How to setup a marketing dashboard that’s useful for RevOps

Marketing dashboards are powerful tools that provide insights into key marketing metrics, empowering your team to make data-driven decisions and drive marketing performance. 

But to truly optimise your marketing efforts and align your strategies with revenue goals, you need a marketing dashboard that's tailored specifically for your RevOps team.

 In this blog post, we'll explore how to set up a marketing dashboard that's useful for Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams, and why it's essential for aligning your marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to drive revenue growth.

1. RevOps teams
2. RevOps dashboards
3. Identifying key metrics
4. You need to report on personas
5. The importance of a central revenue operations dashboard
6. Selecting the right tools
7. Designing your dashboard
8. Structuring your data for reporting

RevOps teams

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a strategic approach that focuses on the entire customer journey, from prospecting to customer retention. RevOps teams are the backbone of revenue generation, bringing together cross-functional expertise from Sales Operations (SalesOps), Marketing Operations (Marketing Ops), and Customer Success Operations (CS Ops) under one roof. 

By aligning strategies, streamlining processes, and optimising revenue generation, RevOps teams ensure that the entire customer journey, from prospecting to customer retention, is considered in your marketing, sales, and CS strategies.

• SalesOps teams ensure the right data is collected, define sales processes, train teams, and set quotas.
  
  
• MarketingOps teams are responsible for managing marketing data, aligning lead generation, demand generation, and nurturing strategies with revenue goals.
  
  
• Customer Support Ops teams manage the customer journey and leverage automation to improve customer experience and set customer retention goals.

RevOps Dashboards

When it comes to the go-to-market model, marketing and sales departments often operate with their own data sets, knowledge, and processes. As you build your RevOps dashboards, it’s important to pull insights from other “departments” to ensure that the entire customer journey is considered in your Marketing, Sales, and CS strategy.

In addition to your central RevOps dashboard, creating department-specific RevOps dashboards can be a valuable strategy. These department-specific dashboards can provide insights and visualisations that are tailored to each team's needs, helping them better understand their role in the overall RevOps mission.

Your marketing team should have a RevOps dashboard that focuses on RevOps Metrics such as lead generation, campaign performance, and customer engagement. This can help your marketing team track the effectiveness of their efforts in driving revenue and align their strategies with the broader RevOps goals.

It's crucial to ensure that your RevOps team has the necessary power and authority to act on the insights provided by the dashboards. This means equipping them with the right tools, resources, and decision-making autonomy to make data-driven decisions and take actions that drive revenue forward. When your RevOps team has the ability to effectively leverage the insights from the dashboards, they can proactively identify opportunities, address challenges, and optimise revenue operations for sustained growth.

Identifying Key Metrics

As a Marketing Ops manager, it's crucial to collect and analyse key metrics that provide insights into the performance of your marketing efforts. These metrics can help you track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, optimise your demand generation efforts, and align your marketing goals with revenue objectives.

Some of the key metrics that Marketing Ops managers should focus on include:

• Channel performance: Understanding how different marketing channels are performing in terms of driving traffic, generating leads, and converting customers can provide insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts across various channels such as social media, email, content marketing, and paid advertising.
  
  
• Pipeline contribution: Tracking how marketing efforts contribute to the pipeline can help you understand the impact of your marketing campaigns on the sales pipeline. Metrics such as marketing-generated pipeline value, conversion rates, and pipeline velocity can provide insights into the performance and ROI of your demand generation efforts.
  
  
• Marketing-generated revenue: Measuring the revenue directly attributed to marketing efforts can help you demonstrate the impact of marketing on overall revenue generation. This can include metrics such as marketing-generated revenue by channel, campaign, or persona, which can help you identify the most effective marketing strategies in terms of revenue generation.
  
  
• Leads: Tracking the quantity, quality, and conversion rate of leads generated by marketing efforts can provide insights into the success of your lead generation strategies. Metrics such as lead volume, lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, and lead quality can help you optimise your lead generation efforts and align them with revenue goals.
  
  
• Content attribution: Understanding how your content contributes to lead generation, opportunity creation, and revenue generation can help you optimise your content marketing efforts. Metrics such as content engagement, content downloads, and content influence on conversion can provide insights into the effectiveness of your content strategies.
  

We've created a comprehensive guide that provides in-depth insights and recommendations into the metrics and KPIs to track as part of your RevOps strategy. 

Download the RevOps Metrics guide to gain valuable insights on the metrics that matter most in your revenue operations strategy.

You need to analysing personas for your Marketing - RevOps strategy

Reporting on personas can provide valuable insights and drive success in demand generation efforts. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and insights, and they help you understand your target audience in a more personalised and meaningful way.

What insights can you draw?

1. Targeting the right accounts demonstrating high intent: By identifying the personas that are most likely to engage with your marketing efforts and demonstrate high intent to purchase, you can prioritise your efforts and focus campaigns on the accounts that are most likely to convert. 
   
   
2. Identifying the personas who drive the highest velocity: Understanding which personas are more likely to move quickly through the buyer's journey and convert into opportunities can help you optimise your marketing and sales efforts to accelerate the sales cycle and improve revenue generation.
   
