I’m not an accountant or a bookkeeper. I’m a “Customer Loyalty Guru” at Klipfolio, which in the simplest of terms means I’m responsible for keeping our customers.

I care about our accounts receivable because in many cases overdue accounts are a lagging indicator of customer dissatisfaction.

I was still relatively new to this position when my boss dumped a bunch of customer account data on me and asked me to make sense of it. In Klipfolio terms he was asking me to put together a report or dashboard on the data that would help us get better as a Customer Success team.

Of course the request made sense.

We’re a dashboarding company. We’re all about monitoring data to improve the data as we go. But I had never built a dashboard with Klipfolio before. And more daunting still, I wasn’t sure what metrics or KPIs my boss wanted to see.

As I saw it, my options were:

1) Run and hide (ie. do nothing and hope that he didn’t follow up)

2) Fumble around with the project (ie. kick it around and get back to him with something, anything, so I could get back to my other tasks)

3) Embrace the data and build a kick ass dashboard that exceeds expectations

I’m sure you know I wouldn’t be writing this if I had proceeded with options 1 or 2.

So here’s what I built, how and why.

Our Accounts Receivable Dashboard

The dashboard I ended up building is a weekly view of customer accounts that owe us money.

The dashboard has three sections. Up top are our key accounts receivable KPIs (you can read more on how I ended up picking these KPIs in last section of this post). These KPIs should be familiar to anyone working in a SaaS (software-as-a-service) business.

What’s really important to point out in this section is that each KPI is given context - they are shown relative to the results of previous periods. The top most numbers are the number of accounts in each category. The middle number is the relative increase or decrease in accounts in the category; I’ve included indicators to highlight positive or negative developments from period to period. The bottom number is the total dollar value (in monthly recurring revenue terms) of the accounts in each category.

The visualization in the middle of the dashboard complements the KPIs up top. It shows the weekly trend lines of accounts for each of the three categories: Forced Cancels, Arrears and Grace.

The colors of the trend lines for each category match the corresponding KPI up top for quick and easy association. Hovering over any of the dots on the chart gives us the specific account count for that day of the week.

The tables at the bottom of the dashboard show what specific accounts are “at risk” (ie. they have an outstanding balance owing), with each table of accounts associated with a specific sales rep.

To the right of the account names are columns listing the total amount of monthly recurring revenue generated by the account, the status of the account (Active, Grace, Arrears), and the amount owing.

As the title of the report suggests, this dashboard gets published weekly, and its shared via a private url with the Customer Success team and with our accounting and operations teams. A number of team members also get the report as an automated email each week - the report is attached as a pdf.

I’ll save how and why we use this accounts receivable report for the final section of this post. First, let me tell you how I built it.

Building an Accounts Receivable Dashboard with Klipfolio

About Klipfolio

I should start by mentioning that Klipfolio is a cloud app for building real-time business dashboards with whatever data you want.

You can connect a wide variety of data sources to Klipfolio (including data in web apps like Zuora, Xero and Salesforce, Excel files from your computer, or data that lives in a database or data warehouse etc.), and then build custom data visualizations referencing that data, which you can then publish to a dashboard. Learn more here.

Connecting my data

I started this story with “my boss “dumped” a bunch of data on me and asked me to make it useful”. The truth is he shared a Google Sheet with me, which in effect is a report exported from our Salesforce account - a report which includes data from Zuora, our subscription and billing application (Salesforce is our account hub - we write a lot of account information to Salesforce records).

So the process of building my dashboard started by connecting this Google Sheet to Klipfolio.

Klipfolio has a “Connector Gallery” where you can select and connect to various web services, including files in Google Drive.

I selected the Google Drive connector, then authenticated with my credentials, and selected the Google Sheet I wanted to reference to build my dashboard.

Then I set the data ‘refresh rate’ to every 30 minutes (you can set the data to refresh as quickly as every minute depending on the data source you’re working with).

What this means is that Klipfolio will go back to my data source every 30 minutes to pull in fresh data, and any data visualizations which are referencing my data will automatically get updated.

Building data visualizations in the Editor

Once I connected my Google Sheet to Klipfolio, I could go into the Editor to build custom data visualizations, referencing the data in my Google Sheet.

Here’s an image of the Editor:

My data source (a Google Spreadsheet) can be seen down below (BTW I can also add multiple different data sources to this work space and work with them simultaneously - they would be shown as multiple tabs at the bottom of the work space).

Visualizations, which in Klipfolio are called “components”, can be dragged and dropped into the “Klip preview” area in the center of the screen, from the component menu on the right hand side.

The “formula bar” above my data is where I effectively specify what data I want to pull into the visualization, and how - with Excel-like functions and math operations. Here’s a video on the basics.

Two Morrissey albums and a couple cups of coffee later, I had built a fully functioning dashboard that made sense of the jumbled mess that was my Google Sheet. One more Radiohead album and a third cup of coffee after that, I was able to turn the dashboard into a visual work of art that Andy Warhol probably wouldn't dismiss entirely.

Or so I thought.

Picking the right KPIs for my Accounts Receivable Report

In fact the process of picking the best KPIs for this dashboard, and of creating the right visualizations to tell the story behind the numbers, was not a quick one.

I actually went back and forth with my boss several times, presenting various iterations of the dashboard, and getting feedback which I’d incorporate into new designs.

In the end what helped was constantly thinking:

What are we going to do with what we’re seeing on the dashboard?

Will it inspire us to act?

Does it give us enough context to improve what we’re doing?

This post on picking the right KPIs for your business was also helpful.

I’m proud of the final product, but the process was almost as important.

The back and forth with my boss and the team on what KPIs we should include on the dashboard, and the thinking that this project inspired, was helpful in and of itself. It forced us to think really hard about what KPIs we wanted to monitor, why and how.

Why an accounts receivable dashboard or report is so important - especially in SaaS

I’ve covered what I built and how, now let’s circle back to the initial request I received from my boss and I’ll explain the “why”. By the way, my boss is the Chief Customer Success Officer here at Klipfolio, Rupert Bonham-Carter.

I’ve been back and forth with Rupert quite a bit throughout this process, so here’s more of the context behind the initial “data dump”.

When Rupert was relatively new to Klipfolio, he didn’t have confidence that our process for engaging unpaid accounts, and of collecting outstanding balances, were optimal.

From the perspective of a SaaS executive in charge of Customer Success and revenue generation, we weren’t doing as much as we could or should to engage and save “at risk” accounts, and with respect to lost accounts, we weren’t collecting enough of the money that was owed to us.

As our support and optimization of the customer life cycle matured under Rupert’s leadership, new processes were put in place surrounding the cadence, channels and forms of communication we would deploy with at risk customers.

This was the context for my dashboard building project - Rupert and the team wanted visibility into the effectiveness of these new processes of dealing with “at risk” accounts.

He wanted to know:

Are we gradually reducing the number of forced cancellations, especially for high value accounts?

What is the total number of accounts owing this week, and how much is owed?

What account reps are responsible for what accounts with outstanding balances? Can they help accounting engage and save these accounts before we have to force a cancel?

The dashboard I built helps us answer these questions. Now we can now see patterns and trends in the charts and tables, and we can identify and prioritize accounts that deserve more attention.

I say “us” and “our” because as I mentioned earlier, this dashboard report is not just used by me, or by Rupert. A snapshot of the dashboard is sent by email to my fellow team members, my boss's boss, and my boss's boss's boss, every Friday morning.

Now we can look at the data visualizations together and determine which actions are the most appropriate to take. By the way, I was able to schedule that recurring email send in a matter of seconds and it was insanely easy to do.

Who would have thought that raw data in a Google Sheet could yield so much power when paired with the right tool?

I didn't, until I tried it.

Companies that provide software as a service – SaaS companies – often sell their services using a subscription model.

The concept is simple: Customers pay a set amount each week, month or year, and receive an agreed-upon service in return.

The model is believed to have been pioneered by the publishing industry (newspapers and magazines), and in addition to being a staple in the SaaS sector, it is used by a number of other sectors including utilities (mobile phone and cable companies, for example) and services such as Netflix or your neighbourhood fitness club. Increasingly, the model is also finding a place in retail and consumer goods for things like pre-assembled meal components and grooming products.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to the subscription model, and no one set way to go about applying the model. SaaS companies would do well to look at what’s happening in other businesses that use it. They’ll find cautionary tales showing pitfalls to avoid, as well as examples of new approaches that could inspire them to innovate.

The advantages of a subscription business model

There are definite advantages to the subscription business model.

For customers, it provides convenience (no more decisions about what to buy or when to buy it, no need to go out and shop) and more manageable recurring pricing, so expenses can be budgeted.

For sellers, it means regular recurring sales (a smoother flow of revenue) and, for those with inventory, it makes inventory easier to manage. It also creates a customer base, builds brand loyalty and takes some of the pressure off sales teams to come up with a steady flow of new customers.

Do a bit of research and you’ll find lots of information about what the model is and how to apply it to a business, including this article in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian and this one in the Harvard Business Review, which warns of the dangers of adopting the model in addition to speaking of it advantages.

The use of the subscription business model is growing

New sectors, particularly in retail and groceries, are adopting the subscription model. Think home meal kits, for example, or Dollar Shave Club, a service that delivers men’s grooming products to customers on a regular basis.

In fact, using the subscription model to sell goods instead of services is a hot trend.

Hitwise, a U.S.-based firm that monitors and analyzes website behaviour, put out a study last year that showed that visits to top subscription ‘box’ sites in the United States (sites that sell subscriptions to goods in boxes as opposed to online services) increased by nearly 3,000 percent in the three previous years.

“While the subscription shopping category is still a niche market,” notes a Hitwise blog, “these sites appeal to a critically important segment of consumers who are entering the prime of their earning and spending years, which should sustain continued growth in the category.”

Added Hitwise senior analyst John Fetto: Consumers who came of age in the digital era are accustomed to subscriptions models for online media (Netflix), music (Spotify) and news (New York Times online). Ironically, for them subscribing to something in the physical world is exciting and new.”

The downside of a subscription model

But there are downsides to the model.

• Consumers may get annoyed if they end up regularly paying for a service they don’t use. (Do you really watch all those channels on cable when you are forced to pay for a specific bundle?)
• They may find themselves getting hit automatically for charges they don’t want.
• They may also find it difficult to upgrade, or more likely, to downgrade or cancel the service.
• And in the worst cases they can feel they were manipulated into signing up for the service in the first place – something that will make them more likely to cancel. Any kind of sales manipulation or incentive is less likely to retain long-term relationships in a subscription economy.
• Businesses may be tempted to get lazy or complacent. Where’s the incentive to keep on top of things if you’ve essentially got a captive customer base? Subscription companies can't rest on their laurels - otherwise their customers will simply not renew. I believe subscription businesses must continually invest and improve - after all, their break-even point comes way down the road, compared to a company that gets paid for a service up front.
• There’s also a moral issue to consider: Is it ethically right to charge people for something they don’t use - the so-called zombie accounts that keep getting charged even though no one is using them?

Options to the traditional subscription models

For a variety of reasons – including that it’s important to keep challenging the accepted wisdom – there are new variations on the subscription model showing up, some of which should pique the interest of SaaS companies.

1. Short-term contracts

There are advantages to letting customers keep their commitment period short.

For example, instead of forcing customers to sign up for a full year, some companies are allowing them to go month to month, with the option of cancelling at any time.

Microsoft Word, for example, used to be sold as a package that you installed on your computer; now you download it and pay a monthly fee that covers updates.

The advantage for the customer: It eliminates the fear of getting committed for the long term, especially if it involves a product or service they are unsure about.

Surprisingly, the vendor/customer relationship benefits too. Vendors cannot rest on their laurels and continue to rake in ‘lifetime subscribers’ while providing a product that is never improved. If their customers can cancel at any time, they have to put time and effort into customer success. So it forces them to be attuned to customer needs and work at keeping customers happy.

