessions all took place on the same day:

• Mike Stelzner, who founded Social Media Examiner and is the mastermind behind why this event exists in the first place;
• Mari Smith, deemed the “Queen of Facebook,” who is the source when it comes to all things Facebook;
• and Jay Baer, the industry’s leading consultant and speaker on the intersection of social media and customer service.

But teamwork was a common theme that ran through all of their sessions—teamwork helped them rise to industry superstardom and, as they all made clear, it is teamwork that fuels social media marketing success.

Here are the key takeaways from their sessions:

Social Media Marketing in 2017: What the Newest Research Reveals

Mike Stelzner entered to applause fitting for the founder of this incredible event, and then delivered an inspiring, no-punches-pulled look into the future of social media.

Made clear by Stelzner, and the research he cited, Facebook is still the king of social media and is doing plenty to ensure it maintains this status for years to come. Facebook Live is on fire, and is suffocating any potential competitors, while Instagram (owned by Facebook) continues to grow and is now the 2nd most widely used social media platform in the world.

Alongside this, however, Stelzner addressed every digital marketer’s pain point with Facebook: engagement has plummeted in the last two years. The reason? Because Facebook changed its algorithm and:

There was a time when what you posted on your page was actually seen by people who liked your page. This isn’t the case anymore, and Stelzner highlighted his point by showing Social Media Examiner’s own data:

There were many takeaways, but here’s what stood out to me:

• Facebook Live and Facebook Messenger are the future and, in some ways, the former is a throwback to those days when your fans actually saw your posts.
• “Instagram is on fire” and Instagram Stories is significantly driving its massive success.
• Only 7% of businesses with a Facebook Page (there are 60 million) are advertising on Facebook. This is likely to rise.

How to Improve Your Facebook Marketing ROI

From what I’ve watched in interviews and in her Facebook Live videos, Mari Smith has one of those electric personalities capable of engaging an audience on just about anything. Today, as I watched from the front row, I realized this personality is magnified tenfold when seeing her in person.

In addition to many other topics, Mari had the audience most engaged when she talked about what few people in the room knew existed—this ability on Facebook Live to be watching a video, click on something in the video, and make the purchase of the product (selecting your size, the color, etc.) all while still watching the video.

Mari stays at the forefront of the industry by, as the example above, knowing what’s happening now and what’s next, actually using it for her audience, and wrapping all of this into a kind of heart-based marketing. So while the wonky-sounding session title may have had some in attendance prepared for a purely deep-dive into analytics—I can’t imagine a better glimpse into both ROI and the basics of how to be engaging on Facebook.

The information in this slide certainly fused a bit of both:

Here are a few of Mari’s key points on Facebook marketing ROI:

• Start using Facebook Live
• Create “thumb-stopping” square content that consistently engages your niche.
• Radically care about and work to engage with all of your customers and potential customers.

How to Staff Your Social Media Team in a Changing Marketplace

With Jay Baer serving as moderator, this panel—consisting of (from left to right) Alison J. Herzog, Director of Global Social Business at Dell; Beverly Jackson, Vice President of Social Media and Content Strategy at MGM Resorts International; and Erica Campbell Byrum, Director of Social Media at ForRent.com—was a practical look into how to find the right talent and how to build out an entire social media team from scratch.

Here are a few of their collective points:

• When building a social media team, map out the entire architectural structure of needs and what kind of talent you’ll need to fill each role;
• Just because everyone is on social, doesn’t mean they “get social.” The best social media hires are those that know how social media impacts the business, and know the importance of being able to respond under the worst of circumstances;
• Think about starting a social media training program in your company, so that new hires to the team can quickly get caught up on what they need to know and why;
• Hire people who have intellectual curiosity, an understanding of human psychology, and hunger to succeed—rather than just those who understand certain social media platforms.

***

That’s a wrap! Stay tuned for our thoughts on Day 3, the final day of Social Media Marketing World 2017.

ICYMI: Here's a glimpse we shared about how this event came to be, and here’s our Day 1 and Day 2 recaps.

