How to drive your business with marketing instrument panels*

Mar 1

posted by Dr. Art Weinstein in Marketing Performance Metrics | 35 Comments

The late Ed Koch, a recent New York City mayor, always asked, “How am I doing?” Marketers — as well as government leaders — need to know if their “customers” are happy.

Perhaps you head the marketing operations for your company and want to get a better handle on customer metrics. You heard about the idea of a marketing dashboard at a recent trade association meeting and think that may solve your problem. How should you proceed? What should be on your dashboard? 

Progressing beyond a single item to monitor the effectiveness of business performance, leading organizations often use a set of key metrics called marketing dashboards to understand their key performance indicators.

Just as an automobile dashboard captures critical driving information such as speed, distance, fuel levels, vehicle and engine temperature, navigation and so on, a marketing dashboard summarizes pertinent information on branding, channels, customer contact, promotion, sales performance, service profitability, the Web, and customer value. 

Consider the benefits

Some specific benefits of using dashboards include the following: business intelligence, trend tracking, measuring efficiencies or inefficiencies, real-time updates, visuals (charts, graphs, maps and tables), customized reporting of performance and aligning goals and strategies with results. Major downside considerations include the cost, time and the talent needed to administer marketing dashboards.

The main value of the dashboard framework is that it consists of a multitude of practical information that is current, accessible and easy-to-understand. Dashboards can be designed for top C-level executives as well as the managers working in the trenches.

The accompanying figure illustrates an example of an executive marketing dashboard. This dashboard features the following metrics: sales levels and growth targets, the decision-makers, exceptions, key accounts (including revenues), the marketing pipeline (status of marketing activities throughout the buying cycle), and tracks leads and dollars generated over an annual period. 

Decide what to measure

What should you measure? The spectrum of opinion varies widely from a single metric such as the Net Promoter Score to 50 or more performance indicators. Just as we don’t want to be overwhelmed with our automotive dashboard, keeping the marketing dashboard simple helps measure what matters and aligns with business objectives. That said, here’s a good starting point to consider in choosing five to ten key performance indicators that may include the following:

• Financial measures: revenues, contribution margins, turnover ratios, profitability
• Competitive measures: market share, advertising/promotional budget, image map
• Consumer behavior: market penetration, customer loyalty, new customers
• Consumer intermediate measures: brand recognition, customer satisfaction, purchase intention
• Direct customer measures: distribution level, intermediary profits, service quality
• Innovativeness measures: new products launched and the percentage of annual revenue from these new products
• Customer value measures: process metrics, customer retention rates, customer lifetime value, RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) 

Realize that doing business today requires a new level of accountability for performance. Superior customer value means knowing customers’ behaviors and buying patterns.

Metrics are an important part of the strategic marketing process to understand: (1) How successful the organization is now; (2) What it needs to accomplish to become even more successful in the years ahead.

Smart marketing managers will embrace this challenge and use metrics as a planning tool to improve business strategies.

                                                                                                                                                                                                        Image Source: www.fishformetrics.com

                                                                                                                                                                                                         *Reprinted from Smart Business, September 3, 2013.

Art Weinstein, Ph.D., is a Professor of Marketing at Nova Southeastern University and author of “Superior Customer Value: Strategies for Winning and Retaining Customers.” He may be reached at art@nova.edu or (954) 262-5097. For more information, visit his website at www.artweinstein.com.

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• #1 by Loren Looney on 3/27/17 - 2:19 AM

  

  Dr. Art Weinstein’s article, “How to drive your business with marketing instrument panels,” is very captivating in many ways. I agree that you must utilize different dimensions of measuring tactics to improve the understanding of customers’ and their buying patterns. It is absolutely essential for the company to sustain a strategic marketing process. According to Dr. Weinstein, “Progressing beyond a single item to monitor the effectiveness of business performance, leading organizations often use a set of key metrics called marketing dashboards to understand their key performance indicators.” Furthermore, marketing dashboards help to measure production. Frequent examination and evaluation of the needs of the company helps gauge if the plan being used will deliver the best possible outcomes. Some important details are saving time and money to guarantee success for the company going forward in the future. All in all, unsurpassed knowledge of the buyers and their satisfaction will uphold the company’s competitive advantage.
  