Keep in mind, though, that shorter contracts do result in higher customer churn rates when measured against longer commitment over the same time period, so you’ll want to balance the pros and cons and do some math.

2. Pay per use

As long as five years ago, some people were arguing that it was time for SaaS companies to ditch the standard subscription model and move to pay-per-use.

Pay-per-use is now much more common, and some major companies – I am thinking here of Amazon and Slack – have adopted a billing model based on how you use their services.

Slack, which we use a lot internally, will not bill a user who has not signed in over the course of a month. This is refreshing - and think what it will do to their churn rates!

Amazon Web Services, like some utility companies, charges rates that vary with the time of day. We use the Amazon Web Services hosting platform for a variety of things. We will pay less for the service if we do work on that platform during off-hours.

While this variation on the subscription model means the seller’s revenues fluctuate from month to month, I’m willing to bet that this is offset by a perception of greater fairness, which in turn breeds customer loyalty. The other advantage for the seller is that they can optimize the use of their facilities. Since electricity on the grid can’t be stored, there’s less going to waste if there is increased use during off-hours; the same can be said for Amazon’s computers.

3. The micropayment model

If you’re an Apple user, you may find yourself paying a minuscule amount of money on your credit card every month – under $2 – for extra storage.

Because the billing is automated, the costs to the seller are minimal.

Because the amount is so small, the customer is less likely to balk.

Micropayments will work if a company does a lot of volume, and only if the cost of billing is next to nothing. The micropayment system has generally not gained much momentum because of the inherent cost barrier of credit card transactions - and many non-credit card systems have also struggled to make the economics work, including Bitcoin or other P2P wallet systems. But it is an innovative approach, and one that can work well for the customer. And it can bring it large additional revenues for companies.

4. Give it away

Three years ago, the Montreal newspaper La Presse launched a free digital edition, La Presse+, available on iPad.

The newspaper’s owners cut back to one paper edition a week at first, and they announced last spring that they will stop their print edition entirely at the end of this year.

The gamble was that by doing away with the costs involved in printing – buying paper and ink, running a printing press and having to worry about sales and distribution – they could make enough money solely through advertising to cover the costs of a free online edition.

The gamble appears to be working, and a news story in June reported that the paper’s online ‘circulation’ – the number of individual iPads that open the LaPresse+ app each day – went up by 18.7% last year and now sits at 273,000. As much as 90% of the paper’s advertising revenues now come from its online edition.

The La Presse model is an example of radical thinking, one that questioned the newspaper’s entire way of doing business. Giving the product away may not work for a SaaS company, but it’s a good example of creative thinking.

Single or multi-dimensional?

Ideally, you want to grow with your customers - or at least increase the revenue you generate as they see more value from your service. If you were to charge a single subscription fee, say $100 per month, no matter how many users were using your service or how many features or resources they were using, it’s clear you’d be limiting your growth potential even as your customers grew.

If you were to charge $20 per month per user, that would be one way to grow since you would earn more revenue as your client grew. . Charging per user is a popular choice, but be wary about the unintended consequences of using this as your limiter (see lessons learned when we radically shifted how we thought about pricing).

There is a variation on this: the multi-dimensional pricing model. This is where you charge $10 per month per user for basic features, and $30 per user per month for pro features, With this model, you grow in two ways. This is what Salesforce perfected and what many of the fastest growing companies like Slack are using today.

Subscription model examples

	Flat	Tiered / Bundles	Single Dimension	Multi Dimension	Usage Based
	Dollar Shave Club	Hubspot	Groove	Slack	AWS
Examples	Netflix	Buffer	Mailgun	Helpscout	Stripe
	Spotify Premium	Unbounce	Evernote Premium	Pipedrive	Twilio
Pros	Easy to sell, single path for prospects	Ability to target different customers	Easy to sell, simple story for prospects	Ability to target different customers	Very fair (usage = fees)
		Expansion path is clear	Revenue will scale as your customer grows	Benefit from multiple expansion paths	Can be single or multi-dimensional
Cons	No expansion revenue opportunity	Can get complicated with many tiers	Single expansion revenue path	If plans are not designed properly, value and then expansion revenue will not occur naturally	Revenue will fluctuate each month
	Difficult to target different customers	Jumps from one tier to another can be a barrier	Difficult to target different customers		Harder for prospects to understand costs
Will work with Freemium

Conclusion

Creative thinking is just what’s needed here.

I believe strongly that a business must always be challenging itself. It must work to deliver a better product, but it must also question and innovate in its business practices. That includes its approach to billing. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work with as much efficiency tomorrow.

It is not written in stone that the subscription business model, as we and other SaaS companies use it, cannot evolve. We should be questioning our billing models. Only two things should not change: Our billing practices should be fair and perceived to be so, and our customers should easily see the value in what we are providing them.

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.

Depending of your business and the information systems that you use, your data can be in many places. You probably have data in management systems (ERPs), SaaS applications, and in spreadsheets. There’s also a good chance your data will pass through spreadsheets before it goes to the dashboard. In this posts, we’ll cover some best practices to prepare your data for use in your dashboard.

Before you can even analyze your data you need to ensure that your data has an analyzable data structure and that your data is always up to date. The ideal structure to analyze data is to organize it in a database format and configure it to update automatically from the data source. Below we’ll show you exactly how to do these two things:

Database layout

With Google Sheets, as with any spreadsheet software, you can select the cell position where you start your table (e.g., you can start your database on the fifth row and third column). However, the ideal structure to make it easy to analyze the data in another sheet is to start in the first row and first column, with labels in row one and data vertically below.

Data format

Each column should be formatted to host the same data type (e.g., all data in column A is date format, in column B currency, and so on). We recommend setting the format via the menu rather than letting Google guessing it for you and applying automatic formats.

Automating the data transfer

Typically the data that you want to bring to your dashboard is not all housed in a single spreadsheet, it's not uncommon to find companies with more than 100 different spreadsheets with data to consolidate and analyze. And a usual procedure is copy and paste the data between the spreadsheets. But this practice can be dangerous and introduce errors in the data while wasting a lot of time.

There are two good options to connect your data with Google Sheets and eliminate this risk. The first is the function ImportRange and the second a Google Sheet add-on called Sheetgo. ImportRange is recommended as a quick solution to work with small volumes of data. It’s a great way to bring information from one spreadsheet to another for spot analysis. However if connecting spreadsheets becomes a routine in your work and you depend on these connections for analysis, reports, and decision making, you can use an application designed for data transfer, like Sheetgo.

You can find more information about the ImportRange function here:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093340?hl=en

Infinite and automatic formulas

Google Sheets also allows you to contemplate future data insertions with a single formula so that you don’t have to copy a single formula thousands of times and don’t have to worry about new data entering outside of your formula range and not being analyzed. By using =ARRAYFORMULA() you automatically replicate the desired formula for the entire array.

Tip 1: When this formula is applied to an infinite range, it will apply your calculation until the last row, independent of blank rows. This may cause some errors when it executes formulas based on blank cells but this can easily be solved with an IF statement to check if that row has data to calculate, and if not display a blank.

Tip 2: Be careful with the range symmetry, because if you put an incorrect data range where the you check the row above and output the results in a row below, the formula can cause the spreadsheet to attempt to add infinite rows, causing the spreadsheet crash.

Creating pre-analysis

If you want to analyze “How many sales were made last week” and you need that information updated weekly, how can you automatically update it? Below we’ve included two tips that will help to create dynamic sample of data based on you raw data:

Infinite ranges

For example, if the data you are analyzing has 1,000 rows, when you create the analysis for the first time you may insert into your formulas the range A1:A1000. But if you are receiving every day new rows you need to update the range. To avoid the maintenance, just remove the number of the end of the range, like A1:A. That way the spreadsheet will understand there is an infinite range, that is, no matter how long the data set is, the formula will always account for new rows.

Rolling periods of time

Let’s assume that you need to create an analysis of sales from the last 7 days. You can included dates, day by day, in the first column and will insert the formula to count the sales by day in the second column. But, as time passes, you will need to come back to the spreadsheet to adjust the range or adjust the dates. To cut out this manual work, just insert a dynamic date as base, and make the other dates relative to this base. For instance, in the cell A7 insert the formula =TODAY()-1 (the output will be the date of yesterday) and in the previous cell (A6) insert a reference to the A7 minus 1 (=A7-1), and so on until you are showing the last 7 days. That way, every day this data range will automatically change and your dashboard will always display the last 7 days.

Conclusion

There are many other tips and tricks that will help to better prepare your data, but the ones mentioned above will give a good base to start to make your dashboard update automatically without maintenance.

Spoonity CEO & Co-Founder Max Bailey, is a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about helping restaurants grow and attract new customers. He’s especially motivated to reach younger generations by focusing on marketing operations, data analysis and resource management. In just 6 short years, the team at Spoonity have helped restaurants complete over 10 million transactions.

About Spoonity

Spoonity is a loyalty rewards platform that enables businesses to provide loyalty rewards program, gift cards, and online ordering through a custom branded smartphone app.

Customers can register, track points and add money to their mobile wallets. Points can be awarded for items purchased, dollars spent or number of visits. The process is simple for customers and staff, which keeps a business running smoothly.

Why Spoonity chose Klipfolio

With amazing success, comes growth. Spoonity is now a global company, with departments and team members located around the world.

With such a big change, the team quickly recognized the need to track key metrics across departments and roles that were starting to become more formalized. The Spoonity team, now uses Klipfolio to track metrics for sales, marketing, accounting, customer success, and onboarding.

“With Klipfolio, we’ve identified new opportunities and addressed critical problems that were limiting our business.” says CEO & Co-Founder Max Bailey.

After building out internal dashboards and creating a data-driven team culture, the Spoonity team recognized that the power and flexibility of Klipfolio could extend even further.

“We wanted to provide metrics for our merchants to monitor their programs in new and creative ways.” said Max.

How Spoonity uses Klipfolio for their clients

Spoonity now offers detailed dashboard reports for their customers so they can easily track reward app performance. The dashboards make it easy for Spoonity customers to track metrics like:

• Most valuable clients
• Most profitable customers
• Demographics
• Top selling items
• And more!

The Spoonity team also took advantage of centralizing a lot of their customer interactions by signing up for the HubSpot for Startups program, which gives seed stage startups 90% off HubSpot’s marketing and sales tools.

Max says, "We use both HubSpot and Klipfolio and the combination is awesome. Klipfolio allows our management team to monitor our sales, marketing, accounting, customer success, and onboarding all in one place which keeps our entire team on the same page."

Advice from Spoonity CEO

Like most startups, Spoonity started early in their metric monitoring journey which Max recommends to all other startups.

Whether you start with manual excel reports or real-time dashboards, getting your team to rally around key metrics is critical to any business’ success.

How Spoonity builds dashboards

And of course, no Klipfolio case study is complete without highlighting a couple of the data sources being used by Spoonity in their dashboards:

• HubSpot
• QuickBooks
• Google Analytics
• Facebook
• Zendesk
• Custom Databases

Start-ups are by definition small, and almost invariably everyone is too focused on making a go of it to worry too much about product management. But once a start-up gains a foothold in its market and begins to grow, making product management a priority becomes critical.

That’s a lesson we learned at Klipfolio, and it’s the topic of this blog. Here are six important lessons about product management I learned as Klipfolio’s Senior Director, Product Management and Documentation.

1. Introduce the concept of product management to your company

It’s hard to know exactly when you should make product management the responsibility of one person on your team, but the important thing is to be aware that you will need to do it at some point.

Klipfolio has grown tremendously over the last three and a half years - our employee count is up by a factor of six, our customer count has grown by a factor of approximately seven, and our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is up by a factor of about nine. To top it off, our product release count has grown by almost a factor of 12 each year.