How fitting it was to end the final day of Social Media Marketing World 2017 by casting our gaze into the future.

Fitting too, however, that our excitement about this future was tempered by the speakers who acknowledged our need to first master the fundamentals available to us right now.

While there was a general sense of amazement that the event was so quickly winding down, the sessions today were razor sharp. Let’s take it from the top:

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Future of Social Media Marketing

This 4-person discussion featured, from left to right, Sandy Carter, CEO of Ecosystems; Christopher Carfi, Director of Content Marketing at GoDaddy; Christopher Penn, Vice President of Marketing Technology at SHIFT Communications; and the moderator Bryan Kramer, who is the President & CEO at Pure Matter.

The discussion spanned the gamut—from what artificial intelligence is and practical examples of how it impacts our everyday lives as both consumers (example: Amazon) and marketers (example: Facebook), to how to start learning enough about it so we can use it to guide our overall marketing strategies.

Of particular importance are two points emphasized by Sandy Carter: making sure the data your company collects is as bias-free as possible, and this gem:

Here are a few other takeaways on the intersection of artificial intelligence and social media marketing:

• Check out Bots.co to begin your learning. "It's basically a search engine for bots."
• Use GrowthBot to see which keywords other companies are purchasing via search ads.
• Explore OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company with a ton of resources.
• Seriously consider using artificial intelligence when you find yourself having to answer the same question more than 3 times.
• Dedicate an entire day to playing around with some of the free AI tools available. This is the best way to get your feet wet and see what can inform your social media marketing.

How to Create Engaging Content with Live Video

Alex Khan (right, beside marketing professor Jed Record) is the CEO at Attractive Media, and he's a world-renowned expert on using live video, particularly Periscope, to grow massive audiences.

The beauty of Alex's talk was in its sheer practicality. He truly opened up his playbook and gave step-by-step instructions for how he (and the many he's helped) built huge followings through live video. Alex covered everything from how to find your topic to how to shoot your live video while keeping in mind that most viewers of it may only see it at a later date on replay.

This slide was one example of many that he broke down point-by-point:

Here are a few of Alex's key points on using live video for social media marketing:

• The biggest barrier stopping you from using live video is often your own comfort zone. "Scale up" your social media marketing by stepping out of your comfort zone and giving it a shot.
• Use BeLive.tv when you want to interview somebody and stream split-screen.
• Live video is watched 3x longer than non-live video.
• Pre-promote your live streams so you're not relying too much on the randomness of your audience's availability.

Google Analytics Fundamentals: How to Measure What Matters for Your Business

Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media gave the most focused and engaged presentation of any that I attended here at Social Media Marketing World 2017.

Nobody is more knowledgable or passionate about the intersection of metrics and content marketing, and Andy conveyed both of these aspects brilliantly. Get this: barely 10 minutes into his talk the audience nearly gave him a standing ovation based on how astutely he had walked them through precisely how to set your site up for optimal use on Google Analytics.

Somehow, through the course of his leading us all through the entire process, he managed to drop other insights such as the importance of never putting your testimonials on a separate page, and the 7 things all testimonials should include:

To jumpstart your own Google Analytics setup, be sure check out his post titled How to Setup Google Analytics.

***

Did you enjoy our daily updates from Social Media Marketing World 2017? Then you might find value in our Marketing Blog, where we focus on the metrics and insights modern marketers need to master.

So you’ve built a great database. Or you have access to one.

You know the database is full of valuable data, but accessing and manipulating that data to extract useful information is complex and time consuming.

At best (if you know the database well and are confident writing SQL queries) you can produce a backward-looking SQL report that can be shared with colleagues via email, or at your next meeting.

But that will only help the business identify past problems and opportunities.

The data that you need to overcome current challenges (and to take advantage of the opportunities that exist now) will probably be written to your database as you deliver your report.

In other words: It will be old by the time you start pulling together your next report!

That’s why you need a SQL database dashboard.

Preferably one that serves up data from your SQL server in real-time, giving you and your team ready access to the information you need to continually improve business performance—rather than course correcting periodically.

This article will help you create such a dashboard.