  On the metrics of customer service, banking institutions utilize these tactics often to better understand the needs of their clientele and their happiness with the bank. Banks are consistently competing for new relationships to better benefit their institutions in the market today. As a banker, you can and will experience something called “Mystery Shops,” which is a form of judging how well you are performing in the customer service area. Another metric used is where there is an outsourced company that calls random clients that visited the branch recently to get their rating of how their experience went with the banker that assisted them. These are just a few ways that this particular institution was able to judge statistically how “Satisfied,” the clients are with the bank by analyzing the bankers preposition of the company and the client’s opinion.
  
  Kindest regards,
  
  Loren Looney

• #2 by Alberto Luaces on 3/27/17 - 7:27 PM

  

  Dr. Art Weinstein,
  
  I want to begin by thanking you for writing this article as it was very informative and truly changed the way that I view Marketing. I always knew that Marketing was something that companies could use to get their name out there, but I never thought about it in the performance measure dashboard way that you describe in your article. When I sat back and thought about using measures and different angles of attack to understand customer trends and patterns it felt as if it was a necessity to have a dashboard in order to get a better handle on customer metrics. The reason that I feel it is a necessity is because of the example that you used in your article, if a car were to not have anything on its dashboard cluster how would we know how fast we are going, what temperature the vehicle is operating at so on and so forth? The same applies to Marketing. If you don’t have a dashboard that is helping you monitor the effectiveness of business performance, helping you track trends and measuring the efficiencies or inefficiencies in your organization, how are you going to be able to know the current status of your organization? How are you going to know what areas you need to improve in, or what areas are in trouble? Having a Marketing Dashboard can help you with all of these issues and can be truly beneficial to your organization. I work for a university hospital and it is extremely important for us to know how we are doing in regards to patient care and service. By utilizing one of these dashboards we would be able to get a feel for how the patients felt about their visit, and it would also help us track trends to see when the clinic is usually the busiest which would allow us to better plan and staff the clinic to provide the best possible service to the patient. I believe that Marketing Dashboards are extremely beneficial and should be utilized by all organizations to ensure they are getting the most out of their business.
  
  -Alberto Luaces

• #3 by Reachel McWhorter on 3/27/17 - 7:45 PM

  

  I enjoyed reading Dr. Art Weinstein article, and I agree knowing how to drive your business with marketing panels are key to a company’s success. A few years ago, I worked as an accountant for International Vapor Group which was the parent company to several E-cig companies such as VaporFi and the CRM system was very instrumental to that company’s success. Each department utilize the dashboard to increase revenues or improve their departments performance. As the Accountant, I would go into the dashboard to track revenues, customer feedback and the marketing pipeline. My boss would review my findings then he would meet with other managers to work together to improve performance which led to more revenue for the company. There are numerous benefits to understanding how to utilize the dashboard such as understanding trends, measuring efficiencies or inefficiencies, visuals and the ability to align goals with results. Understanding trends allowed the marketing department to decide which product would be flavor of the week or which flavor there would be put on sale and or what new product they would create. In brief, I really enjoyed reading this post because it discussed the benefits of a process that I was able to experience first-hand.
  
  Kindly,
  
  Reachel McWhorter

• #4 by Juan Mosquera on 3/27/17 - 10:06 PM

  

  I do find the post by Dr Art Weinstein about "How to drive your business with marketing instruments panels"
  Insightful.
  
  With a well-designed marketing dashboard with critical information that is relevant to the specific business, a marketer can determine if the current plan is reflecting the expected results or not and it will provide the necessary easy to read data to share with other teams in the organization so they can align to accomplish the desire goal.
  
  It is important to highlight that Dr Weinstein talks about providing the dashboard to managers in the trenches but not to all the employees in the organization, since I believe that other members of the organization will not benefit from it and perhaps it will distract them from their main objectives.
  
  
  For companies that are focusing on Net Promoter Scores, reviewing dashboards is becoming an essential part of their managers daily routine. All the data collected will provide a manager key data that he or she can summarize to the rest of the team so they can refocus and work together in areas that require improvement.