With so much growth in the number of product releases, it should come as no surprise that product management became a priority.

Product management was introduced when I came on board, more than three years ago.

I took over the responsibility for product management from the founders, and worked to align strategy and target markets, introduce new processes, and overcome a lot of bad habits. It’s not always a straightforward process, but it is possible for product management to thrive in the tempest of growth and change that is a start-up.

2. Don’t go it alone

Product success and priorities should not be the exclusive responsibility of a single person - the product manager. Because change can happen quickly, we found that there is huge value to having the primary stakeholders collaborating for constant alignment.

We created a team of people from Development, User Experience and Product Management to bring three perspectives to the table at once and help balance the trade-offs between time, functionality and cost/resources.

Our structure ended up being like a three-legged stool: If one department is not in the room, the context is missing and things tend to tip.

We have found this partnership approach so useful, we have replicated it in teams as we have grown.

We get together at least once a week as the leaders for the product organization. At the team level, the people in the partnership are connecting pretty much daily.

3. Learn to balance the short-term priorities and the big picture

We went from about eight-week cycles to releasing almost every day, and sometimes twice a day. We will have over 200 releases this year vs. 14 the first year I was with Klipfolio.

Over time, there’s been an incredible acceleration in the need for stories and requirements. Inevitably, tasks get broken down into smaller increments. With this shift to more agile development, we have a prioritized list being picked up in two-week sprints. This allows for much more flexibility to redirect effort to areas requiring additional focus, and to quickly shift priorities.

However, the need for a more traditional roadmap remains. The management team, board of directors and marketing all want to see the longer-term plan. Having that longer-term plan also helps keep an eye on the big beats we want to achieve in the future. This provides a target for teams to aim for, generates urgency and excitement, and helps align teams behind our vision for the future.

We have chosen to balance both needs, and the roadmap evolved to ensure the high-level themes of what we want are prioritized. However, more fleshing out happens as things come closer.

This has allowed us to react as we found competitors jumping into our space and we needed to adjust quickly.

4. Experiment and adapt processes

With all this change, you should expect to learn more and change as you go.

We have built in a culture for experimentation that goes from tracking data on our product with MixPanel, to conducting A/B tests on functionalities like tours and onboarding and regular testing and adjustments to pricing models for optimization.

We have also been experimenting with processes to design, mock up and test new ideas and concepts. Over the past few years, we have used a number of approaches, including:

• Writing traditional requirements documents
• Enhancing requirements with user stories, something that has evolved and improved over time as other departments got more involved
• Following design thinking and creating journey maps
• Experimenting with user story mapping based on Jeff Patton’s book
• Trying design sprints (developed at Google Ventures)
• Tailoring design sprints for specific projects

These tests and experiments have brought in new concepts and excitement, not to mention more alignment and acceleration! However, beware of blindly following the patterns without regard to your situation, cultures and mindsets. You could end up creating the impression of being too rigid (the “stick to the process” mentality) rather than agile. We are currently blending a number of concepts from across the various approaches to fit with our culture and teams.

5. Grow with development

This feels like motherhood and apple pie issue - as the Dev team grows, so does their throughput, and the demand for a higher velocity of requirements and demands on your time. Nevertheless, it bears marking out as an important factor in product management.

You need to ramp up your capacity beyond just the development team. The biggest challenge for me was giving away the exciting projects to work on. I consciously gave the most exciting things to my team. My objective was to keep them engaged, enthusiastic and focused.

I’m also not big with “command and control” as an approach to enabling the team. I did find the more we grew and the increased demands on our time, the more we needed to have enough context to make decisions and then run.

We grew from one Dev team, one PM, and one UX to having four teams - each led by a partnership between Dev/PM/UX. We replicated the three-legged-stool of Dev/PM/UX for each team. They are each running version of design sprints with user story mapping.

6. Align product manager strengths with their projects

All job descriptions for a product manager will have all the common elements about speaking with customers, distilling requirements, driving the priorities, etc.

However, the types of skills needed may vary depending on the project, or product or company. For example, outside of the general skills of a product manager, there are a few common background skill sets that can help a product manager. The three that jump to mind are UX or design, technical or development, and business.

Inevitably, product managers will have some skill in each of these areas; however, as with personality tests, their strengths will gravitate towards one or two of those areas, but rarely all three.

We happen to have been lucky to have a really strong UX team, so the emphasis as we look at product managers is not on their design skills.

That said, we do have different areas for our product offering where being more business or technical savvy can be an asset. I mention this because over time, we have occasionally had our team shift focus areas. (Did I say we were living in a tempest?) During one of these shifts, we had a mismatch - one product manager with more technical tendencies was put in an area where being business savvy was the key to success. The product manager made a ton of progress and the area took some great leaps. However, there was an impact on morale, team cohesiveness, and such.

I love that we have an open dialogue in the team, and the product manager raised it in a one-on-one. Shortly afterwards, we had another shuffle that led to a better alignment with the employee’s strengths/tendencies.This change made a huge impact on the product manager and the person’s success profile in the company, among other things.

Those are the lessons we’ve learned. I hope you find them useful.

Scott Lawrence is the Senior Director of Product Management and Documentation at Klipfolio.
@ScottLawrence67

1) Work with extremely smart, equally nice, and collaborative people, as well as a group of down-to-earth leaders who get stuff done.

2) Be part of one of the fastest growing Canadian companies.

3) Work on a product recognized by analysts as a leader in its category.

4) Quickly see your impact on the product with our daily releases.

5) Tackle challenging and interesting problems, and strive to do the right thing, the right way using our always evolving manifesto.

6) Use modern, exciting, and relevant technologies like AWS services, React and Redux, Akka, Spring Boot, GraphQL, and Elasticsearch.

7) Innovate every day and have the freedom to contribute your ideas as part of our internal hackathons.

8) Learn, teach, and mentor by attending our lightning talks and joining our guilds.

9) Collaborate with your manager to grow your personal brand and skills.

10) Give back to the community by participating in and organizing events like Meetups and Hackathons, as well as supporting charities in our community.

11) Location, location, location! Our office is in the heart of downtown Ottawa, where all the action happens - close to transit, and cycling-friendly.

12) Enjoy perks like a fitness bonus, training benefits, sitting/standing desks, free snacks, delicious coffee and so much more!

13) Benefit from flexible hours and an environment that encourages work-life balance.

14) Build lasting friendships by participating in various social committee, team, and corporate events, including board game nights, wine and cheese, axe throwing (yup, you read that correctly) and more!

15) Bring your dog to the office :)

Still not sure?? Check out our employee reviews and blog posts, or reach out to me and let’s chat!

Helping is the new selling

When a massive poster with the words “THINK LIKE A CUSTOMER” is the first thing you see getting into work every day, the message to the Customer Success team here at Klipfolio is very clear: helping is the new selling.

Account management originated when companies realized that making a sale wasn’t enough to stay competitive - the way clients are treated post-sale is arguably more important to the health of a company as retaining customers is significantly less expensive than acquiring new business.

With that in mind, account managers, customer success managers, and anyone who is tasked with preventing churn and finding expansion opportunities must ensure that their primary focus is to do what is right for the customer.

Make it personal

You pick up the phone!

Business visionary Michael Scott once said “People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake.” While most of that is true, connecting with customers is the key takeaway, and if you can’t get facetime with them, the best way to do that is over the phone.

Know your product

I hope this goes without saying, but if you’re going to think like a customer, you need to be in the trenches with them. Before you hop on a call with anyone, if you don’t have a solid grasp of your own product, your customer won’t trust the things you’re saying. If they don’t trust you, they won’t take your recommendations, or, even worse, they’ll leave. For instance, our software is tough to master. It’s power is in its customizability, so I’ve had to spend hours learning to answer any question that comes up. However, some things are simply too far advanced for me to know, so I understand how to defer things to our dashboard experts on the Support and Ninja Services teams.

When you know what your product can do, you can be the authority on how each one of your customers can best utilize its functionality. I remember speaking with a customer who was using Klipfolio for internal dashboards. At the end of the call, he mentioned that he used SQL data to create websites for each one of his clients to act as a report. Right away, I was able to recommend creating a dashboard template to create personalized client accounts using our Client Management functionality, a process that would ultimately save him hundreds of dollars and countless hours.

Know your client

The point of contacting a customer isn’t to meet some quota, but to offer value to them (this is being helpful). Use the tools at your disposal to identify problem areas as well as opportunities. Luckily for me, I understand Klipfolio so well that I use it every day for my own job.

With our Salesforce integration, I’m able to pull in key information from our customers and base my conversations around that. If they submit lots of tickets, I may need to let them know about our Professional Services or our many workshops. If they haven’t logged in for a couple of weeks, I can reach out to find out the reasons why they aren’t using their beautiful dashboards. If they’re a marketing agency, I can let them know about our Partner program. With thousands of customers under my watch, I can’t hope to speak with every single one, but that’s only OK if I reach out to the ones who need it the most.

Use email sparingly

I haven’t yet mentioned email. We’re all guilty of relying too heavily on email communication in an attempt to not annoy clients. I hate getting promotional calls from companies, so I had subconsciously conflated that with making any general phone call.

It’s best treated as a means to send meeting invitations and to follow up on calls. All too often, email conversations morph into monstrously long email chains that span days; even worse, nothing but the original question was discussed. Email has its place, but a simple half-hour call allows for not only getting to the heart of an issue, but also opens the floor to discuss other problems as well as opportunities. It’s so refreshing to call a customer in response to an email and hear how thankful they are that they’re getting attention. (It’s my job!)

At the end of the day, as an account rep your ultimate responsibility is to ensure the success of your base. Protect your customers from murderous machines and let them hear your voice. And always make sure you use your data to inform your decision-making.

Tim Ceuppens is an Online Marketer at bakerMEN, a certified Klipfolio Partner from Belgium. His main focus is looking at what data they have available, assess who they need to reach, what they need to reach them, and how they’re going to put all of those things into play. He frequently meets with customers, where this data is the basis of their meetings.

About bakerMEN

bakerMEN is a growing online marketing consultancy firm that helps you translate your marketing needs to the digital age. They share their knowledge with your team to ensure you grow together.

bakerMEN connect you with your customers through online advertising and help you distil important insights on their behaviour through analysis. Klipfolio allows them to not just tell you and your team about the status of your project, but to show it in clear data visualizations.

Why bakerMEN chose Klipfolio

Even when they were just 5 people, it would take the bakerMEN team about 3 days to get all of their customer reports out the door. They eventually moved to Google Drive, which was fine at first. But as they grew, they began advertising on non-Google networks and reporting became a very time consuming job for the lean team. They needed a tool that was as automated as possible, easy to use for customers, automatically updated, and easy to maintain.

They first heard of Klipfolio through one of their partners. As they started building out their dashboards they could see it had the features they were specifically looking for:

• Ability to add and combine multiple data sources
• Simple visualizations
• Ease of use for the end user
• Automated reports

When we started there was quite a learning curve to get the formulas down, but that's been so improved these last two years.

How bakerMEN use Klipfolio

“We’re using Klipfolio for all of our client reporting and internal reporting. We also have a dedicated TV dashboard showing real time information about the status of all our projects.” says, Tim.

Using Klipfolio for their clients allows bakerMEN to get all 100 project reports out in less than 2 days. Tim also mentions, “If you're asking me how long that would take us if we had to do it all by hand, I'd say about a week.”

Here’s an example of one of their client reports

One of the things that is often requested but we've always had trouble with is getting historical data for a Twitter handle/account.

The reason? Twitter does not make historical data available via its API. In order to get this data in any dashboarding service, you would need to use a paid service, like Quintly.

With a bit of a workaround, however, you now have the ability to track this information in a Google Sheet!