What is a SQL dashboard?

A SQL dashboard is an assembly of metrics, indicators and visualizations that pull in data from a SQL database, which is a relational database that can be managed with SQL (Structured Query Language).

How to create a SQL dashboard

Options

There are a variety of ways to create dashboards by pulling in data from a SQL database. In all scenarios you’ll need to:

• Assemble SQL queries to pull in the raw data;
• Manipulate and aggregate the data to build metrics and KPIs;
• Visualize and assemble the metrics and KPIs to create a dashboard.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish these three tasks, and a variety of services and platforms that can help you along the way.

If you’d rather not write SQL, you can use a free tool like Metabase, which allows you to point and click your way to pulling in slices of data via handy drop downs (the SQL query gets written behind the scenes).

The MySQL add-in for Excel helps you in a similar way by enabling you to select and dump rows and columns of data into Excel without writing SQL.

Alternatively, if you’re handy with SQL and your data is in a MySQL database, you can use a free tool like phpMyAdmin to write the query and then select the option to export the data you pulled as a csv or xml file.

BI tools like Tableau and Klipfolio come with their own tools and wiziwigs to pull and view data from a SQL database.

These same tools can help you aggregate and “mashup” SQL database data with other data sources to build metrics and KPIs, and to visualize and assemble the metrics and KPIs to create dashboards.

So you’ve got lots of options to consider.

Questions to ask before building a SQL dashboard

In weighing your options to build your SQL database dashboard, consider resources (time and financial), the type of dashboard you’re trying to create, and how you intend to use it.

Here are a few questions worth answering before getting started:

Will the dashboard be shared with people outside of your organization?

If so you may want to consider a cloud-based solution that enables you to publish public (indexed by search engines like Google) and/or private (not indexed) links. If you’d like to open these dashboards up to the public, look for applications that support embedding data visualizations or entire dashboards on web pages.

Do you want the dashboard displayed on large-screen TVs and office walls?

Again, cloud-based solutions tend to excel in this area. Services like AirTame, RiseVision, True Digital and Screen Cloud can help you get your dashboard up on office walls, if your dashboard has a URL. If you’re working in a desktop application, you won't have this capacity unless you publish it to the web—make sure you can.

How “real-time” do you need the dashboard to be?

Lots of dashboard providers claim to be “real-time,” but most aren’t in the true sense of the word (updating when your data updates).

And most of them that are tend to be quite costly. Do you need your dashboard to be updating minute-by-minute? Every time you sign-on? Every few hours? Different dashboard applications will have different limitations surrounding data refreshing.

What’s your budget for getting this up and running?

Dashboard applications that enable you to plug-into SQL databases can cost you hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Those that are more costly tend to be more enterprise focused, and usually come with a bevy of more advanced functions and analytics associated with traditional Business Intelligence.

The less expensive options tend to focus more on plugging into the data and visualizing it, with less power/emphasis on data discovery and analysis.

Will this be used for SQL reporting?

In addition to monitoring the data on a dashboard, you may want to send static reports or screenshots of the dashboard in certain instances (I’m thinking client reporting, or to share KPIs and data visualizations with someone who’s not going to be looking at the dashboard regularly).

If you want the ability to do this, make sure you can download dashboards and data visualizations as images or PDFs, and that the look and feel of the data visualizations are maintained when you do.

How big is your data set and how much data do you need to visualize?

Some dashboard providers store the data you pull in, and some don’t. Some have limitations on how much data you can bring in at a time. Look into these limitations and consider them against your needs.

Some dashboard providers store the data you pull in, and some don’t. Some have limitations on how much data you can bring in at a time. Look into these limitations and consider them against your needs.

Will you be combining SQL database data with other data sources (data mashups)?

If so, consider the number of data source integrations the dashboard provider offers, the “openness” and flexibility of the app infrastructure (if a web service is RESTful and follows best practices you should be able to connect to it), and the opportunities and limitations surrounding mashing up data sets.

Does the dashboard provider offer some sort of editor or WYSIWYG to manipulate and mashup data sets? Does this process require coding or IT support or can you handle this yourself?

