When Good Dashboards Go Bad: Problems, Perspective, and Prevention

A dashboard can be anything a company wants it to be. It can be tailored to meet specific goals, objectives, and company structure and culture.



A dashboard can be anything a company wants it to be. It can be tailored to meet specific goals, objectives, and company structure and culture. It can accurately and wholly reflect a pharmaceutical companys efforts to increase profits and value.

Thats it. Thats a dashboard. But marketers and other managers can make dashboards much more complicated. And a dashboard that showed promise, that suggested a revolutionary ability to look at the big and small pictures, track company goals, measure success, and generally boost business, can turn into yet another useless and ignored system cluttering up time and space.

How do good dashboards go bad? And how can you prevent it from happening? In this article, we examine the major problems that can afflict well-meaning dashboards. We look at how a more holistic, inclusive perspective and measurement methods can prevent problems. And finally, we examine the key characteristics of successful dashboards.

Dashboard Disaster

When dashboards go bad, they go really bad. Good intentions fly out the window in the face of poor data, planning, management, or a myriad of other issues. Lets take a look at some of the key problems dashboards can suffer from.

Wrong measurements. While the marketing department may view metrics charting numbers of ads executed or campaigns developed as valuable, and as the kind that will demonstrate the hard work marketing has done over the past months and years, only marketing will care. Tracking measurements that are only relevant to marketing alienates the other divisions that are supposed to engage with the dashboard, and paints a picture of naivet among the c-suite.

Ill-defined measurements. Know what youre trying to learn from your dashboard? Know what the definitions of success are? Many dashboards crash and burn at this point, without a clear definition for the standards used and the questions the team is trying to answer.

Too many measurements. The amount of information marketers can cull from internal sources and throughout the company is staggering. But is all that information truly useful? Will it help drive change and growth? Probably not. Good dashboards go bad when they try to incorporate too many metrics and gain confusion instead.

Intimidating measurements. A dashboard can offer its users highly valuable information. But if those users cant understand the information, it wont be of any use or value. Dashboards that display metrics in non-user-friendly formats dont show whats really important trends, future opportunities, areas for improvement, and financial results.

Limited measurements. Dashboards are often focused on providing metrics as the light at the end of the tunnel, the end stop of the marketing process. But this is an extremely limited view and exercise. Dashboards that place metrics only at the end of a marketing initiative, and not throughout the entire process, are doomed to fail.

No obvious actions on the basis of measurements. The data is pretty. Its informative and interesting. All good things. But dashboards that dont offer logical action steps that follow from that data have gone bad.

Lack of engagement with measurements. The dashboard may be perfect in concept and execution, but without people interacting with it, theres no point.

It may seem inevitable for dashboards to flameout due to so much potential for flaw. But companies can avoid the good-dashboard-gone-bad syndrome.

Better Perspective and Measurements

As youve seen in the previous section, many of the problems surrounding dashboards involve metrics. The first step to ensuring an appropriate and useful dashboard is having a better perspective behind those metrics.

To get an errant dashboard back on track, or to start on the right path from the beginning, marketers must ask key questions. Theyre simple and direct, but often get lost in the planning and execution process:

What decisions are you trying to make?

What information is necessary to make those decisions?

The goal is to be excruciatingly clear about your own goals. The kicker is to then link those goals to relevant and important aspects of the greater business. Tying marketing goals and the companys business objectives together translates into an appropriate system for the all stakeholders.

Now how to make sure the metrics you use build on this stronger foundation? Consider the kinds of metrics you can and should incorporate:

Overall: The key information on a dashboard should tie together marketing efforts with a relevant business measure. One bigger picture measurement is profit. Revenue is often grasped onto by marketing, with the rationalizations that other data availability is limited, or theres an inability to accurately translate financial data to profit. With new analysis methods, these issues are increasingly moot. But many marketers still believe that marketing is primarily a top-line-driving function, one that doesnt influence the bottom line (profit). Thats a problem, because presenting metrics of marketing effectiveness in terms of revenue is seen as naive. It encourages company management to see marketing as unnecessary. Focus instead on profit as the overarching financial metric on the dashboard, and youll achieve greater attention and usage.