The following example details how you can set up a Klipfolio datasource to track the Followers, Friends, Listed, and Favorites count for a Twitter handle daily in a sheet that looks like this:

For this to work you will need:

• A valid twitter account
• A valid Google account
• Access to your Klipfolio API key

Unfortunately this does not go backwards to get previous account data - you can only start tracking from the time you set it up onwards.

1. Set up the Twitter datasource

First, you will need to set up your Klipfolio datasource. This is the actual datasource that retrieves the information from Twitter.

To get stared, create a new datasource and from our Connector Gallery, select Twitter.

For this section, pick Account Stats (either one).

Select a valid twitter authentication token, or create a new one.

On the next page, enter the Twitter Handle that you wish to track. You can keep the query in basic mode.

If you are using custom mode, this is what the query would look like:

Click 'Get Resource', then once the data has been loaded, continue to name and save the outsource. The refresh interval here is irrelevant, as the next steps will refresh the datasource for you.

Finally, once you have your datasource, make sure to keep track of the datasource ID, highlighted below, which we will need later.

2. Get the Klipfolio API key

You will need a Klipfolio API key to allow you to refresh the Twitter datasource, and to grab the data from it that is pushed to the sheet. You can follow the steps outlined here to get your Klipfolio API key. Keep this API key handy, as we will need it soon.

3. Set up the Google Sheet

To create the actual Google Sheet that you’ll be putting the historical information into, log in to Google Sheets and start a new one:

Set up the sheet with the following headers:

4. Set up the Script

Now that you have a Google Sheet to push data to, you’ll need a script that actually does the pushing of the data. Never fear, we have already created this script for you - the only thing you need to do is copy and paste.

To get to the script, go to Tools -> Script Editor:

Here you will copy and paste the code supplied at the bottom of this post. There are two sections where we need to adjust the code. Near the top of the code, replace XXX with your Klipfolio API key (see step 2 above) and replace YYY with ID of the Twitter datasource you created (see step 1 above).

5. Set up the Trigger

To set up the trigger that runs the script once a day, first, save your script.

Next, set up the trigger:

At this point you may be asked to enable permissions to run your script.

You can simply sign in to your Google account, and click 'Allow'.

Once this is done, you can set up the timer to go once per day, at whatever time you wish:

Now, every day our Google Sheet will be automatically updated with the information from the twitter account we are tracking.

6. Connect Klipfolio to your Google Sheet

The final step is to create a new datasource in Klipfolio, connecting to the Google Sheet you just created. Start off in our Connector Gallery and select Google Drive.

Then, follow these instructions to get your Google Sheet into Klipfolio as a datasource you can use.

If you are having any issues with the datasources not working, check to see if either of the datasources you are using is encountering an error. You may need to periodically re-authorize one or both of the authentication tokens.

Hope this helps out!

Best regards,
Joshua Cohen-Collier
Technical Support Engineer, Klipfolio

Code to paste into Script Editor:

/*
Gets the followersCount,friendsCount,listedCount and favouritesCount from a twitter datasource, and posts it to a linked Google Sheet.
*/
function trackAccount() {

var apiKey="";//Enter your API key here
var DSID="";//Enter your twitter datasource ID here

var sleepTime=4;//Number of minutes to wait before checking datasource

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();//Get sheet this script is linked to

//Refresh datasource first
var URL="https://app.klipfolio.com/api/1.0/datasource-instances/"+DSID+"/@/refresh";
var options = {"async": true,"crossDomain": true,"method" : "POST",'muteHttpExceptions': true,"headers" : {"kf-api-key" : apiKey,"Content-Type": "application/json"
}
};
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(URL, options);

//Get date this was sent
var d = new Date(),
month = '' + (d.getMonth() + 1),
day = '' + d.getDate(),
year = d.getFullYear();
if (month.length < 2) month = '0' + month;
if (day.length < 2) day = '0' + day;
var rowDate=[year, month, day].join('-');

Utilities.sleep(sleepTime*60000);// pause in the loop for specified number of minutes, so as to avoid datasource not being refreshed when we update

//Get Datasource data query settings
URL="https://app.klipfolio.com/api/1.0/datasource-instances/"+DSID+"/data";
options = {"async": true,"crossDomain": true,"method" : "GET",'muteHttpExceptions': true,"headers" : {"kf-api-key" : apiKey,"Content-Type": "application/json"
}
};

//Run API query
response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(URL, options);

//Check for errors
if (response.getResponseCode()!==200)
{
return;
}

//Get text of response
var responseText=response.getContentText();

//Get followers count
var followersCount=responseText.substring(
responseText.indexOf('followers_count')+17,//start index
//^above number + index of , insto substring starting at above number
responseText.indexOf('followers_count')+17
+
responseText.substring(responseText.indexOf('followers_count')+17).indexOf(',')
);

//Get friends count
var friendsCount=responseText.substring(
responseText.indexOf('friends_count')+15,//start index
//^above number + index of , insto substring starting at above number
responseText.indexOf('friends_count')+15
+
responseText.substring(responseText.indexOf('friends_count')+15).indexOf(',')
);

//Get listed count
var listedCount=responseText.substring(
responseText.indexOf('listed_count')+14,//start index
//^above number + index of , insto substring starting at above number
responseText.indexOf('listed_count')+14
+
responseText.substring(responseText.indexOf('listed_count')+14).indexOf(',')
);

//Get favourites count
var favouritesCount=responseText.substring(
responseText.indexOf('favourites_count')+18,//start index
//^above number + index of , insto substring starting at above number
responseText.indexOf('favourites_count')+18
+
responseText.substring(responseText.indexOf('favourites_count')+18).indexOf(',')
);

//Write to sheet
sheet.appendRow([rowDate, followersCount,friendsCount,listedCount,favouritesCount]);

}

So you’re ready to build your first dashboard. Great! But how are you going to make it relevant? How are you going to make it actionable? We’ve seen too many examples of well-intentioned data champions who build impressive dashboards, only to complain that nobody looks at them after a few weeks.

In order to build a dashboard that keeps your team engaged, you have to think about some key concepts. That’s why we put together this Dashboard Planner.

Print out the Dashboard Planner worksheet and fill it out with key stakeholders at your company. Completing these four steps will set you up for success and save you time rebuilding dashboards later.

1. Goal

First, let’s start with your goal. Think about yourself or your team: what is the main goal you are trying to achieve? Maybe you are in support and need to hit your target of responding to tickets within 48 hours. Your goal would be “answer tickets on time”. Maybe you’re on a marketing team and want to increase traffic to your website by five per cent. Whatever it is, write it down...it helps make it official.

2. Audience

Next, define the audience for whom this dashboard is intended. Is it your manager? Your team? You? The CEO? This is one of the most common dashboard design mistakes we see. You can’t just have a “marketing” dashboard, because the CEO will be interested in very different metrics than your content specialist! Select an audience for the first dashboard you want to build that aligns with the goal you specified.

3. Metrics

Now we get to the fun part: thinking about metrics. We find it helpful to think about two categories of metrics: lagging, and leading.

Lagging metrics are typically easy to measure. They reflect outputs, and are often common or familiar metrics (e.g. “revenue”). The tricky thing about lagging metrics is that they are often very difficult to action directly.

Then there are Leading metrics. These are typically harder to measure, and they reflect inputs instead of outputs. Leading metrics are often very specific to businesses, so you’ll need to put some thought into them. The nice thing about leading metrics is that they are highly actionable—perfect for a dashboard.

So now that you know the theory, let’s put it into practice. I find it easiest to start with lagging metrics and work up to my leading metrics.

How would you measure success against the goal you defined earlier? To go back to our examples, perhaps as the support manager, you would say “100 per cent of all tickets had a response time smaller than 48 hours”. As the marketing manager you might say “Traffic increased by five per cent by the end of the month”. These are great lagging metrics. Relatively easy to measure, easy to define, but not very actionable.

4. Action

Now let’s think about what actions we could take to move the needle on either of those lagging metrics. For the support dashboard, we might want to show “number of tickets that have been open for more than 4 hours without a response yet”. Now we’re talking! If your support team looks up at their TV dashboard and notices that this number is too high, they can take action! Maybe they’d ask the sales team to help, or work with DevOps to determine whether there is a system problem that is causing an influx of tickets. The point is, the leading metric here is much more actionable.

Similarly, for the marketing dashboard, we might say that we want to publish three blog posts per week for the entire month in order to boost website traffic through new content. Then we would show “number of blog posts this week” with a target of three. If your content strategist notices they are behind on their target late in the week, they better ask for help churning out some blog posts!

Now that you’ve finished filling out your planner, you should be able to see the impact Klipfolio will have on your day-to-day processes. It’s one thing to build dashboards and monitor the health of your business, it’s a whole other ballgame when you use those visualizations to take proper action on the fly.

Your best next step is to schedule some time with a Klipfolio Guru and review your goals together so they can help you turn this plan into a reality.

Happy dashboarding :)

A big part of our role as the Integrations team here at Klipfolio is to facilitate easy connections to services that our customers use on a regular basis. Because we deal with a wide variety of customers, we are exposed to all kinds of services and their APIs. We look at services ranging from as big and complex as Salesforce or Google Analytics to emerging services like Emma.

In the last few years we have seen a lot of different approaches to APIs and we want to share our experience with you. Over a series of blogs we plan to let you in on some of the awesome ways companies have tackled their APIs and some of the not so awesome ways.

At Klipfolio we know that we haven’t built our API perfectly yet and that we have a lot to improve on. Our goal is to include you in our journey of do’s and don’ts as we go. Over the series of the blog, our posts will vary in technical depth and level of detail. This post is intended to give a lay of the land and to explore some topics that we may (or may not) cover in more depth in future posts.

So, storytime. What have we seen that we love and don’t love so much?

Authentication

The starting point of connecting to any API is figuring out how to authenticate to the service. The best case scenario is when the service uses standard OAuth 2.0 as their method of authentication. We have seen a lot of variation in how OAuth is used and deviations from the standard. This sometimes makes it harder to integrate into our application.

Registration

There are even more variations in the registration processes for OAuth applications. Some services make the process convenient through an easily accessible development portal. Other services require a lengthy process of demos and detailed descriptions of your integration use case. As a third-party integrator it is really exciting when we find a service that allows us to create a test integration so that we can start our development in parallel with the app registration process. This gives us the flexibility to move quickly, especially if there is test data to play with.

One of the biggest joys we get is when we come across an API that is clear and consistent. Nerds, we know. What do we mean?

Provide clear documentation

Step one, it has documentation, check! Ideally, an API is well documented with sections that are easily navigable and have obvious labels. Finding crucial information should be intuitive. A good example of this is Mailchimp’s API. Their documentation is extensive and easy to navigate with sections describing authentication, rate limits, and best practices. They are very detailed about their query parameters and give good response examples for each endpoint. They also include error codes and a glossary. Bonus points go to services that have an API playground for users to test an endpoint in as they are consulting the reference docs.

Be consistent

As we start to work with the API comes step two, consistency in API request and response structure. A huge pain point for us is having to navigate through API documentation to decipher all the different behaviours of each endpoint.

You would think that a service that implements the ability to divide data into discrete pages would use a consistent request structure and parameters. After all, a user has to define the right parameters to be to able navigate through all the pages available. Unfortunately, services don’t always follow a consistent model, we’ve seen slight differences in the way pagination is implemented. For example:

Similarly, consistency across response structure for different endpoints in an API is important. It is much easier to consume APIs that have a predictable response. For example:

{“user”: “Jane Smith”
  “e-mail”: “jsmith@acme.com”
  “date_created”: 1510094940
}

{“id”: “84ckhj9”
  “campaign”: “Fall Sale”
  “date_created”: “2017-07-01”
}

See what we mean? We would expect date_created to return the same date format for both responses. They are from the same API, right? Instead their different formats create confusion, make reusability of code more difficult, and reduce the chances of a successful implementation.