Is Klipfolio the right solution?

It’s a tool that will take you a bit of time to master, but if what’s described below is what you’re looking for, you’ll be glad you invested the time.

• Pull in moderate amounts of data from your database (2,000 entries or less);
• Build custom data visualizations and dashboards to spec;
• Have data visualizations and your dashboards update in near-real time (refreshing up to every 60 seconds);
• Share and view dashboards on mobile devices and large screen TVs;
• Not spend hundreds of dollars a month.

If Klipfolio feels like a tool that could be right for you, here's an introduction and a few tutorials to help get you building SQL dashboards:

Building SQL database dashboards with Klipfolio

Klipfolio is a cloud application for building real-time business dashboards, helping you connect to and visualize data from virtually any data source, including databases.

With Klipfolio, you can connect to a wide variety of database management systems including:

• MS SQL (Microsoft SQL Server)
• MySQL
• Oracle Thin
• Oracle OCI
• Sybase SQL Anywhere
• PostgreSQL
• Firebird
• DB2

You can also connect to cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery, and to APIs like Segment.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps to:

1. Connect a MySQL database to Klipfolio
2. Write a SQL query to create and save a SQL data source in Klipfolio
3. Build custom data visualizations with a SQL data source

I’ll also introduce you to Metabase, one of my favourite tools for building SQL queries, without having to write them manually.

We’ve uploaded a sample MySQL database that you can access by following along with the tutorials. Or you can play around with them until you’re ready to connect to data from your own database.

Here’s what you’ll need to access the sample database:

• Host: mysql-06.klip-net
• Port: 3306
• Username: northwind
• Driver: MySQL
• PW: @ed/EXF8BVGW$sAXVz1Y
• ERD:Use this Google Drive link

Connecting database data to Klipfolio with SQL

The process of building custom data visualizations and dashboards in Klipfolio starts by connecting your various data sources to Klipfolio, and you do that in the data library.

Here’s a video tutorial on how to create a SQL database data source to Klipfolio (if you’d rather read about it, the step by steps are below the video):

From the dashboard page click Library, then select the Data Sources tab, and click Create a New Data Source.

To connect to data that lives in a database, select the SQL Database Query from the list of core connectors on the right hand side.

Fill in the fields provided, write your query, then click execute and save. You’ll have connected a new database data source to your Klipfolio library.

Here’s a sample SQL query I used to create a new database data source, referencing our sample MySQL database (you can play with this sample data as well, using the database information listed up top):

SELECT order_date, company, first_name, last_name, product_code, product_name, unit_price, quantity

FROM customers

INNER JOIN orders on customers.id=customer_id

INNER JOIN order_details on orders.id=order_details.id

INNER JOIN products on order_details.product_id=products.id

ORDER BY order_date

By the way if you’re new to SQL, there are tons of great sites and tutorials out there to learn how to write SQL. Here's a great one at W3.

And if you don’t care to learn SQL, that’s not a problem either. I’ve fallen in love with Metabase, an open source tool that helps you build SQL queries without having to write SQL. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use Metabase to build a SQL query that you can use to access your data in Klipfolio:

Now that you’ve connected your database data source to Klipfolio, you can reference it to build data visualizations (we call them “Klips”), and every time your database data source updates, so will your Klip.

Building a data visualization in Klipfolio with a database data source

Once you’ve connected your database data source to Klipfolio, you can create data visualizations and dashboards based on that data source.

Here are two tutorials that will walk you through the process of building a multi-component Klip (if you’d rather read about it, the instructions are down below):

From the dashboard page click Add a Klip, then Build a Custom Klip.

Then select the visualization component you’d like to start building with, and on the next screen where you’re asked what data source you’d like to start building with, select Use an existing data source from the library.

Then find and select your database data source from the drop down list.

That’ll take you to the Klip Editor where you can reference your database data source to build out a custom data visualization.

A final word

We know firsthand the challenges that can arise at various parts of this process. I’ve watched people at all levels successfully build out SQL dashboards, and I’m convinced that you can as well.