• #5 by Sareilys Perdomo on 3/28/17 - 10:09 AM

  

  This was a great article. I completely agree with Dr. Weinstein in regards to including metrics in the strategic marketing process. The marketing dashboard, as explained in the article, is a tool that will measure and help organizations understand their key performance indicators. According to Dr. Weinstein, benefits of using a marketing dashboard include trend tracking, customized reporting, aligning goals, visuals, and measuring efficiencies or inefficiencies (Weinstein, 2017). It is essential for businesses to get involved with using dashboards because overall this will help their organization. The only major disadvantage to the dashboard is the cost, time, and talent needed to keep up with it.
  
  Currently, I work for a confectionary broker. Our organization is extremely complex because we deal with manufacturers, customers, distributors and operators out in the field. The marketing director spends most of her time analyzing reports in order to create a visual for upper management to see how the company is doing by using dashboards. Dashboards include a lot of practical information that is current and this is was the owners like to see. There are many different performance indicators to measure in the organization I work for: financial measures, competitive measures, customer measures, etc. Overall, using a dashboard will let the organization know if they are profitable and if their customers are happy.

• #6 by Ana Roque on 3/28/17 - 11:04 AM

  

  Corporations today face new challenges when it comes to sales support and communication to their field staff. I agree with Dr. Art Weinstein’s article as it illustrates the new upcoming marketing metrics that corporation need to be successful in their particular industry. Dashboards have become a popular marketing instrument. Overcoming the obstacles of budgeting to include cost, time and administration of the tools are essential. These tools can track business performance in a very simplistic form that takes you right to the point for improvement on branding, channel performance, promotions, profitability and more.
     Technology has given us tools to become more efficient and focus businesses/employees to make smart decision in a shorter period. The dashboards facilitate these decisions.
  
  Ana Roque

• #7 by Amanda Williams on 3/28/17 - 5:28 PM

  

  Dr. Weinstein's article provided insight into a valuable tool for a business. Having a dashboard allows a company to determine the most important areas for success. Focusing on these areas alone is worthwhile to an organization and monitoring them has many benefits.
  At my workplace we call them Performance Measures and they are tracked on a monthly and yearly basis. There are also customer surveys done to collect more information for our metrics. The time and effort spent tracking these areas seems to be outweighed by the benefits. I feel that more transparency in the Performance Measures and other monitoring areas would be beneficial to employees.

• #8 by Jenna Guzman on 3/28/17 - 7:16 PM

  

  Dr. Weinstein’s article regarding the importance of marketing dashboards and their use for making more informed marketing decisions is insightful. I agree with the importance of utilizing the tools available to us to better perform our jobs. It is true that business intelligence, such as a dashboard showing key performance metrics, can be an expensive tool to utilize, but businesses need to consider the money it could save them doing research and paying staff to run reports as well as the benefits of being able to make quicker, more informed marketing decisions to increase profits. Dr. Weinstein also touches on the importance of choosing the right metrics to display. I agree that dashboards should be limited to five to ten performance indicators. Marketing managers need to see sufficient information to make well-informed decisions quickly, but not so much information that it seems jumbled and overwhelming. Furthermore, as he also discusses, it may make sense to customize the dashboard based upon job level within the company. Top level executives should see broader information to give them an overall picture of how well the marketing programs are performing, while marketing managers making daily changes and decisions can see more in depth information for decision making purposes.

• #9 by Brooke McLaughlin on 3/28/17 - 7:51 PM

  

  I found this article very interesting and informative. I agree that the dashboard is a very effective tool that is used to capture the trend of an organization. This can help a company see where they are at in the market and if customers are responding to their product. I also agree it is a very valuable tool for a sales team. This can track the growth of a sales person and can help with goal setting for the next year. Even though a dashboard can be costly and time consuming the information that this will provide will be worth the hard work and money put into it in the end.
  I work for a national roofing company and a dashboard would be very beneficial to track quotes generated vs. quotes sold over a year span. Our estimating department puts out a ton of quotes per day due to a new process that was rolled out this year. This can help provide additional information on whether or not this new process is working and the customers are approving additional work.
  Thanks,
  Brooke McLaughlin

• #10 by Krishawn Wiggins on 3/28/17 - 9:21 PM

  

  This is a very great read and I do agree that you have to use many different avenues to get a understanding of your customers as well as their buying patterns. A great way to do this would be for a company to have a very effective strategic marketing process. You should always be up to date on your dashboard so you know the needs of they company so you know what works best and what needs more attention. Which I did not even think about until reading this article when I think of marketing I think of getting a name or brand out to the public not a performance measure.