Use errors to educate

Step three is having helpful error codes. When something goes wrong, we want to know why and how to fix it. There’s nothing more confusing than mixed messages in an HTTP response. For example:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
{“code”: “404”
  “message”: “Your account does not have the right API access”
}

The HTTP response header indicates that everything is OK, but the actual API response tells a different story. Why not just send the code in the response in the HTTP header? Similarly, there is this example:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
{“code”: “400”
  “message”: “Error”
}

We get it, there was probably something wrong with our query, but what is the point of showing an error message if it is not going to help us figure out what we did wrong? Services that have a special section in their API docs specifically for error messages get a special shout out!

Communicate updates

Finally, step four is proper communication and documentation around changes to the API. We all have a lot of things to keep track of when it comes to integrations so getting a friendly reminder when things are changing in a service is super helpful. The goal is always to be proactive rather than reactive so that nothing breaks on our customers or on us. Being notified well in advance and being able to reference a document or changelog that outlines the changes helps achieve those goals.

We know that we are not the only ones exploring or building APIs and have likely missed some things that are top of mind for you. We would love to hear what you are noticing too! Have you run into major pain points or an API that you absolutely love?

Erik van Dorp is the owner and CEO of Cervinomarketing, a certified Klipfolio partner based in the Netherlands. With a Masters in Business Economics, Erik has been passionate about data since the start of his career and wants to help his clients fall in love with their data. Erik believes that data can be impactful and captivating when it’s used to help tell the story of a business, which is something he strives for with all of his dashboards.

About Cervinomarketing

Cervinomarketing has been a trusted Klipfolio partner for the last 4 years and works with an impressive line-up of clients like The Dutch Diabetes Foundation, Netbooster, and Joolz, just to name a few. Cervinomarketing focuses its attention on marketing and online marketing agencies, which has helped them become experts in building marketing dashboards for agencies and their clients.

When Cervinomarketing started working with Klipfolio, they saw the power of the API which allowed them to scale up the deployment of dashboards for their clients.

Since Cervinomarketing can deploy dashboards faster than others can build them from scratch, agencies love working with them.

They’ve built their own template library that helps them scale their business. The Klipfolio API allows Cervinomarketing to quickly copy dashboards from their template library and paste it into a new client. Erik even mentions that in the last 2 weeks, they have delivered 50 dashboards to 3 agencies for 18 clients.

So what’s the secret behind their process? Erik says, “the secret behind this is that we have built a smart data engine that sits between the online marketing channels and Klipfolio.”

That data engine collects and stores data from all channels, then combines, cleans and filters the data, adds descriptions and targets and then feeds the data sources into the dashboards.

All the data preparation is done through a simple to use interface and the data processing is done automatically.

This saves Cervinomarketing time and makes Klipfolio an even more powerful tool for them.

Multi-Channel Dashboard Example

View the live dashboard

What’s next for Cervinomarketing?

Cervinodata

Looking for a data engine to store your own data? Cervinomarketing is opening up their data engine, Cervinodata, to the Klipfolio community.

Cervinodata allows Klipfolio users to collect, store, and prepare their data. You can also add context and targets before feeding it into Klipfolio.

Erik is excited about the future of Cervinomarketing and their data engine adding, “Cervinodata can be very powerful for Klipfolio users that wish to combine data from multiple accounts or channels, for instance from multiple Facebook pages or Google Analytics accounts. Klipfolio is a very powerful dashboard tool and combining it with Cervinodata will open up new possibilities.”

The push to become “data-driven” is taking over most organizations these days. Chatter about “big data” and the relative ease with which companies can access metrics related to their business has everyone jumping on board.

Well, nearly everyone. Non-profits have traditionally lagged behind their for-profit counterparts in adopting a data-driven approach to doing business, putting them at an inherent disadvantage in monitoring success and identifying improvements.

Here’s the good news, though. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are lots of opportunities for non-profits to join the business world in using data to drive performance. Where should your non-profit start? By adopting some KPIs.

Measuring impact through KPIs

There are a lot of ways to measure the success of a non-profit. But most of them revolve around one theme: Impact.

Say you’re a charity that’s trying to develop a cure for a disease. In this instance, your impact would be measured by how much progress you are making towards finding a cure. Or say you’re an advocacy organization that works on behalf of members to influence the political and cultural climate in which they operate. In that case you’re probably more interested in the impact you’re having on the conversation about your topic, say in newspapers or at the legislative level.

Describe it how you want to. But the idea is the same. The more you can do to alter the landscape in which you operate beyond what would be happening if you didn’t exist at all, the more you can claim to have found success.

How not to measure success for non-profits

The temptation for many non-profits is to focus exclusively on revenue and donation metrics when deciding on KPIs. The reasons for this are understandable: Every organization needs money to operate, and non-profits are no different. Competition for donations is fierce, and non-profits need to hue to a well-defined strategy to bring in the revenue they need to follow through on key goals. If they can’t get people to donate, then they’re not going to be around to make a difference in their chosen areas.

But the problem with treating revenue metrics as KPIs is that it can cause your organization to lose sight of what it’s really trying to accomplish. All of a sudden revenue stops being a means to an end and instead is treated as the final goal.

By all means, it’s important to adopt some metrics for fundraising. The money needs to come from somewhere, right? You’ll definitely want to know about a sudden spike or decline in donations.

But only adopting fundraising metrics as key performance indicators means you’re chasing KPIs that do not reflect your underlying strategic goals.

The problem with measuring influence

It’s one thing to decide you need to start tracking influence. Actually finding some metrics that correspond to this goal? A whole other matter entirely.

Influence is one of those qualitative metrics that tends to defy our attempts at quantification. You can’t just “count” influence the way you do with revenue or value of goods sold. There is no one metric that can show you directly how much impact you’ve had.

So you need to get creative.

How to find your non-profit’s key performance indicators

In the business world, there’s no cookie cutter approach to adopting KPIs – the process of finding them needs to be an essential component of exploring and refining your strategy. You can’t just take someone else’s KPIs and adopt them as your own, because everybody’s situation and environment is unique.

It’s no different in the non-profit world. Your KPIs will need to be as unique as your organization’s mission and strategy.

But there are a few general KPIs that non-profits will want to look at when setting their own strategy, either to use directly or for ideas on setting their own.

Donation metrics

Revenue numbers of course need attention (even non-profits need money to continue operating and reach their key goals). But for most non-profits revenue likely wouldn’t qualify as a key performance indicator. The reason? Raising revenue isn’t an end goal for non-profits.

But metrics related to revenue can act as a key indicator of how successfully you are getting your message out to the people you’re trying to reach. Seeing the number of donors decline? It likely means your message isn’t getting through the way it has in past years. Seeing the average donation per person decrease? Maybe you’re not reaching the same audiences as in past years, or maybe your messaging wasn’t quite as effective as it once was.

Donations aren’t the be-all and end-all. They can, however, act as a key indicator in the absence of other available metrics.

Legislative influence

The development and influence of public policy is a major reason for the existence of many non-profits. That’s why a lot of them devote so much of their resources to meeting with politicians, studying the public policy environment and involving themselves in the legislative process.

Even non-profits whose existence is tied closely to other goals – such as a health organization’s focus on research – still have a government relations arm devoted to public policy. The problem is that actually measuring that influence can be exceedingly difficult.

The legislative process is a complex one, often involving factors that are too complicated to boil down to simple cause and effect. Changes in laws frequently take years and are influenced extensively by cultural issues, the will of the voters and – you guessed it – politics. Politicians will also, for simple reasons related to optics, frequently resist attributing their decisions to any particular person or organization.

Still there are indicators on which non-profits can rely.

One potential area to look at is the number of public recommendations made that were eventually included in final legislation. Another is the number of times officials from your non-profit were asked to consult with politicians on public policy issues – examples like legislative committees spring to mind here.

If you can show that politicians and public servants have paid attention to you, it goes a long way toward demonstrating influence in the legislative arena.

Research progress

Many of the topics non-profits research don’t have end dates that will be reached any time soon. Organizations devoted to the study of cancer, for example, will be unlikely to claim a “cure” any time in our lifetime.

So the question then becomes: How do you demonstrate progress towards a goal that is years into the future?

A lot of these will likely be unique to the organization (and likely beyond the understanding of a lowly digital marketer such as myself). But it’s worth thinking about what your non-profit produces that act as a marker on the way towards longer-term goals. Research reports produced or the number of times your research was cited elsewhere spring to mind as possible ideas.

Media impact

Many non-profits claim raising profile and gaining attention as a key goal. That’s why media impact frequently comes up as a key indicator of success.

The reasons for this are somewhat straightforward: Reach and legitimacy.

Many organizations have adopted tactics, such as social media updates and blog posts, to communicate directly with audience members. But few of these strategies can reach as many people as a placement in a respected newspaper or radio/TV station.

Major media outlets continue to reach huge numbers of people on a near-daily basis. One placement in the Globe and Mail will likely eclipse the exposure that many organizations get from their website in an entire year.

Getting earned media attention also confers a modicum of legitimacy that just isn’t possible for organizations that only use their own publishing tools.

Thought leadership impact and influencer marketing

Thought leadership plays an increasingly large role at many organizations. Nonprofits and charities are no longer content to raise money and then put it towards their research. They want to be (and be seen as) leaders in developing thoughtful ideas and solutions in their fields.

If you can demonstrate that top leaders in your field are paying attention to what your organization has to say, you can claim a significant level of impact.

Closely related to this is the idea of influencer marketing. The ability to reach key influencers who work in their space is a key indicator of success for many non-profits. Want to know if your message is getting through? Check to see who’s paying attention to you.

Maybe these people aren’t necessarily “thought leaders”. But they can still be influential in helping to spread your message through social media and other platforms. I’m thinking here in particular of community leaders who, thought they may not work in the field where your organization operates, may still have significant role in championing your cause.

Reach and engagement

Many nonprofits are concerned with more than just those who fall into the “stakeholder” or influencer category. They’re trying to influence perceptions among those who would fall into the “general public” category.

Here the utility is in influencing perceptions, opinions and actions over the long term. I don’t know for certain, but at a distance many health-related organizations would seem to fall into this category. Think, for example, of Heart and Stroke Foundation commercials aimed at getting us to lead healthier lives.

Here the number of people that you’ve reached would be an important KPI. Or maybe you’re interested in the number of people who saw an ad and performed a key conversion action, such as signing up for a newsletter or attending an event.

For many nonprofits, these sorts of achievements are more than just a means to an end. They fit squarely with the goal of influencing the public at large.

Bringing it all together

Which KPIs have worked for your non-profit? Let us know in the comments below.

Did you know Klipfolio has a special program for non-profits? Check out our pricing FAQ page or get in touch with our team to learn more.

If you’ve read this blog at all over the past few years, you’ll know that we are smitten with key performance indicators.

And why not? KPIs are great! They allow a business to monitor its underlying performance, build a better team and focus employees’ strategic efforts.

But just because we love KPIs doesn’t mean we can’t branch out every now and then.

There are a slew of performance management tools out there, all of which taken together have enough acronyms to make a bowl of alphabet soup jealous.

One in particular, though, is worthy of our attention: Objectives and key results. OKRs, as they are known, are a great tool for identifying new initiatives and setting ambitious targets.

The best part? We don’t even need to abandon our first love. OKRs, it turns out, are ideal for supplementing your KPIs.

So before you damn our wandering eyes, hear us out! You might just find the perfect tool for reigniting your love affair with KPIs.

So what are OKRs anyways?

OKRs are a performance management tool that sets, communicates and monitors goals in an organization. The idea is to set expectations that get all employees at your company working together in one unified direction.

OKRs were used at Intel in the 1970s, when the company was transitioning from a memory company to a microprocessor company. However they really took off after John Doerr, a former Intel employee, introduced them at Google (the company with which they are now synonymous). Today OKRs are used predominantly in the technology sector as a means of setting and measuring quarterly goals. Increasingly, though, they are expanding into more and more of the business world.

