Transform Data into your Company's Most Valuable Asset

Industry performance benchmarks show what good looks like. They bring context to performance measures.

Supplementing performance measures with industry benchmarks can quickly spot gaps or underperforming areas that offer the biggest financial uplift. Benchmarking turns competitive knowledge into competitive advantage.

When executives and managers have both visibility and measurability to the most significant gaps between their current state and where they want to be, they can employ an effective case for change and plot the most direct route to improvements.

And rather than guesswork or estimated ROI figures with questionable assumptions, forecast models built on benchmarks use industry data to provide confidence in calculating pro forma business outcomes and setting realistic goals. The knowledge of what has worked for similar companies lowers risk and accelerates time to value.

Research results published in the CRM Benchmark Report found that the Best-in-Class analytics performers ranked CRM dashboards as the top information delivery tool.

Good dashboards focus on the most essential key performance indicators and are designed to prioritize information based on what's most important to each user. They display exactly what should be done, in a sequenced order, to aid time management, create a work rhythm cadence and maximize productivity.

Great dashboards go further to shift information from being merely interesting to being actionable. They deliver data-driven and fact-based insights that answer key questions, help people make better decisions and encourage action to lift performance. They include comparison points, such as industry benchmarks, to provide a relative ranking of what's working and what needs improvement.

The best dashboards permit real-time predictive modeling to show how changes in behaviors or actions impact business outcomes. They display forward looking analytics and show the financial impact of both action and inaction. It's this level of reporting that shifts information visibility from hindsight to foresight. It's also this level of reporting that connects metrics with prescriptive guidance, such as guided selling, best practice recommendations and links to Playbooks.

Data becomes much more actionable when it advances from historical to predictive. In fact, without predictive analytics, the view for every person in your company is entirely backward looking.

Revenue growth is a process, not an event. So, to visualize that process we use analytics such as the below Predictive Pyramid. It's a bottom-to-top revenue roll-up and interactive dashboard that shows the linkage from activities to tactics to targeted outcomes.

The data that drives the calculations is sourced from company history if its available or industry benchmarks if it's not.

Good predictive analytics are neither standalone nor exist in a vacuum. Business outcomes are the result of a value chain derived from many activities. Modeling that value chain allows you to identify the most direct path to the results that most matter.

This type of visualization is extremely helpful in determining where to invest your limited time to achieve the biggest uplift.