Monday, March 4, 2013

Scorecards, Dashboards & KPIs - Oh My!


Today we have a guest blog from Elizabeth Andreini:

In Q4 we were all thinking about setting budgets and planning for the coming year. Now that we are in the first quarter of the year, are you making sure that the money you are spending on marketing is as effective as possible? Understanding how your marketing efforts are performing can be difficult but will help you better assess what’s working…and what’s not. Make this the year you make smarter marketing decisions!

If you haven’t put them in place, now’s the time to utilize scorecards, dashboards and other measurement tools to ensure that you are spending money most effectively – and making the biggest impact on your bottom line. Here is a quick briefing on scorecards and dashboards with five hints on using these tools:

       Scorecards: help you understand performance relative to plan, and enable you to align operational execution with business strategy
       Dashboards: tie to operational goals and leverage reports containing Key Performance Indicator data to help you gain insight into Key Performance Drivers so you can “pull the right levers”

5 important factors to consider when using scorecards and dashboards:

  1. Have a clear purpose in what you are tracking and what you are going to do with it.
  2. Be SMART (specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and time bound) in your data requirements.
    - Use “good” data. That means data that is not averages, is reasonably accurate, complete AND easy to get.
  3. Align the use of the scorecards and dashboards with your company’s business processes so the information can get used in decision making to drive company behavior and decisions for optimal impact.
  4. Look beyond outcome data showing history to gain insights on how your decisions and processes can be modified to get a different result – identify your Key Performance Drivers.
  5. Provide a frame of reference using targets or benchmarks, whether internal and/or industry specific as a point of comparison.
As the CEO, the questions you should ask about your marketing efforts are:

  1. What are the success measures of my marketing efforts? Do I know which marketing efforts are the most effective?
  2. Do I have the right information easily accessible in the company so marketing can use it to track their marketing efforts and spend? How can I help ensure the company and those in it are helping capture the information we need?
  3. Is my marketing more or less effective than my competitors? Is it more or less effective than others in my industry? Does my marketing department regularly track their progress and make adjustments based on the results so we are making better/smarter marketing decisions than last year?
Here’s hoping 2013 is the year your marketing efforts have even more impact on your company’s success!

ELIZABETH ANDREINI

As the President of Accelerate Marketing, LLC, Elizabeth Andreini, is the “secret weapon” CEOs turn to at key growth points when they need to transform marketing and product management to grow their customer base, increase revenue & scale their business. In addition to providing experienced executive insight and guidance, Elizabeth often works as an interim CMO or VP to provide the hands-on leadership needed to rearchitect marketing and product management and improve execution from the inside.

Elizabeth Andreini, founder & president of Accelerate Marketing, LLC 
Accelerate Marketing, LLC
Twitter: @acceler8mkting