OKRs consist of two main components:

• Objectives: What you want to achieve. These typically involve setting a goal (usually qualitative in nature) around a specific initiative you hope to improve or work on.
• Key results: How you will achieve your objective. These are quantitative goals that are measurable and have a defined time limit by which they need to be accomplished.

An OKR typically includes one objective, each of which has four to five key results (or fewer). At any one time a company will have several objectives, each of will have their own individual key results.

Consider this example. Let’s say that you’re the lowly Cleveland Browns, who just became the second-ever NFL team in history to go 0-16.

The Browns have a lot of problems, but one area where they’ll absolutely have to improve if they ever want to win a game again is in reducing the number of interceptions they throw.

In that case they might set the following OKR.

Objective: Improve passing game, with a particular emphasis on reducing interceptions

Key results:

• Draft a quarterback with an interception ratio (the number of interceptions divided by passes thrown) that’s under 1.0 per cent
• Reduce the number of bobbled passes from receivers to under five per cent
• Achieve a run-to-pass ratio of 45:55

Here’s an example that’s closer to the business world. Let’s say you’re a traditional retailer that’s just launched its first online store but are disappointed with the early returns. Here’s what your OKR might look like.

Objective: Create a best-in-class ecommerce marketing campaign

Key results:

• Run five social media advertising campaigns
• Boost website visitors by 300 per cent
• Set up three remarketing pixels/tags
• Secure one influencer endorsement

OKRs sound pretty similar to KPIs – what’s the difference?

In some ways, KPIs and OKRs are the same. For example: The “objective” part of OKRs isn’t that dissimilar from individual KPIs (though that of course depends on whether you’re setting a qualitative or quantitative objective).

But there are also key differences.

Let’s revisit, for a second, our definition of KPIs:

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.

A few things are worth noting here. The first is the focus KPIs have on “key business objectives.” This means that KPIs focus on not just any initiative. They need to be essential to the performance of your department or entire business. The second is the focus on achievement. The idea is to set a goal that tells you how healthy your business is. They tell you what really matters if your business is to be successful overall, not just in a particular area you want to focus on.

OKRs, by contrast, aren’t necessarily about underlying strategic goals (though they can be). Instead OKRs are usually directed towards specific initiatives.

OKRs are also different in that they are measured on a scale of 0 to 1.0. KPIs, by contrast, are measured using whatever metric you’ve adopted – revenue, say, or sales.

One final difference worth noting is particularly important: KPIs are, with some exceptions, meant to be achievable. KPIs are typically SMART– meaning they are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and have a Time Frame for achievement (emphasis here on the “A” part of SMART).

OKRs, by contrast, aren’t.

“The “sweet spot” for an OKR grade is 60% – 70%,” says Google. “If someone consistently fully attains their objectives, their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough and they need to think bigger.”

Google even goes so far as to say that managers who consistently exceed their key result targets are likely hoarding resources.

Sorry, I’m still a little confused

Here – use this handy chart!

OK I think I get it now. But I’m still not clear on why I would ever want to use OKRs

OKRs are useful for a few different reasons.

To push your team out of its comfort zone

KPIs are designed to be unattainable for a reason. In fact, this is what Google says sets OKRs apart from other goal-setting techniques.

“OKRs can enable teams to focus on the big bets and accomplish more than the team thought was possible, even if they don’t fully attain the stated goal,” says Google.

“OKRs can help teams and individuals get outside of their comfort zones, prioritize work, and learn from both success and failure.”

As a communication and team-building tool

OKRs are an excellent tool for telling your team what your expectations are for them. They set out, in exact terms, what your priorities are for the team and what you expect them to achieve.

They’re also an excellent tool for lessening the temptation towards micromanagement and eradicating redundant collaboration techniques.

“OKRs allow us to eliminate cascading level after level after level, which requires meeting after meeting after meeting,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s former SVP of People Operations. “You publish the key big priorities and initiatives that need to get done, and let people fill in the details of how they're going to get it done.”

To address a shortcoming that needs to be addressed

OKRs are ideal for identifying areas where your company wants to improve. Unlike KPIs, which are used to assess the underlying health of your business, setting OKRs are ideal for addressing problematic areas.

To identify and measure change in your organization

Because KPIs are more focused on overall strategy, they are less ideal for setting goals for major changes you hope to address. Adopting a new KPI or changing an existing one has an inherent element of change. But it doesn’t set out, in the same way as an OKR, what specifically you hope to do differently.

But I thought you said OKRs worked well with KPIs?

They do! KPIs and OKRs, used properly, can serve different but equally important purposes.

Consider it this way: KPIs are important for strategy. They allow you to decide on and communicate what your strategic goals are for the organization. A KPI says to everyone “OK, if this business is going to be successful, THIS is what we’re going to need to achieve.”

OKRs, by contrast, can serve a tactical purpose. They allow you to identify particular initiatives that you want your team to work on and then have them get to work.

Let’s pick up on one example from earlier. In this case you’re a traditional store that’s seeing a decline sales. You know you need to modernize, so you decide to launch an online store. In this case you would set a KPI for sales from your new online store (since your traditional sales are declining, you’ll need to boost your revenue on other platforms in order to survive, much less thrive).

So you’ve got your KPI, but that’s just part of the picture. You also need to decide on and implement, at the tactical level, initiatives that will allow you to make good on your strategy. What changes can you implement that will help you achieve progress?

Here’s where OKRs come in.

You know you need to challenge yourself to achieve your key goal. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t need to move into a new market. By setting some OKRs, you can help address the shortcomings in your underperforming ecommerce strategy.

You dive into your metrics and find that your store is underperforming because you’re not getting a lot of traffic.

People simply don’t know your store exists. So you decide that you need to improve your digital marketing game to increase awareness.

You’ve got your objective: Boost your online store’s digital marketing strategy. But to achieve that goal you’ll need to implement some major tactical changes. Perhaps something along the lines of the following:

• Generate 100,000 clickthroughs from organic social media posts
• Generate two million views through targeted ads on social media, Google AdWords and Criteo
• Run five different annual campaigns aimed at boosting ecommerce sales across owned media
• Recruit three social media or YouTube influencers to advertise your brand

When is a good time to use OKRs?

OKRs can also be deployed at different times, depending on the situation your company is in at a given moment.

Think of it this way: There should never not be a time when you’re not using KPIs to measure the health of your business.

However there are times when OKRs will be particularly useful. Here are a few occasions where an OKR might be an ideal tool to use:

Your company is undergoing a strategic shift

Your KPIs should always keep pace with your business’s underlying strategic goals. If you’re launching a brand new product line, embarking on a major acquisition spree or branching out into new business areas, you’ll want to make sure you change and update your KPIs to reflect these shifts.

But you’ll also need to get specific about how you’re going to achieve them. At a more tactical level, what are the objectives and key results that will allow you to follow through on underlying strategic changes?

Your company’s performance isn’t meeting expectations

Let’s say that one of your KPIs is a 90 percent customer satisfaction rating. For the most part you’ve managed to hit your target. But one quarter you find your rating dipping well below expectations.

This would be a great time to set an OKR or two to address the situation. The first objective would likely be to find out why your customer satisfaction rating is falling, with a potential key result being a completed audit of the customer experience. The second objective? To address the situation. Here a key result might be to introduce a new customer satisfaction program or to retrain employees who deal with customers on a regular basis.

With these OKRs, you now have a concrete plan for dealing with your company’s sub-par performance regarding your KPI.

Your employees are complacent

People – particularly high-performers – need to be challenged. Sometimes employees underperform because they’re burnt out. Just as frequently, though, performance slips because they have become complacent and don’t feel excited about what they’re asked to do on a daily basis.

OKRs, because they are purposely designed to be unattainable, help to challenge your employees and push them out of their comfort zone.

Some people won’t like the prospect of chasing a goal that is purposely designed to not be achieved, but it’s possible they might not be the type of performer you want on the team anyways.

Bringing it all together

Have you tried augmenting your KPIs with OKRs? Let us know what’s worked – and what hasn’t – in the comments below!

If you’ve had the pleasure of diving into powerful marketing automation tools like Marketo, you know life isn’t always easy. And it’s even harder to get data out of these tools. In this article, I’ll show you how Marketo data doesn’t have to be hard to get and your results can be much more visually appealing.

One of my first projects with Klipfolio was injecting some new lead gen ideas to drive more trials. Instead of reporting on a monthly or quarterly basis on the impact these campaigns were having, I wanted an easier way to display and share this data with my team and my boss.

Answering quick questions like “How many leads from this nurture started a trial?” and “How many of those trials converted into customers?” are all questions that typically require quite a bit of digging inside of Marketo.

Besides, having the ability to showcase your personal impact on the business is always powerful.

1. I’ll start by walking you through the campaign and how I set it up in Marketo
2. I’ll show you how to report in Marketo using static lists
3. I’ll walk you through the steps to connect Marketo to Klipfolio
4. I’ll show you how to build a dashboard in Klipfolio

1. The email course campaign in Marketo

In exchange for your email, we send you bite sized lessons on KPIs for digital marketers for 10 consecutive days. No pressure to buy or start a trial, the emphasis was on short, valuable introductory content tailored to digital marketers.

We wanted to test how many subscribers would organically start a trial after receiving valuable content that they would otherwise need to pay for in other places.

Here’s how I set that up inside Marketo

Our site is built on Drupal and we customize our landing pages inside of that CMS. In Marketo, we create simple landing pages that have basic forms and we use an iFrame in Drupal to connect to that form’s URL.

This is our form in Marketo:

This is our landing page in Drupal:

2. Marketo logic - Static lists for reporting key metrics

We then create a smart campaign that listens for leads who fill out that form (it’s labelled as newsletter-subscription) and (after some CASL double opt-in logic) we add them to a static list called subscribers. Our 5 day email-send-sequence is then triggered when a person is added to the subscriber list.

For reporting purposes, I wanted to track subscribers who completed the following actions: 1) completed the nurture, 2) free trial starts from within a course, and 3) new customers from the course. I used smart campaigns to listen for those behavioural signals and then sent them to a static list for easy reporting.

3. How to unleash your Marketo data into a Klipfolio dashboard

Marketo has great analytics built inside the software, but I’m not about to ask my CEO to log into Marketo to see the latest data. And I don’t want to be doing this multiple times a day.

This isn’t a knock against Marketo data either. Sometimes you want to do more hand-to-hand combat with your data than Marketo really allows for. Besides, I want that data out of Marketo and in a way that I can cleanly show my CEO.

I wanted to quickly tout the benefits of using static lists in Marketo for quick reporting instead of waiting for large smart lists to load.

We've already done the heavy lifting of figuring out how Marketo's static list API works. It requires editing the request URL, but that's it. Marketo has a rich list of fields you can query in a request.

Just follow my simple steps and put your brain on autopilot. For more in-depth help, view this support article.

4 simple steps are required for getting Marketo connected to Klipfolio:

1. Set up Klipfolio as a “LaunchPoint” service in Marketo by going to Admin > LaunchPoint icon > New Service (copy the client ID and client Secret in a notepad).

2. Find your URLs.

Your REST API Identity URL and your REST API Endpoint URL can be found in Marketo by going to Admin > Web Services.

The unique ID for your Static List can be found by selecting the 4 numerical digits after the letters “ST” in the URL presented in your browser’s address bar. Save those in a notepad.

3. Create a data source in Klipfolio. Open your Klipfolio account (you can also do this with a free trial account) and go to Library > Data Sources and create a new one by selecting Marketo from the list of services. Enter the appropriate values from the steps above which should be saved in your notepad.

For the REST request URL, you want it to look similar to:

https://614-OQV-361.mktorest.com/rest/v1/list/{uniqueID}/leads.json

4. Modify the API request to retrieve additional fields for example:

https://614-OQV-361.mktorest.com/rest/v1/list/2269/leads.json?fields=firstname,lastname,email,leadScore

Select Get Resource.