• #11 by Nikesh Patel on 3/28/17 - 10:04 PM

  

  After reading Dr. Art Weinstein’s article I was thrilled to understand and know how much marketing influences a company’s success. It’s important to state that many large company’s face challenges when they market their product or company; Dr. Art Weinstein explained it very well by stating that corporations need to be in their industry by understanding how successful they are now and what needs to be done to more successful in the years ahead. In my current role working with the marketing team has brought me to think that marketing is everything for a company, it can make or break how a consumer imagines your brand. With the correct marketing strategies, we the consumers will remember when a company does something special for their customers. The marketing dashboard is a very useful tool as Dr. Art Weinstein explains, it can measure and help organizations understand their key performance indicators (KPI) (Weinstein, 2017) and help them drive towards keeping the KPI’s running strong and help company’s track performance overtime.

• #12 by Valentina Serna on 3/28/17 - 10:35 PM

  

  I agree with Dr. Art Weinstein’s article; I currently work in HR and have seen the importance of analytics and dashboards. Part of my team at work are HR Analysts, and just the other day as part of a team building experience they showed us what they do and the impact they have on the company. Just as the article mentions, my colleagues described the types of metrics and information that needs to be incorporated into the dashboards. The dashboards must be able to show high executives how different variables affect different outcomes and can show progress of a new initiative over time. This is also true when it comes to marketing dashboards, using these key metrics, helps summarize information such as sales performance, profitability, branding and other important factors as mentioned in the article. Now a days, the world is moving so fast that decisions need to be made in a matter of minutes, having something that summarizes how well (or not) marketing strategies are working can save companies a lot of headaches to say the least. Personally, I’ve seen how metrics have been used to improve our department’s objectives to meet business needs. They give us something measurable that allows us to determines what works and what does not.

• #13 by Monique Hunter on 3/29/17 - 7:03 PM

  

  I really enjoyed Dr. Art Weinstein's marketing blog, it was very informative. It is extremely important for companies to know if their customer's are happy with the services and/or products they provide. I really like the concept of "marketing dashboards", because it helps organizations familiarize and keep up with their performance and results. Another benefit of this concept that I felt was insightful was that it is an easy tool to use and is readily available for c-level executives and managers. After reading this article it really gave me a new perspective on marketing strategies and how important it is for a company to have them to be a success!

• #14 by Juan Silva on 3/29/17 - 9:42 PM

  

  This is a very interesting article and I agree with Dr. Art Weinstein’s point of view that metrics are an important part of the strategic marketing process to understand how successful the organization and what it needs to do to become even more successful. Using dashboard does not only benefit C-level executives and manager to be able to have a clear and simplified vision on where the company performance stands and see areas they could improve, but it also helps employees to keep track of their own performance, activities and goals. This is especially true in sales. Having a well-developed dashboard in a company can help the sales department to keep track of the team's daily activities and goals, each sales executive also has access to their own dashboard and they can see where they stand regarding their activities and goals for the day, or week. In personal experience, this has helped me to be more organized and helped prepare for the tasks that must be accomplished days ahead.
  
  Juan

• #15 by Jennybel Herrera on 3/29/17 - 9:46 PM

  

  Dr. Art Weinstein's article was very interesting and informative. I definitely do agree that a company should invest their time and money on metrics. Using this resource is a great marketing strategy and guide to use. After all what keeps any company going is the success and satisfaction of the customers. Using metrics can measure and assist a company in what area they may need to improve and also in what areas they are doing well in. This way the company can continue growing successfully, make changes financially if needed, and cater to customers behaviors and adjust accordingly through the measurements of the dashboard. The goal behind any company is customer satisfaction which will maintain their loyalty and in return will keep the company thriving. Using this tool will make this kind of information accessible. I would definitely take advantage of this technology to use as a wonderful marketing strategy.