Efficiency: As we said before, keeping track of your own marketing efforts to the detriment of other, bigger picture measurements, shouldnt happen. But dashboards can incorporate some efficiency measures that can translate well to all dashboard participants.

-Value and volume: Simple and powerful. This is the ratio of the estimated share of gross profits youre receiving compared with the share of total volume sold in the category.

-Marketing cost per unit: Divide the total marketing expense over a period of time by the number of units sold, and you get MCPU. Over time, the MCPU should decline.

-Marketing mix productivity: These models correlate investments in different media forms to actual sales volume.

-Program/Non-Program Ratio: Compares value-creating activities versus overhead. The higher the ratio, the more efficient the operation. Can be especially helpful when broken into direct program resources, indirect program resources, and non-program resources.

-Program/Payroll Ratio: Compares customer-reaching activities versus internal process management (payroll).

Customers: The dashboard is built around the profit the company receives from selling to customers. So it only makes sense to include customer-centered metrics in the dashboard.

-Return on Customer: Built on the concept of customers as assets, assets that will improve profits over time, this metric considers the lifetime value of a customer multiplied by the total number of customers. You can then compare the investment made in garnering and maintaining those customers to find an overall return on customer.

-Active Customer Counts: How many of your customers are active, meaning purchasing at certain levels over time?

-Segment Mobility: This measure takes frequency distributions of customers by value, and shows how the customer base is migrating from one segment to (ideally) more profitable segments.

-Customer Loyalty: Marketers can define loyalty by repeated purchases over time, a preference to do more business in the future, or referrals customers have made or intend to make.

-Customer Experience: Metrics can demonstrate customer satisfaction levels, perceptions of quality, engagement levels, repurchase intentions, and more. You can also gauge the customer experience in terms of time of order completion, compliments or complaints, and resolution turnaround time.

Keys to Success

As we said before, the dashboard is entirely what you want and need it to be and can be linked to the decisions that need to be made. As long as its beneficial, it works. It should be built on key questions related to company objectives, and it should incorporate relevant, powerful metrics. Beyond that? Here are key characteristics of successful dashboards.

Alignment, alignment, alignment. Its worth repeating. As weve noted, dashboards must align measurements effectively with company strategy and objectives. Ways to do it: Companies can conduct gut checks, querying management and other departments on corporate priorities and comparing them to marketing goals. Do they mesh? They should. Only then will dashboard measurements be relevant to overall company objectives and needs.

Achieving buy-in with the whole C-suite: A top-down approach means tighter alignment with company needs and goals. Plus, engaging the entire management means problems will be addressed, demands met, and people given the power to make change based on dashboard findings.

Using stakeholder analysis to select the best metrics: Apply a formal selection process to weigh stakeholder input, including company management, customers, and more. Figure out whats most important to them, and select metrics that will be valued and adopted throughout the company.

Consolidating metrics: Metrics can quickly pile up, from studies, media reports, satisfaction data, web logs, CRM systems, and so much more. Stick to 10-20 metrics of greatest interest to the key stakeholders.

Demonstrate effectiveness and not just efficiency: Marketing performance must be viewed in terms of financial results, not just progress reports.

Designing insightful communication formats: Scoring systems should be simple. Frames of reference (charts comparing measures to benchmarks or standards, for example) should be employed. Use bright colors and shapes to catch attention and draw out key findings. Overall? Make it organized, logical, and useful by demonstrating trends and opportunities.

Ensuring action through enforced accountability: For each metric tracked, someone needs to be driving the bus forward. Assign individuals to be accountable, and empower those folks with the authority and resources they need to make things happen.

Giving diagnostic/predictive insight: A dashboard needs to be more than just a reporting tool. Multiple levels must be available so that departments can look at top-level objectives and results, but also tactical performance levels.

Conclusion

With a bigger-picture perspective, relevant and powerful measurements, and a few other tweaks, marketers can prevent good dashboards from going bad, or start new systems on the right path.

For an example of dashboards for pharmaceutical marketers that are totally focused on the decisions hat need to be made for growing a brands market share and profit, please contact Dr Andree Bates at Eularis www.eularis.com for a demonstration.

Author:
Dr. Andree K Bates
Eularis
www.eularis.com