Congrats, your static list is connected to Klipfolio! You can now duplicate that data source for each of your static lists, all you need to do is swap out the list # in the REST request URL.

4. How to start building your Marketo dashboard

Alright, this is the fun part. Now that Klipfolio is connected to Marketo, we can create visualizations that display Marketo data.

I’ll walk you through how to create this simple table for displaying the performance of the email course lead gen campaign we mentioned earlier.

I wanted to showcase the number of subscribers that signed up for the email course, what % of them started a trial, what was their trial score (behavioral score), what % of trials became customers and the total contribution to monthly recurring revenue, MRR.

In your Klipfolio dashboard, click “Add a Klip” and “Build a Custom Klip”.

In the list of chart options on the right, select the Table component and drag it into your Klip.

Under table properties, we’ll tweak the number of columns to 3. We’ll also name our columns: Subscribers, Trial Start % and Win %. You can also play with the formatting and font style of your column headers. We’ll do the same thing for a second table showing deeper metrics.

Next step is displaying your Marketo data inside your new tables. Select your subscriber column, then the Data tab. Since we have no data sources associated to our Klip yet, click the + Add Data Source at the bottom left corner.

Locate the data source that you already created and select it.

Your data source should now appear at the bottom left corner in JSON format. Don’t let this scare you, Klipfolio allows you to manipulate this data into simple numbers.

In the formula bar, type “Count” and select the recommended COUNT function.

We want to count the total number of unique entries, to do this expand your JSON results, then expand the first result and click on the first “id” field. The formula bar should update with the following query COUNT(@/result/id;) and your table should now display that number.

That’s it. It’s as simple as that.

To populate the rest of your table, you need to add your two other data sources (static lists). You should have one for Trials and another for Wins.

The rest of the columns can be populated with formulas that refer to our trials and wins list.

For Trial Starts %, in the formula bar type the reference character “&” then select Trial starts and divide it by a reference to your Subscribers.

Your formula should look like this.

In your table, the Trial Start % doesn’t have ideal formatting.

We can tweak that in the Properties tab, by unchecking “Automatically set format” and selecting Percentage. You can also define the number of decimals that will appear.

You can do the same thing for your Win % column, so your formula would look like this:

For the AVG Trial Score column our formula will be slightly different. We want to reference the specific Trial Score field that is associated to everyone in the Trial Start list. For that we’ll use the average formula, Type “Average” in the formula bar, make sure you have your trial start data source selected, scroll down to the first JSON record and find your average trial field or whatever demographic score field you use on your records and select it. Your formula should look something like this:

Finally, the last column called “MRR” needs to display the total amount of MRR when we combine all customers in the Wins list. Our formula would use the SUM formula and would look something like this:

Tweak the format on some of your numbers, and boom… you’ve got your Marketo data on a dashboard.

You can add indicators to this Klip, you can email yourself a report every morning, you can share a live link with coworkers and so much more.

The power of sharing data

It’s been 8 months since I launched our first campaign. Today we have multiple email courses tailored to specific audiences and my dashboard has grown quite substantially. Here’s a quick look at what you could do:

If you’ve read this far, hopefully you’ll be able to get up and running with this tutorial. We have a great support team that would be happy to help out at any time.

Thanks for reading.

Anthony Pena is a Data Analyst and Certified Klipfolio Expert at Pena Business Data Reporting. His main focus and role is to have a comprehensive understanding of the businesses he works with so he can help highlight KPIs and metrics. Anthony builds custom dashboards to help ensure all of his clients are on track to hit their goals and to help identify areas for improvement.

About Pena Business Data Reporting

Starting out as a freelancer, Anthony grew his business and now works with clientele as Pena Business Data Reporting. Pena Business Data Reporting specializes in meeting the growing demand to turn large, complicated business data into simple, understandable stories that report on the health of a business and lead to actionable insights.

Getting started with dashboards

Before Anthony started Pena Business Data Reporting, he worked as a Microbiologist for a biotech startup. In that role, he routinely ran experiments in the lab and needed to quickly communicate the implications of the results to the senior leadership team to keep investors up-to-date with the status the company's soon-to-be product.

“I needed one place where my team, and my managers, and I could visually check-in on the progress being made on a weekly basis in an easy to understandable way. Once I realized that many of the same questions kept popping up, that's when I realized a I needed a dashboard tool to summarise all of our relevant KPIs.”

Why Pena Business Data Reporting chose Klipfolio

Anthony brought his dashboard knowledge from the biotech startup to Pena Business Data Reporting. When asked about why he chose Klipfolio Anthony says, “Klipfolio clearly supported the greatest number of connectors to various APIs and sources of data. This coupled with the excellent support from all the great team members at Klipfolio made the decision easy to move forward with Klipfolio.”

“Klipfolio in many ways can account for a surge in growth to my business last year. Many customers have been demanding Klipfolio, which in turn drives up the number of requests we receive for building dashboards on the platform. A win, win!”

How Pena Business Data Reporting uses Klipfolio

Pena Business Data Reporting develop highly customized dashboards on behalf of their clients who either already know about the benefits of using Klipfolio or are looking for a SaaS platform to report on their business metrics. Pena Business Data Reporting will set their clients up with a Klipfolio account, connect them to virtually any supported API, setup databases when needed, offer custom CSS and HTML styling and build custom dashboards based on each clients needs.

Metrics Tracked by Pena Data Business Reporting

So what type of metrics does Pena Data Business Reporting track? Here are just a few KPIs that they keep a close eye on:

• Sales Conversion Rate
• Average Order Value
• Total Ad Spend
• Total Sales
• Return on Investment

Celebrating the Big Wins

When asked how Pena Business Data Reporting celebrates big wins, Anthony answered, “Sleep! Just kidding. I personally enjoy pulling out the grill and enjoying a good craft beer to celebrate.” We couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate!

Andreas Tóth, the Online Sales Manager at Electrolux has worked for the company since November 2016, helping to grow the online sales and introduce a data driven culture with the help of Klipfolio dashboards.

When asked about his role, Andreas tells us, “We are a completely new team at Electrolux, in charge of starting up 55 shops in 19 European countries. The stores were created to sell spare parts and accessories directly to consumers.” Andreas needed a way to track these new stores in the central Electrolux office and also share that data with each country, which is when he began his journey with Klipfolio.

About Electrolux

Electrolux is a Swedish multinational home appliance manufacturer, headquartered in Stockholm. It is consistently ranked the world’s second largest appliance maker by units sold and sells products under a wide variety of brand names, including its own.

Electrolux was founded in 1919, selling vacuum cleaners in several European countries. Over the past 99 years, Electrolux has expanded operations and now sell a wide variety of products including refrigerators and dishwashers. They have grown significantly over the years and now employ over 50,000 employees worldwide.

Electrolux Before Klipfolio

Before building dashboard with Klipfolio, the Electrolux team relied solely on Google Analytics to track and share all their data. The problem was, not everyone knew how to use Google Analytics and being able to find the exact data they were looking for was difficult. The team needed a simple to understand dashboard that each store and country could use to find their specific sales data.

Why Electrolux Chose Klipfolio

The Electrolux team was looking for a tool that could help monitor their daily sales and KPIs. And more than that, they needed a tool that would make it easy to share that sales data with teams around the world.

When we asked Andreas why he went with Klipfolio he said, “I tried a couple of different dashboard tools, but decided to go with Klipfolio because I think it had the best integration with Google Analytics. The number of pre-built Klips to choose from made it the easiest and fastest dashboarding tool for us. And the ability to to set up different user groups was also an important factor in our decision.”

The Electrolux team also finds the mobile app to be an extremely useful feature that helps them stay on top of their metrics no matter where they are in the world.

How Electrolux Uses Klipfolio

The Electrolux team uses their dashboards in three different ways -- on TV monitors around their offices, on personal desktops when they want to dig into the data, and through the mobile app which gives them a good view into KPIs wherever they are.

The central e-commerce team uses two TV monitors in their office to track their daily sales and performance, giving the team a real-time view into their KPIs. They also use their dashboard as the focal point in bi-weekly meetings to discuss their current performance and compare that to YoY data.

As mentioned earlier, the ability to easily share data with different users, groups, and shops was a huge factor in the decision to move forward with Klipfolio. The local Electrolux shops have complete access to the dashboards so they can follow the sales for their specific brand and country. This helps to give the power of data and knowledge to everyone at Electrolux, helping the team make data driven decisions.

Metrics Track by Electrolux

What does a worldwide home appliance company track on a daily basis? Andreas says that their dashboards contain both sales and web metrics like:

• Revenue
• Average Order Value
• Daily Sales
• Weekly Sales
• Monthly Sales
• Website Sessions
• Conversion Rate
• Revenue per Channel
• ROI for Paid Traffic

These metrics help keep the sales team up-to-date on their performance and the overall performance of the company.

How Electrolux Celebrates Big Wins

With the help of Klipfolio, the Electrolux team is able to use their dashboards to react much faster when they see problems with sales or performance numbers at any of their shops.

Catching problems before they affect sales numbers helps the company with their continued growth and success and allows them to celebrate big wins!

So how does the Electrolux team celebrate their big wins? Andreas shares with us, “We celebrate by having fika, and we find a way to have fika at least once a day!”

Cheers to that! And cheers to helping Electrolux take over the spot as the world’s largest appliance maker.

What is International Women's Day

International Women’s Day is dedicated to celebrating all women around the world. This awareness initiative is a call-to-action to move towards gender parity and to recognize women for their social, economic, cultural and political contributions to society ¹. Here at Klipfolio, we want to highlight the women in our team that contribute to our success daily. From our fresh new faces to our senior management team, our female coworkers are absolute superstars.

The stats

While Canada is breaking tech barriers through innovation, it’s no secret that the tech industry itself has a distinct lack of women in it’s employment. Statistics Canada estimates that women only make up 22% of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workforce ², despite an approximate share of 39% of STEM degrees and 66% of non-STEM degrees going to female graduates ³. In a survey of over 900 tech-based Canadian companies, females only made up 13% of the executive teams, hold only 8% of director roles, and almost three quarters of them have no females on their boards ⁴. Now, this isn’t only an issue about representation (though it is a big one), it’s also an issue about company success and longevity. Any group outside the majority can bring an endless supply of knowledge and perspectives to the table that can help make a company successful.

What is Klipfolio doing?

To recognize and pay tribute to all of our amazing women working for Klipfolio, we gathered short bios from some of our staff and will be tweeting them out through March 8th. We want to highlight their importance to our teams, while also helping to spread the word on the International Women’s Day campaign and gender parity.

Without further ado…

Meet our women in tech!

I can say wholeheartedly that the women in Klipfolio are intelligent, hardworking individuals with extensive knowledge in their respective fields – In fact, I could easily write a full essay on all of their achievements! Instead, we’re putting a spotlight on what makes each of us unique individuals both personally and professionally.

Trish Mermuys

Customer Loyalty Manager

Loves soccer, reading sci-fi, and eating all the sourdough bread.

Valerie Hamilton

Customer Marketing Manager

Life goal: Star in my own HGTV house flipping show.

Prerna Luthra

Customer Success Guru

Part time drummer, Dysfunctional without music ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Meggan King

Manager of Support Services

Loves fixing everything and owns too many boats. Thankful that she gets to work with so many amazing, inspiring and hilarious women at Klipfolio.

Lianne Sit

Senior Software Developer

Loves dancing, solving puzzles, the journey more than the destination, and all things blue.

Pamela Buffone

Director of Product Marketing

Avid house fixer-upper, loves being part of a great team and is always in awe of the natural beauty in the world.

Jieyi Rong

Customer Success Guru

Loves reading crime novels; Chestnut’s mommy; Loves solving problems; Always plans trips around good food.

