We recently highlighted how interactive Power BI dashboards could help private equity companies track and measure the performance of their portfolio companies. Now, we’d like to explore how private equity operational dashboards can be used to track, measure, and inform decisions in two vital operational areas: sales and inventory management. In this first part, we’ll explore private equity dashboards for measuring sales performance.
Second only to measuring financial performance, the ability to track and measure sales performance – including product demand, pipeline, and revenue in near real-time – is a top priority when a private equity firm makes an acquisition.
Product Performance Dashboards
The dashboard below was initially developed for a private equity-backed machinery dealership chain. This dealership chain and the private equity company wanted to be able to understand at a glance:
What products are most popular, and which are least popular?
What is the total revenue by day, month, quarter, and year?
What is the revenue by product?
Who are their biggest customers by revenue?
What is each customer buying?
How do all of these KPIs differ by region and/or branch?
The sales performance dashboard we created shows several key sales invoice amounts by day, month, quarter, and year. This further can be drilled down by item. Consequently, in a flash, the end-user has the ability to decide what are the most popular orders within a timeline and who are the most profitable customers.
This data alone can answer numerous business questions that can benefit the sales and marketing teams. The insights provided by this dashboard helped the sales, marketing, and product teams to understand the current state of their product demand, opportunities for growth, and areas for improvement. As a result, they can use this information to:
Explore why products, locations, and customers were underperforming or outperforming others.
Invest in sales and marketing for underperforming products or regions.
Produce more high-demand and high-profit products.
Understand seasonal trends to optimize sales and marketing efforts.
Determine the viability of products and locations.
Sales Rep Performance Dashboards
Drilling down even further, the dashboard below was created to help identify performance at the individual sales rep level and answers questions like:
Who are the top-performing sales reps? Who are the lowest performing?
What is the revenue by each sales rep?
What is the performance by sales reps month-over-month?
What are the products each rep is selling?
The dashboard above can quickly identify the most successful salespeople within the portfolio company based on how much revenue they brought in. Tracking their performance is as seamless as it looks. This gives the capacity to some managers to look at their employees’ performance from another perspective based on accurate and real-time data. It can also help drive decisions on hiring, training, coaching, and territory realignments.
Customer Profile Dashboards
Another type of sales performance dashboard we created for this client is a customer profile dashboard. This unique type of dashboard provides a snapshot of essential information about a customer, such as name, address, ID numbers, and interactive dashboards that provide information about their sales history and purchase trends.
The customer profile dashboard above can help sales and marketing teams personalize outreach at the customer level, resulting in better engagement, more sales, and higher profits.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this blog on private equity operational dashboards for sales performance. If you have any questions or want to see more dashboard examples, please contact us to connect with a data analytics dashboard specialist.
Software & Solutions for Marketers is the final installment in our Marketers’ Guide to Data Management and Analytics series. Throughout this series, we’ve covered major terms, acronyms, and technologies you might encounter as you seek to take control of your data, improve your analytics, and get more value from your MarTech investments.
In this last section, we will cover various aspects of software and solutions for marketing, including:
The differences between the cloud and on-premise (on-prem) solutions
Customer data platforms (CDP)
Custom development (custom dev)
Cloud vs. On-Prem
Cloud
Also known as “cloud computing,” the cloud is a global network of software and services that run over the internet on someone else’s server, as opposed to running locally on your computer or server.
Why It Matters for Marketers:
Get the flexibility your business needs. Today’s marketing teams are mobile, require a variety of working schedules, and are often spread across geographies and time zones. Cloud-based software and services are accessible by any device with an internet connection, quick to set up, and reliable to access, regardless of the user’s location or device.
Deliver the level of service your customers expect. Hosting your website or e-commerce business on the cloud means your site won’t get bogged down with high traffic or large data files. Additionally, hosting your data in the cloud reduces the amount of siloed information, empowering teams to work more seamlessly and deliver a higher quality, more personalized experience to customers.
Spend your money on campaigns, not infrastructure. While many softwares are sold with on-premise or cloud options, the cloud-native options (tools such as Snowflake, Azure, AWS, and Looker) enable marketers to use these technologies with little to no reliance on IT resources to maintain the back-end infrastructure.
Real-World Examples:
Most marketing organizations use cloud-based applications such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Sprout Social. These cloud-based applications allow marketing users to quickly and reliably create, collaborate on, and manage their marketing initiatives without being tied to a single location or computer.
On-Prem
On-premise or on-prem refers to any software, storage, or service run from on-site computers or servers.
Why It Matters for Marketers:
Most marketing software is run on the cloud these days. Cloud solutions are faster, more dynamic, and more reliable.
So why would a business choose on-prem? Today, there are two main reasons a business might still have on-prem software:
The company is in a highly regulated industry where data ownership or security are big concerns.
The company has legacy on-prem solutions with massive amounts of data, making the switch to cloud more challenging.
However, many of these companies still recognize the need to update their infrastructures. On-prem is harder to maintain and has reduced up-time as glitches or breaks are fixed at the speed of IT teams. What’s more: on-prem solutions can bottleneck your insights and ability to deliver insights at scale.
With this in mind, even companies with more complicated situations can use a hybrid of cloud and on-prem solutions. By doing this, they migrate less sensitive information to the cloud while keeping more regulated files on their own servers.