• #16 by Miranda Underwood on 3/29/17 - 10:27 PM

  

  Marketing instrument panels are a great tool and asset to any business. I experience something like this when I was taking a social media marketing class. Our professor had us sign up for a free trial with a website that tracks your social media accounts with a dashboard just like the marketing instrument panels. It gave you a dashboard of your followers gained/lost, tracked your most popular/unpopular posts, etc. The information it recorded and displayed would be of great use to a social media marketer to improve their presence on social media. The marketing instrument panels are much more in depth, and I can see how useful they could be to improve any business. In my opinion the cost would be well worth the data gained.

• #17 by Hele Barnes on 3/30/17 - 12:15 AM

  

  I agree with Dr. Weinstein that it is important for businesses to keep track of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is one of the driving forces behind company progress. Marketing dashboards are beneficial to a company because marketers are able to have all of their vital information in one place and with technology, information is even more accessible. The area of marketing requires a bit of speculation in order to meet customer’s needs. A dashboard allows a company to easier analyze their performance indicators to better appeal to their targets. Just as Dr. Weinstein correctly used an automobile example, the marketing dashboard serves as a business’ control panel. This means that it shows the operations of the business and also gives warnings. It is important for a business to know its status and how its fairing in the market. There is no way for a business to progress if it does not know or understand the reason for its shortcomings. Also, because this information is easily understandable for anyone throughout the organizational chart, it can serve as a motivational factor for employees to help the business progress.

• #18 by Amanda Chavez on 3/30/17 - 12:16 AM

  

  I agree with Dr. Art Weinstein’s article. I do agree that companies should use a variety of many different avenues to get an understanding of the customers and their buying patterns. By having a strategic marketing plan it could help achieve these goals. It is also important to be up-to-date with your dashboard to know what the company needs to understand what is working and what needs improvement. The market dashboard is a very useful tool that can help an organization succeed and meet their goals.

• #19 by Stephanie Ramcharran on 3/30/17 - 12:32 PM

  

  This was a great and informative post Dr. Art Weinstein. A marketing dashboard is a great a creative way for marketers to see how their product is doing and how much this product is costing them in every aspect. When managing any task being organized is an important factor and this dashboard is a great way to be organized. The information that is taken in from this dashboard is so easily interpreted in every way possible. Another aspect that I loved about this dashboard is that you can actually see the clientel of this product and can see if the consumers actually like the product or not.

• #20 by Victoria Vilsaint on 3/30/17 - 1:15 PM

  

  I agree with Dr. Weinstein article. The article, “How to drive your business with marketing instrument panels” provides better insight on the use of a dashboard. An automotive retail technology team called Dealer Intelligence (DI) was created at my place of employment. The purpose of this department is to analyze, all aspects of the organization, such as driving profitability or empowering management. Di provides consequential information in order for the CFO, General Managers, and a few staff member to operate the dealership to its best abilities. DI has become its own entity and is now available to any car dealership, big or small. ("Dealer Intelligence | About," n.d.) Their goals are to help empower their customers and help improve their bottom line in order for the organization to grow. ("Dealer Intelligence | About," n.d.)
  
  References
  Dealer Intelligence | About. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.dealerintelligence.com/page-about.html

• #21 by Thomas R Rivera on 3/30/17 - 2:39 PM

  

  Great post Dr.Weinstein. If a company can afford the initial overhead cost and the salary for a capable employee to administer the marketing dashboard then it is a great value to add to a company. Having quick access to key performance indicators can let you know how the company is doing, it can also let you know when a problem is developing so you can make required changes to correct it before it turns into something major. On the other hand overwhelming the dashboard with useless information will not benefit anybody, so choosing the correct metrics to observe is important. A lot of companies are taking advantages of dashboards and not just the marketing department. At my engineering firm all supervisor have a dashboard that shows various information about the employees. Based on company expectations it is programmed to alert us when someone it outside those boundaries. We can then find out why there is the exception and provide guidance if necessary. It’s a very useful tool. Again, thanks for sharing the information.