   
3. Prioritising strong engagement with the right personas: Track the engagement levels of different personas with your marketing initiatives. By understanding which personas require engagement at specific stages of the buyer’s journey, you can create valuable content that is personalised to their needs and goals and distribute that messaging at the right time. 
   
   
4. Understanding which personas are bringing in the most revenue: Persona-based reporting can provide insights into the personas that are driving the most revenue for your business. By tracking the revenue generated from different personas, you can identify the personas that are most valuable to your business and allocate resources accordingly to maximise revenue generation.
   
   
5. Prioritising target accounts by intent topics and tailoring messaging: Identify the intent topics that are most relevant to your target accounts. By understanding the topics that are driving the most interest and engagement among your personas, you can tailor your messaging and content to align with those topics.
   
   

Reporting on personas promotes a coordinated effort between the sales and marketing teams to align their efforts across the customer journey. By understanding the personas that are most critical at each stage of the buyer's journey, sales and marketing teams can work together to tailor their messaging, campaigns, and initiatives to meet the specific needs and preferences of those personas, resulting in a more cohesive and effective customer experience.

The importance of a central revenue operations dashboard

Now, this is really just a disclaimer. In addition to your marketing reporting, it’s also critical to have a centralised revenue operations dashboard. Doing so allows different teams to draw insights from metrics that were traditionally owned by specific departments, leading to better collaboration and alignment across the organisation. 

For example, if deals are being lost as a result of “Client didn’t have the budget” this could point to a qualification problem with your SDRs. If you’re losing because of price, this would point to your positioning i.e. Is your marketing demonstrating the value of your offering? If you are losing sales because the “client went quiet” this could highlight your sales team is not building strong sales relationships.

When you begin to look at the customer journey holistically and are aligned under one revenue generating function, it’s much easier to create campaigns that grow revenue. 

Selecting the right tools

The ultimate goal of any Revenue Operations (RevOps) team is to create a single stream of unified data, enabling seamless collaboration and data-driven decision-making across all customer-facing teams. One powerful tool that can help achieve this goal is HubSpot's CRM.

Capturing a single source of truth

HubSpot's CRM serves as a central repository for all customer data, capturing a single source of truth. It allows different teams, such as sales, marketing, and customer service, to capture and store customer interactions, communications, and transactions in one place. This eliminates data silos and ensures that everyone in the organisation has access to the same up-to-date customer information, enabling better coordination and alignment.

Integrations into your CRM

HubSpot's CRM also offers seamless integrations with other tools that are commonly used by customer-facing teams, such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) tools, and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) systems. These integrations enable data to flow seamlessly between different tools and the CRM, ensuring that all relevant customer data is captured and consolidated in one place. This not only simplifies data management but also enables more accurate and comprehensive reporting and analysis.

Leveraging HubSpot's App Marketplace

HubSpot's CRM also has a robust app marketplace that offers a wide range of integrations and add-ons to enhance its functionality. For example, tools like Ebsta Revenue Intelligence can provide additional insights and analytics to drive decision-making. These tools can help uncover patterns, trends, and opportunities within the data captured in HubSpot's CRM, enabling RevOps teams to make data-driven decisions and optimise their revenue generation efforts.

Designing your dashboard

When designing your dashboard, it's crucial to start by identifying the problem that it needs to solve. What specific information do you need to make informed decisions or take action? Limit the fields and data displayed to what is relevant for the scenario at hand. Avoid overwhelming users with a flood of data and charts that can be confusing and counterproductive.

Numbers alone may not always provide sufficient context. Use text blocks or images to communicate cause and effect, and provide additional context for the numbers. For example, use annotations or explanations to highlight trends, patterns, or anomalies in the data. This can help users interpret the numbers more effectively and make informed decisions based on the insights provided.

In HubSpot, adding images and text is quite simple to create, but can add context to numbers immediately. 

Structuring marketing data for easy reporting

When setting up metrics and reports in your CRM, it's important to structure your data in a way that makes reporting easy and efficient. 

If possible, avoid free text fields

Free text fields allow users to enter unstructured or inconsistent data, which can hinder analysis and reporting efforts. For marketing teams, this can be especially problematic when dealing with personalised email sends, where wrong names or inconsistent data can result in errors or inaccurate communication.

The ideal approach is to have structured, consistent, and accurate data in your CRM, as this makes it easier to analyse and report on. However, finding the right balance between validation, sister fields, and permissions is important, as an overly structured CRM can also create rigidity and hinder the capture of nuanced information.

Validation, sister fields, and permissions

Property validation involves setting rules for what can be entered into a property. This can be done by accessing the "Rules" section of each property and setting constraints such as preventing special characters or setting min/max amounts for the property

 Additionally, permissions can be set on individual properties, allowing only certain users or teams to edit them. This can be useful in setting up governance processes, such as requiring a "Reviewed by Manager = Yes" before a deal can progress, with the "Reviewed by Manager" property only editable by the management team.

Sister fields are additional fields that provide related or contextual information. For example, if you have a dropdown field called "Solution Fit" with options like "Meets Sales Need" or "Meets Operations Need," you can create a sister field called "Solution Fit Description" as a free text field. This allows sales representatives to provide deeper context or additional information about the solution, which can be helpful for reporting and analysis purposes.