Right Analytics: How do I drive, measure and optimize?

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Key Levers:

• Live dashboarding
• Campaign review & Kaizen (continuous improvement)
• Next best actions

Data, analytics and reporting are the key to unlocking every other component in achieving a complete unified buyer experience. A well-designed analytics approach informs all parts of a business of the current performance of every channel, enabling a constant process of review and optimization. According to McKinsey, companies that effectively use analytics in service of marketing and sales performance are 1.5 times more likely to achieve above-average growth rates than their peers.

Analytics will drive your campaign at the very beginning and measure its success at its completion. Predictive analytics will determine the selection of your accounts or segment, the channel(s) to activate and contribute to choosing the right message for your audience. Post campaign, analytics will measure performance and opportunities for further optimization.

The goal is to bring together silos, tools and systems, and reporting to provide a holistic overview and a single view of the customer and the entire customer journey, from the very first touchpoint with your brand, all the way to (hopefully) becoming a customer.

Live dashboarding

To effectively harness analytics for growth, ensure that real-time reporting is in place to predict, track, measure and optimize your campaign performance. Track campaign analytics and key performance indicators, overall activity metrics, conversion rates, and pipeline-revenue metrics, all attempted sales development representative touches, including calls, emails, social, etc., plus meaningful interactions. As this can involve many tools and data points, setting up the perfect live dashboard will take time and effort, and ‘live’ may initially be an aspiration rather than a reality. However, achieving a live dashboard will make a greater difference to your bottom line than any other recommendations in this whitepaper: it’s a must.

Campaign review

Whatever your reporting setup, regular campaign reviews using available, cross-functional data points, accompanied by a ‘kaizen’ approach targeting continuous learning and improvement, is the best approach to enable alignment between silos. Growth can be incremental, rather than based on long waits and uncertainty, and focus can easily be switched between marketing, SDR and sales functions depending on where the customer experience requires improvement.

Next best actions

With live dashboarding in place, organizations can use analytics not only to understand current performance, but also to inform data-driven decisions for future campaign recommendations and segment selection. Next best actions can be defined, based on reviewing common buyer behavior: what is the most popular content order? Should we send an email before or after trying to connect via LinkedIn?

1. Crawl

Identify all relevant data points to measure across tools and silos, and start to combine, even manually. Use initial findings to start learning and delivering results, but also to develop a roadmap to the creation of a comprehensive, live dashboard.

2. Walk

Launch live dashboarding and implement kaizen (continuous improvement). Start to understand buyer behavior and use this to optimize approaches for all levers. Use A/B testing to garner insights to be more data-driven in campaigns.

3. Run

With full ‘single view of customer’ in place, add on a layer of predictive analysis. Improve performance by combining live reporting (what is happening) with tests based on past common behaviors.