• #22 by Stephen Blumenthal on 3/30/17 - 6:03 PM

  

  I agree with Dr. Art Weinstein’s article, and specifically the need for metrics when quantifying data about the company you are analyzing. Data is a huge component in today’s business world and to be able to massage, interpret and manipulate data comes as an extreme benefit to those who build dashboards to present it to upper management. A dashboard is a brief overview of data metrics that help analyze KPI’s and make it easy to interpret a macro level picture of the data you are observing. I believe dashboards are extremely useful tools to companies as they give an at-glance picture of where the company is in certain areas that are being measured. Dashboards can be costly because you must have someone who knows how to build, and require constant maintenance and reviewing. I believe Weinstein made great points on how metrics are an important way to measure companies’ performance and how dashboards are becoming more and more popular as we learn to manipulate data.

• #23 by Verushka Alvarez on 3/30/17 - 7:35 PM

  

  Dr. Art Weinstein’s article made me think about the different marketing instrument panels used to measure and understand the marketing activities and the buying patterns. I do agree with the author when he mentions that it is important for the company to sustain a strategic marketing process because it will help the company recognize its position and what it needs to do to accomplish a successful future. Many companies use key metrics known as marketing dashboards in order to understand and see the marketing indicators and productions. When companies use key metrics in marketing dashboards, they are in some way evaluating the future outcomes and if the current marketing efforts are leading them to their marketing goal. This may also help the company be aware of their competitive advantage and their position in the market.
  
  In my previos marketing position, we had to use several metrics through marketing dashboards in order to measure the effectiveness of different companies and their marketing initiatives. Using the marketing metrics gave us the opportunity to measure and decide what was the next marketing decision for that client. In some cases the marketing initiatives were leading to success, yet in other cases it didn’t. The marketing dashboard aided us in foreseeing what marketing initiatives were not leading to the marketing goal.

• #24 by Alissa Fudge on 3/30/17 - 8:21 PM

  

  I agree with Dr. Weinstein that a marketing dashboard is important for a company. Marketing dashboards are used simplify reports for metrics to one single display (Pauwels et al., 2009). Dashboards can be made up of all kinds of different and I work for a company that tracks metrics for sales, customer service, promotion success, how the customer values the company, customer’s likely hood to revisit our store, profitability, specialty pipelines, and how we stack against the competitor. Marketing metrics allow a company to have more accountability and helps a company with their influence on the market (Gaskill & Winzar, 2013). My store manager is required to report to our district manager if he is outside of the metrics the company expects our store to hold. He has to have a game plan on how we are going to bring our store back up to the metrics required for our store. Each store in the district is rated and stacked against each other on a scorecard that is displayed in the dashboard. I feel there I great importance in a company being able to measure themselves against their other stores and against the competitor. I think knowing how you stand in the market helps an organization to better adjust their marketing plan. The company even has competitive battle plans in place in case our marketing strategy is not working in a certain market. I think the money spent on the dashboard is well spent and is important to the success of a company. There are many reasons for an organization to implement a dashboard, but there are four factors that managers find is important for a company to use a dashboard. The first one is poor organization with data, cross-functional reporting for a company to allocate resources, the increase in accountability and the measuring of accountability, managers being biased about information and marketing decisions (Pauwels et al., 2009). I think that all of these reasons have contributed to a need for the dashboard. I agree with Dr. Weinstein that the dashboard is important for understanding how successful an organization is and what they need to accomplish to be successful in the future.
  -Alissa
  References
  Gaskill, A. & Winzar, H. (2013). Marketing metrics that contribute to marketing accountability in the technology sector. SAGE Open, 1(1), 1-10. doi:10.1177/2158244013501332
  
  Pauwels, K., Ambler, T., Clark, B. H., LaPointe, P., Reibstein, D., Skiera, B., … Wiesel, T. (2009). Dashboards as a service why, what, how, and what research is needed? Journal of Service Research, 12(2), 175-189. doi:10.1177/1094670509344213

• #25 by Ricardo Puyana on 3/30/17 - 8:31 PM

  