Kaushi Bandara

Professional Services Ninja

As a 10 year old, I wanted to become a professional astronomer and as an adult, I actually became one! (I then left academia for high-tech).

Goal in life: travel and eat my way through as many countries on this amazing planet as possible!

Dominique Steneker

Software Developer

Will unashamedly dance non-stop. This includes but is not limited to: when programming, when sitting down, and—on the rare occasions—when sleeping.

Yvonne van Alphen

Technical Support Specialist

Loves taking pictures of nature, strumming a guitar, and doing downward dog with a dog.

Natalia Castillo

Software Development Team Lead

Loves spicy food, cats, recycling and the colour purple. Plays for the Alliance.

Danielle Hodgson

Product Manager

Loves skiing, cycling, canoeing, and camping; a general outdoors enthusiast.

Stacey Shrout

Controller

Yoga lover and entrepreneur who loves to travel, run, kayak, ski, read and write

Seema Nikam

Technical Support Specialist - India

I love singing and people say I have a good voice. Reading cooking and helping people makes me happy. Secretly everything amuses me… I am still a kid at heart :)

Fatimah Virjee

Technical Writer

Loves to travel, read, and cook. Can often be found staring at the bottom of a mug wondering why there’s no tea left.

Katya Zeisig

Digital Marketing Specialist

A licenced ski instructor, and an unlicensed crime-show lover.

Kalyani Khandelwal

Technical Support Specialist - India

Meditates daily, loves doing yoga. Would be the first one to start dancing at a party!

Krista Matthews

General Counsel

Loves smart humour, music, reading, yoga, spin and watching the sunset from her kayak.

Holly Ebbs

Technical Documentation Manager

Loves sitting in the backyard watching the birds, foxes, rabbits, deer … and the occasional bear. In my spare time I like to run, bike, play soccer, hike, read, and knit.

Kumari Himadri

Technical Support Specialist - India

Dance Enthusiast. Loves to travel and explore.

My life mantra: ”Life is full of choices and I choose Happiness...”

Nikta Kanuka

Product Manager

Has gone from hating winter to loving it, largely thanks to Dante (pictured here).

It’s a team effort

What if I told you that for once, Google doesn't have the answers you are searching for? That, despite the urge to rely on your trusty search engine to reveal the magic key performance indicators (KPIs) you should use to evaluate your team’s success, the answer just won’t be there?

You’d say I’m crazy. Google has all of the answers, always. Right?

B2B sales KPIs: Out with the old, in with the new

How many times have you attempted to select sales KPIs from standard, boring, lists you’ve discovered online and apply them to your business? Heck here is our own list of Top 50 Sales KPIs for you to check out if you want! Admit it, we’ve all done it - and all of us have quickly realized that our teams are unique, and, more often than not, the snooze-worthy KPIs we thought were great don’t actually result in...just that - results.

Determining KPIs that are individual to your B2B sales team performance is key to unity in achieving common goals such as Product Performance, Sales Closing Ratio, or Sales Targets. This being said, presenting a clear focus that is easy for your staff members to digest will ensure everyone is on the same path to success.

Think of your team’s sales strategy like riding a bike. Without speed and direction, the bike is rendered useless. The same is true for progressing your company’s strategic plan; without key metrics and you as the driver, the results just won’t come.

Progressing your strategy starts with you, and here’s how.

Start by reviewing your B2B sales plan to determine your most important KPIs

KPIs reveal how your company is performing against the benchmarks you set, and, they directly influence the achievement of your strategic goals.

To get started, your team should gain a complete understanding of organizational objectives from the top down and a plan on how to achieve them. This process expands beyond your immediate team and involves input from all departments; company-wide collaboration results in a more robust view of business processes and overall direction.

Ask yourself:

What are you and your team trying to achieve? Why does this objective matter? How will you determine if you’ve achieved this? How will you measure progress?

In order to keep your team focused, limit yourself to one or two overarching KPIs that are complimented by secondary KPIs, and supported by team KPIs (more on these later).

As a B2B company, your answers to these questions are likely financial in nature and centered around revenue growth. This primary goal is typically accompanied by a secondary or supporting goal. For example, if your primary goal is to increase annual revenue, your secondary goal may be to increase MRR.

Whatever your most important KPIs may be, this first step allows you and your team to thoroughly understand the company’s main objectives and lays the groundwork for how your team will take action. Learn more about how to take control of your sales data from our own Klipfolio leaders.

Customer-centered KPI targets

With your top KPIs in mind, it is time to determine what is driving customer behaviour and how this relates back to the measures you’ve set.

Let me explain.

Customer actions are the driving force behind the success of your business. So, you must determine which measurements will result in positive change in your customers. In the case of driving revenue, ask yourself where this revenue will stem from: Sales volume? Increased customer base? All of the above? Catering your sales KPIs to your customers will help you establish which activities will influence their behaviour.

Sales KPI targets from the inside-out

Once you have a solid understanding on your targets from a customer-perspective, it’s time to determine what needs to be done within your organization by setting KPI targets from an internal perspective; ensuring you implement actions that will directly influence your customer KPIs.

Your targets from the inside-out must align with your targets from the outside-in. It is impossible to achieve company-wide goals without ensuring your approach is streamlined appropriately. For instance, if the customer-focused goal is to increase sales volume, an internal target may be to alter your pricing structure to more effectively align with customer needs.

Ask yourself: “What impact will this KPI have on my customers? How will my actions impact this KPI?” The answer should lead to the same outcome.

Nailing down the details

1. Be specific

Take your company’s primary sales KPIs and break them down further. How can your department contribute to this larger goal? View your primary goal as it relates to your specific line of business. Give your metrics some context. If the monthly goal is to increase MRR, what does this mean for the marketing department? For example, in order to increase MRR by x%, you may decide to launch a new outbound email program or aim to improve SEO.

2. Be action-oriented

Refine these contextual metrics; what are the action items that need to be implemented to achieve them? Continue to work backwards until you can determine exactly what activities are required of your team. Once you have finished, you should have a solid list of both contextual and action-oriented metrics. Using the previous example, the actions involved in launching a new outbound email program could involve designing email templates, scheduling, and determining recipients.

3. Be informed

Continuous and consistent communication and monitoring of your KPIs is imperative to the success of your B2B team.

By displaying metrics to your team, you can track your progress against daily and monthly targets to reach your goals. Dashboards are a great option for interpreting and displaying data in a concise and meaningful way through the use of visualizations such as graphs and charts. This form of communication with your team ensures that every member remains informed on progress while allowing you to see a real-time, interactive view of your marketing funnel.

Dashboards can also be displayed on a TV monitor setup in your office. Consistent display of business metrics allows for transparency on all levels and the ability to make real-time business decisions.

Finally, now let’s look at a Salesforce TV Dashboard example

Great, you made it this far but wondering what does success look like. At Klipfolio we see a lot of our clients connecting our platform so their CRM systems including Salesforce.

Your CRM solution tends to be a critical source of truth for your sales team operations, so let’s help make that data come to life and share with others.

Bottom line

Determining sales KPIs requires strategic thinking, collaboration, and clear direction. Creating KPIs for your B2B team that are in-sync and supportive of organizational goals will ensure your team is headed down the path to success.

With a team that is informed, actions-oriented, and persistently working towards company consolidated KPIs, results are inevitable.

In June 2019, A&W Restaurants will turn 100 years old. There are a lot of stories to be told relating to this iconic brand. Personally, I have fond memories enjoying a mug of root beer and bag of onion rings propped up on a tray attached to our car window. I recently recreated those memories with my family at the Dexter, Michigan A&W, one of the few locations left with carhops today.

What does this have to do with email marketing and a visual dashboard?

Since 2013, we’ve had the pleasure of working with the A&W digital marketing team on their email marketing program called the Mug Club. In 2018, with steady subscriber growth averaging 5% each month and an average click-to-open rate of 21%, Liz Bazner, Digital Manager and Spencer Barrett, Associate Digital Manager, felt confident to expand their email marketing program and increase engagement even more.

A journey built by data

Alongside A&W, our goal was to understand where we could fill the gaps and administer relevant subscriber journeys. By transforming the unsubscribe data — when, where and how — into a visual bar chart using Klipfolio, a dashboard, and data visualization platform, we could interpret subscriber behavior efficiently. Just knowing when a subscriber would take action to unsubscribe or hit the spam button helped us instantly see where we could improve the program and decrease churn.

From this data alone, we validated the reason that an extended “welcome series” is needed to build trust and establish consistency, along with the intention to transition our annual re-engagement campaign to an automated conditional timeframe. It was fascinating to see an uptick in 1.5 years of subscribers taking action with spam complaints and unsubscribes through the subscription center. This visual also clearly depicted some subscribers who had been with A&W since the beginning of their current email marketing program in 2013. What made them unsubscribe?

“We love the visuals that Klipfolio adds to our data! Our marketing team is full of visual learners, and it makes it so much easier to digest the data we get from our consumer emails.”

-Liz Bazner, Digital Manager, A&W Restaurants, Inc.

Making it more personal

Our intuition was telling us to reach out with more personal content throughout the year. A&W has a loyal following on social media —Facebook, Twitter , and Instagram specifically— that shares their love with memories and photos of enjoying a root beer float. Since email marketing is a highly personal marketing channel and based on our positive social media engagement, we knew we could bring the history and the future to the forefront.

Incorporating advanced analytic data from Litmus, we already observed that 70% of those that opened the Mug Club emails read them, spending over 8 seconds on each. 50% of our audience is viewing their Mug Club email on a mobile device and although the email and coupon landing page are responsive design, having to print a coupon versus showing it directly to the cashier on a mobile device, is becoming more of a challenge.

“As a digital marketer specifically, much of my job revolves around educating our team and our franchisees on technology and online platforms. The dashboards we’ve built with Klipfolio make great additions to any presentation involving email marketing, and it’s an added bonus that they’re so easy to update!”

-Liz Bazner, Digital Manager, A&W Restaurants, Inc.

Survey says...

Using a dashboard was one form of listening; our next task was to validate our findings by asking their Mug Club subscribers directly through a brief online survey. The outcome of the study reassured the interest of mobile coupon redemption, online ordering, text messaging and that we need to recognize our subscribers' enthusiasm and loyalty to the brand more often.

Besides, we discovered a few pain points that address customer experiences at the restaurant that would not have been brought to our attention otherwise. Tying the incentive back to the restaurant, the reengagement series and online survey resulted in a 14% completion rate. A similar study will be incorporated into our cyclical re-engagement journey at 120-day increments of inactivity to encourage interest and feedback, or to part ways.

Visuals, feedback & instinct

Because of the use of a visual dashboard, data collected from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Litmus Creative Platform, one 3-minute survey, internal insight and old-fashioned instinct, A&W has a solid plan to expand their subscriber reach and enhance engagement as they head towards celebrating their 100th birthday.

More than coupons

In the upcoming days, a new email welcome series will launch to detail the benefits of joining the A&W Mug Club in addition to the following goals:

• To onboard successfully
• Build trust with our subscribers
• Learn more about our subscribers
• Reduce subscriber churn in the first 90 days
• Reduce spam complaints in the first 90 days
• Introduce social channels and blog
• Tell the A&W story

If you love A&W Restaurants as much as we do, subscribe to the Mug Club to watch this story unfold.

About Lisa

Lisa Wester is the founder and Chief Engagement Officer of RootedElm, an email marketing agency in St. Louis, MO. When she’s not analyzing data, refining email marketing campaigns and sharing newfound knowledge, Lisa can be found practicing yoga, pilates or in the company of her family, including two active daughters, a marathon-running enthusiast husband, Mutt Messi (who lives up to her nomenclature) and Hermann Tortoise, named Francis. Lisa has used Klipfolio since 2013. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can read more about her work on the RootedElm blog titled The Grove.