Especially because our customer support team is here to help you at every step of the way.

I’m also happy to field any questions you may have. Just drop them in the comment section below. Best of luck!

See Also:

Building a dashboard with Excel data in Klipfolio

There was a time when new employees were given a quick orientation tour, shown their desk, and left to fend for themselves after the paperwork was done.

No more.

Like a growing number of firms today, Klipfolio has embraced the concept of ‘onboarding’ its new employees.

The process started with our development team, but because we’ve seen great results it’s now being adopted by the rest of the company. We’ve learned that a good onboarding process makes new hires successful faster, with less team effort. And that makes the whole team more successful.

What is employee onboarding?

Onboarding is about socializing new hires. It’s about getting them to buy into and embrace the company’s culture so that they can become as productive as possible, as fast as possible.

‘Onboarding’ is a relatively new concept in human resources, but an important one. It is way more than orientation – showing the new hires where the bathrooms are, for example, or explaining to them how they get access to their email account.

The process can last months, even up to a year in some firms. Firms that overlook a proper onboarding are missing out on a great opportunity to bolster team success.

As an article in the Harvard Business Review notes: “Companies realize that there’s a high payoff in this unique early honeymoon period by making the new employee feel welcome and comfortable in her new surroundings, assuring the person that she’s made a good decision, and minimizing the time it takes to become productive members of her new workgroup.”
(For anyone interested in learning more about onboarding, there’s also a white paper on the topic published by the National Business Research Institute.)

At Klipfolio we have found it is a fast and effective way of making new employees productive, and we have gone through several iterations to improve our process.

What we used to do for our new hires

Before we adopted the concept of onboarding, new hires would be welcomed in a haphazard manner.

Whoever was around would introduce the new hire to the team. But the person was often given very out-of-date instructions on getting set up. And other information would be shared only as it came up.

As a result, it took the new hire a long time to ramp up and begin contributing. This was bad for both the new hire and for the team.

At one point, we sat down and asked ourselves how we could make the onboarding process better for everyone.

We identified key points in the new hire’s timeline, and worked to improve each one.

The goal was to decrease the time it takes for a new hire to become a productive member of the team, and also reduce the amount of time the team spends training new hires. We also wanted the ramp-up period to be interesting and challenging without discouraging people (how to keep employees engaged). We also want new hires to understand and buy into Klipfolio’s corporate culture, which includes being welcoming and helpful. Finally, we want to create a positive first impression with new hires, so that they can feel they’ve made the right choice in joining our team and also feel engaged.

To onboard properly, you have to prepare

Proper onboarding doesn’t just happen. Here’s a list of what we do to make the onboarding process work:

1. Be prepared
2. Make a strong first impression
3. Hold an onboarding meeting
4. Focus the first work task on teaching the process
5. We follow up later so we can measure our success at onboarding

Be prepared

Have everything the new hire will need ready before the person arrives.

For example, we make sure that all the necessary accounts are created in advance, so no time is wasted.

We also assign each new hire a mentor. We decide before a new employee shows up who their mentor will be.

Make a strong first impression

Having a mentor is important. It personalizes the process of fitting in. It gives the new hire an actual person they can go to with questions, and also someone to introduce them to the members of the team. It is also important to put time and effort into preparing the new hire’s first important weeks. These two things help make a strong first impression.

On the new employee’s first day, their mentor greets them and shows them to their desk. He or she then helps them become familiar with their work environment and answers any questions. Then the new hire spends the morning on setup and the necessary corporate and administrative paperwork.

Hold an onboarding meeting

In the afternoon of the first day, there’s an onboarding meeting involving the new hire’s manager, their mentor and another senior member of the team. It involves a 20-30 minute presentation about Klipfolio’s corporate vision, and includes an org chart, information on product architecture and the development process, and other relevant topics. The goal is to give the new hire the basic information they need to succeed, including an explanation of the daily development process (if the new hire is a developer).

After the meeting, the new hire gets a tour of the office. At this time, they also meet other key team members.

Focus the first work task on teaching the process

After the onboarding meeting and the meet-and-greet, we assign the new hire their first issue.