Real-World Examples:
In marketing, it’s likely that most data will be in the cloud but if you’re working with a client in a highly regulated industry, like government or healthcare, you might have some on-premise data sources.
Healthcare companies have patient privacy regulations like HIPAA about how customer data can be used, including marketing campaigns. In this case, an on-prem solution might be a better alternative to protect patients’ rights.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A customer data platform is a software solution that synthesizes customer data from various sources to keep them in sync with each other. CDPs often additionally offer the ability to send this data to a database of your choice for analytics.
Why It Matters for Marketers:
CDPs allow your various tools (such as your CRM, Google Analytics, and e-commerce systems) to stay in sync with each other around customer data. This means if you change a detail about a customer in one system, everyone else sees this update come through automatically without any manual updating.
Real-World Examples:
CDPs make it really easy to create quality account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. CDPs deliver a persistent, accurate, and unified customer base, making it easy to use data throughout the ABM campaign.
For example, selecting and validating target accounts uses data from across your entire organization. Once pulled into the CDP, you can perform analytics on that data to identify the best accounts to go after. You will have thousands of attributes to better understand which customers are more likely to purchase.
One note: CDPs do not usually tie these customers and their information to other subject areas like products, orders, loyalty, etc. They are also not meant for analytic use cases. If you are doing deeper, company-wide analysis, you might want a data warehouse.
Custom Dev
Custom development, or custom dev, is a term that refers to any application or solution developed to satisfy the requirements of a specific user or business rather than for general use.
Why It Matters for Marketers:
Even the best out-of-the-box software or solutions are designed to overcome the challenges of a broad user base, providing functionality that only satisfies generalized needs. Custom dev solutions address your specific business needs in a way that gives you a competitive advantage or reduces the amount of time spent trying to make a generic software match your unique needs.
Real-World Examples:
One retail company was receiving flat files from a monthly vendor report that were hard to integrate with the rest of their reports. This made it challenging to get the deeper insights their marketing team needed to make informed omni-channel decisions.
As there were no tools available in the market with a connector to their system, a custom dev solution was needed. An application was created to automatically take in these flat files from the vendor so the marketing team could receive new data without the lengthy request and ingest process that relied heavily on IT resources. This enabled the marketing team to easily target the same customer across channels by using personalized campaigns that aligned with purchasing habits and history.
Another example of custom dev is the implementation of automated customer touchpoints. Adding features that trigger events based on business rules is a great way to personalize your customers’ experience. For example, you could create a rule that emails customers a coupon for their most frequently purchased product when they haven’t made a purchase in the past six months.
Throughout this Marketers’ Guide to Data Management and Analytics series, we hope you’ve learned about the different tools to manage, integrate, analyze, and use your data more strategically to get the most out of your investments. Please contact us to learn how we can help build and implement these various solutions, so you can better understand your customer base and target your customers accurately.
Snowflake is a powerhouse in the data world, but it can become even more powerful when paired with other technologies that suit your organization’s needs. 2nd Watch is a tech-agnostic firm, meaning we only recommend tools we truly believe are the best for your business. Because Snowflake partners with such a wide range of technologies, we have lots of options to create a tech stack uniquely suited to you.
Among the many tools that work in conjunction with Snowflake, the following Snowflake-adjacent technologies enhance Snowflake in different ways and are all noteworthy in their own right.
HVR (a Fivetran company)
HVR, which became part of Fivetran as of late 2021, is a cloud data replication tool that natively supports Snowflake. It executes real-time data replication by reading directly from database transaction logs, which allows for high performance and low impact on database servers.
As one of the earliest technologies to join the Snowflake Partner Network, HVR understands how analytics efforts can be impacted by real-time data streaming to Snowflake. Using HVR to offer immediate access to your data in Snowflake’s Data Cloud, you can make timely decisions based on current, accurate data.
Riversand
Riversand is a master data management (MDM) tool that “goldenizes” your data. In other words, it creates one current, complete, and accurate record.
After connecting your organization with the right MDM tool for your situation, like Riversand, 2nd Watch would oversee the MDM implementation and provide guidance on next steps. This includes sharing insights on best-in-class data warehouses, like Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Together, Riversand and Snowflake can prepare you for downstream analytics and long-term data governance.
ALTR
ALTR is a cloud-native Data Security as a Service (DSaaS) platform that helps companies optimize data consumption governance. With ALTR, you’re able to track data consumption patterns and limit how much data can be consumed at various levels across your organization.
ALTR and Snowflake work together in two ways:
ALTR seamlessly integrates with Snowflake so you can view your securely shared data consumption information.
Sisu accelerates and expands your analytics capabilities. Using Sisu, business users are able to self-serve and find the answers to increasingly complex questions.
Sisu connects directly to Snowflake’s Data Cloud, so you always have access to your most up-to-date data for comprehensive, actionable analytics. Sisu and Snowflake partner to empower you to make quick, decisive judgments.
These four technologies are just a taste of the many tools that work with Snowflake to improve your organization’s data and analytics capabilities. To discuss your specific data and analytics needs – and to determine the tools Snowflake partners with that will help you meet those needs – contact 2nd Watch today.