  The article written by Weinstein (2013) shortly refers to the importance of having measurable information available as well as the importance of being able to use it. The first step to solving a problem is realizing there is one. Having a dashboard can allow you to see if sales are dropping, complains are rising or if customers traffic in your website is decreasing. Once detected this issue you can determined the root of the issue. Perhaps some products have quality issues, or a salesman is treating customers badly. Having information is key to take action on time and not allowing crisis to grow and damage the brand. On regards the second factor of knowing how to use a dashboard, it is of no use to a person to have 150 variables if they can’t understand them and can’t process them into information useful for decision making. That is why having and organizing a dashboard into segments or areas (like financial indicators, customer relations, sales indicators, among others).
     In my personal experience, I had the opportunity to work in digital marketing in a company in Venezuela called TuDescuenton that was the leading brand in online cupon market, sort of the Groupon in Venezuela. For marketing, we used Google analytics that allowed us to see all the sales and consuming metrics as well as a software developed by one of the shareholders that gave us access to all the financial metrics. Combining the information, I was tasked with the forecasting of daily, weekly and monthly sales. In case that forecast was wrong it was my job to determine, what factor was causing the anomaly? Being positive or negatively. Usually when sales were less than expected causes could be related to uncontrolled factors such as internet drops in the city wifi (it happens A LOT in Latin America), power shortages and during the early 2016 it was causes by a growing economic crisis that affected the economic environment. Nonetheless there were cases when controllable causes affected sales such as programing errors that we were able to detect quickly using the dashboard. Without does early diagnosis I estimate that sales could drop by 40% in a day if action was not taken swiftly, not to mention the social media backslash of complaining customers.
     Another amazing benefit of using dashboards is that it allows you to understand why customer fail to complete an acquisition of a product, using a funnel in our dashboard we were able to determine that customers were actually calling suppliers directly to access the product (in a contract breach) instead of buying the coupon in the webpage, we detected this because there was a unusual exit of customers in the information stage. This lead to a strategy to monitor all coupon allies to prevent customer leaks.
     Having and using properly an information dashboard is what can give a company the ability to perform more competitively, but in order to do so, management must be proactive in understanding the metrics and what factors can affect them. By doing so management could have a better strategic point of view of the company and do a better allocation of the resources. Information is power, power to make your company into a market leader.
  
  Sources:
  Weinstein, A. (2013, September 3). How to drive your business with marketing instrument panels. Retrieved from https://secure.business.nova.edu/marketing-blog/in...

• #26 by Jason Brett on 3/30/17 - 9:07 PM

  

  There were many great points in this article that I would just like to add to. There is no doubt that it is important and in some cases critical for businesses to have a dashboard that measure key financial and performance metrics. Depending on the type of business I would even go a step further and say that it is necessary. These type of metrics are ubiquitous measures of performance and can assist in management and decision making. There are a few key factors that can give businesses an edge when dealing with these metrics. First, the frequency of these metrics tend to assist in real time decision making and overall effectiveness of the metrics. Also, deciding which metrics are important and not overwhelming the user with too much information or missing critical data. Finally and what I believe to be most important is not over relying on the data given by the metrics. This means realizing that the data must be interpreted and the human aspect and decision making must be involved.
     Companies that understand how to use data to their advantage have a proverbial leg up on their competition. Decisions can be made based on trends and as trends change these can be adapted with changing data and environments.

• #27 by Terri-Ann Bethune on 3/30/17 - 10:32 PM

  

  Dr. Art Weinstein's article on marketing performance metrics, "How to drive your business with marketing instrument panels", is simple yet brilliant. Coming from a career in the automotive industry, I love the comparison of the automobile dashboard to that of the marketing dashboards. Today's business world does require a level of accountability for performance. "Superior customer value means knowing customers’ behaviors and buying patterns." If companies are able to monitor the market by creating a marketing dashboard that meets the needs of their agency, the company will be able to get real-time data and hopefully make a sizeable profit.