We have prepared, in advance, a list of starter issues for new hires to work on. These issues match their skill set.

If the onboarding involves a developer, for example, he or she must locate a text file in our codebase and update it with an interesting fact about themselves. There is no coding or technical challenge involved in this issue, so the new hire can focus 100% on learning our process.

After completing this, the developer moves on to the other issues we prepared in advance.

We follow up later so we can measure our success at onboarding

One week later, we schedule a meeting with the new hire to gather feedback. (The meeting involves the same people who were at the initial onboarding meeting.) As with everything the development team works on, we ask about what went well, and what we could have done better. We listen and incorporate feedback so that the process improves for our next new hire.

New hires want to make a good first impression. It is easy to forget, though, that making an impression works both ways. The company must also make a good first impression on the employee. If the company seems unprepared for new employees, then it hasn’t done all it can to help them become successful in their new position.

Everyone benefits when the company has taken the time to prepare and successfully onboard a new employee. The new hire is successful faster, and enjoys their new job. And the work team gains a highly engaged new member who is able to start contributing quickly.

Jeremy Hall is a Software Development Manager at Klipfolio. He can be reached at jhall@klipfolio.com.

Other posts related to successfully onboarding employees:

How to build a knowledge-sharing culture in your company
How to create a software development manifesto, and why it’s important to have one

At 8:45am every morning, the executive team at Jobber meet for their daily leadership stand-up in their downtown HQ in Edmonton, Canada. The capital city of Alberta, Edmonton traces its strong entrepreneurial roots back to Canada’s iconic retailer, The Hudson’s Bay Company. With so many of Edmonton’s private sector working in the service and trade industries, it’s natural that Jobber calls this city home.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Jobber -- they are the technology backbone for home service businesses. Their software helps service based business with quotes, scheduling, invoicing, and payment collection. Tens of thousands of lawn care, maid service, plumbing, and other home service professionals use Jobber to run the day-to-day aspect of their businesses.

Why Jobber chose Klipfolio

Sam Pillar, CEO of Jobber and his team originally wanted to get dashboards up on TV screens throughout their office so everyone could see KPIs relevant to the work they were doing.

Since then, they’ve built numerous dashboards that are used in all sorts of other contexts, including leadership and management meetings.

Taking his love for data a step further, Sam even has a screen at his house to display his dashboards and track his business. Now that’s what we call commitment!

How Klipfolio has helped

After building dashboards with Klipfolio, Sam says:

“Our company and team level KPIs are much more accessible to everyone in the company now. Not only do we have core stuff displayed on TVs throughout the office, but people can check in on more detailed dashboards, or KPIs for other teams really easily without having to ask someone or generate a report. This helps everyone stay current and informed about what’s happening in the business, which ultimately should help the team make better, faster decisions.”

He adds in, “Our business is improving every day, which is measured by our data. Klipfolio is one of the ways we visualize that data. Of course, it can just as easily show us when and where there’s a problem, which is arguably more important.”

What metrics does Jobber care about

Using dashboards in leadership and management meetings is just one of the ways Jobber is taking advantage of Klipfolio. Here are some of the key metrics the Jobber team looks at daily:

• Trial Volume
• Lead Volume
• MRR Add
• Conversion Rates
• ARPA
• ASP
• Churn

Advice from Jobber CEO

As Sam, looks to the future he is confident with the right data at his fingertips and more importantly with an amazing, engaged and aligned team the future is very bright at Jobber.

Sam said, “We got really lucky with this, and have developed an amazing group. That’s not to say we haven’t had our share of problems, but generally speaking I think we’re in the very top percentile when it comes to team. I don’t think I realized when we started just how important it would be, and I know there’s more I could have done to move us forward faster if I’d fully recognized from day 1 that

your people and your culture are everything".

How Jobber builds dashboards

And of course, no Customer Spotlight post is complete without highlighting a couple of the data sources being used by Jobber in their dashboards:

• Salesforce
• Google Drive
• Google Analytics
• New Relic
• Custom Databases
• Zendesk
• Jira