• #28 by Alesha Washington on 3/30/17 - 11:11 PM

  

  Marketing metrics give systems that advertising experts, mark chiefs and promoting executives can use to assess showcasing execution, and back their showcasing arrangements and methodologies. By gathering and breaking down promoting measurements, brands can manufacture their advertising execution in various ways, Increasing focused insight and envisioning contender responses to new showcasing techniques, More precisely evaluating organization advertising resources, for example, mark value and its level of viability among target crowds, Building an information base of present and notable information that help drive advertising blend choices and direct the organization through quickly changing economic situations.
  Author Rex Briggs likewise presented the expression "ROMO" for profit for marketing objective. This mirrors advertising efforts may have a scope of targets, where the arrival is not quick deals or benefits. For instance, a marketing effort may expect to change the impression of a brand.

• #29 by Vashronda Sellers on 3/30/17 - 11:12 PM

  

  The article was interesting and highlight the importance of understanding consumer behavior. I like the idea of using a dashboard to measure effectiveness. Companies utilizing a dashboard customized to measure key performance indicators have an advantage over companies that do not utilize a dashboard.
  The big take away I got from the article is that companies need to understand that a dashboard can be very useful; however, they must keep it simple. Companies should only measure what matters and align with business objectives.

• #30 by Engers Duran on 4/1/17 - 9:26 PM

  

  This article was brilliant. After I read this article I found the advantages or benefits of using a marketing dashboard. Something that was very interesting in this articles is that organization uses a marketing dashboard to measuring the effectiveness of how an organization achieve their goals. I believe that some of the most significant elements for a company to be successful is to create a good relationship between their employees and their clients. A marketing dashboard has the benefits to measure consumer behavior and customer loyalty. Also, Board helps employees to understand how they are performing in the organization, helping them to know their weaknesses. I found this board great. Since it was designed from C-level executives to managers, everyone understands how they have contributed to achieve organization goals. (Team work).
  Thanks

• #31 by Camila Mangieri on 4/1/17 - 10:53 PM

  

  This article is very interesting and I do agree with the author, companies are aware that they need to find ways to drive business using marketing dashboards. At my store we just got a NPS machine, and so far I think it is a great way to measure customer satisfaction and the overall brand experience. We also perform callbacks when customers are not satisfied with our service or our products, and we do take notes in order to follow up. After having access to the surveys and customers reviews I was able understand customer needs and perform a better product allocation for my store.
  I believe it is very important to use performance indicators in order to drive business and to understand customer needs.

• #32 by Karla Ortiz on 4/2/17 - 11:15 AM

  

  In the article “How to drive your business with marketing instrument panels” by Dr. Art Weinstein, states the resourcefulness and benefits of key metrics integration through a marketing dashboard. “Processing beyond a single item to monitor the effectiveness of business performance, leading organizations often use a set of key metrics called marketing dashboards to understand their key performance indicators.” – Dr. Weinstein.
  
  I believe that there is great value and benefits to the integration of this marketing tool; as it is discussed in this article. Some of the dash board incorporation remunerations are: trend tracking, efficiencies measurement, track keeping of goals and strategies, among other. Consequently, as discussed by Dr. Weinstein, “Major downside considerations include the cost, time and the talent needed to administer marketing dashboards.” Taking into consideration the previously stated by Weinstein, I think that the target for this tool are mid to large size corporations, with a wide array of products and/or services portfolio to monitor.

• #33 by Farooq Hassan on 4/14/17 - 5:49 PM

  

  I thought this article was very insightful on using marketing instrument panels. I think, for many companies, having an instrument panels is imperative to make sure one knows the status of his or her business and the competition. This will allow the company to make any changes it needs to in order to compete better and sell more products.

• #34 by Santiago on 4/15/17 - 11:25 PM

  

  The idea of utilizing marketing instrument panels is really fascinating, there are plenty of benefits to gather different sources of information guided towards your ideals and current goals.The ability to track consumer behavior, financial measures its a total game changer and with no doubts these are great metrics to plan and test different strategies to your business.
  I found this article really interesting and it has taken my total interest to grow my knowledge and master the use of metrics and marketing instrument panels, it is something that I will be adding to my personal use on my personal business to test different strategies to develop the perfect plan for each occasion.

• #35 by karthi on 4/16/17 - 3:06 AM

  

  nice post and articel