Salesforce Simplified: The sales metrics that matter: Six experts, six themes, one invaluable guide

 Modern business generates vast quantities of data that can help sales leaders improve pipelines and increase the sales team’s performance. But if we’re completely honest, we’re all too busy, and too under pressure to sift through, digest and interpret everything – especially when the data is changing so quickly. You have to keep your eye on the ball. But which one? How should you prioritise what you track? Which metrics are most important, what can they tell you about your business, and how can you best act on them? We found the people with the answers 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Derek Cassese 

Transcript

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Andy Whiteside: Everyone welcome to episode 4 of salesforce. Simplify your host, Andy White Side today is December fourth, 2023. II really thought it was still November. I really did. There! Cassie is on with me. Derek, how's it going? Good!

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Derek Cassese: How has how has it been building the salesforce practice within zint integrin like, what's what's been going on. I really caught up with you much lately. Yeah, it's it. It's interesting. Man. I mean, we're you know, we're going through the process and what I mean by that is the partner process within salesforce to make sure that we have.

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Derek Cassese: You know the other appropriate credentialing that customers are gonna want to look at. So that that's happening. We also put together 2 pretty pretty cool assessments that we're offering

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Derek Cassese: at no charge, for you know, for the customers to at least. you know. Show them how we, how we work, and you know how they can interact with us and stuff. So it's

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Derek Cassese: you know, it's taking some time to get everything in place. But

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Derek Cassese: I'm really excited about what you know. Next year's gonna bring.

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Andy Whiteside: Are you still convinced that there's a ton of opportunity to be a

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Derek Cassese: a better, unique, differentiating partner in the salesforce ecosystem? Oh, yeah, I mean I never yes, that has not ever changed. I know for a fact that there is a need

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Derek Cassese: you know, when the majority of folks say that their their favorite partner is Xyz, because they show up. I mean, there's gotta be more to it than that. Right? So yeah, I that's why I'm excited because I know that we're gonna do stuff differently. And you know, we're gonna actually

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Derek Cassese: team. You know, we're gonna kind of show what the word team means right? Because we're gonna create a team environment with the customers and those that we help.

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Andy Whiteside: It's it's kind of refreshing to to be on this side of fence. I hope for you, because you're in a world where, if you just do good by people, you'll do good business

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Derek Cassese: absolutely. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: well, and that's and that's one of the reasons why I do these podcasts. We wanna talk out loud about things that we believe people should know about including the topic for today. But that's that's part of the way you you do it better. Is you just put yourself out there and give in advance of receiving.

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Andy Whiteside: And

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Andy Whiteside: I was still podcast over the weekend.

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Andy Whiteside: I haven't. I'm trying to find a way to say it where it then that the guy's comment was, stop smelling your own gas right stops. Stop caring about what your stuff smells like, and figure out how you can help somebody else with how theirs works.

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Derek Cassese: Interesting way of putting it. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: I was like, man, that's a that's a really good way to sum up what we're trying to do stop, you know, stop smelling your own parts and start figuring out how to help people. There's there, you go there, you go. There's one dropped for this, podcast. I love it.

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Derek Cassese: yeah, I mean. there's there's just a neat, I mean, I've done it right. I've been on the, I've been on the vendor side. I've been on the customer side. I'm now on the partner side, and

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Derek Cassese: there's just so much of the show up. What do you want us to do type stuff as opposed to showing up, at least with an opinion, a point of view, some, you know, so that you're actually adding value and benefit other than just showing up and transacting, and, like.

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Derek Cassese: you know, pushing buttons.

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Andy Whiteside: you know it's the bar in all honesty.

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Andy Whiteside: and don't tell the extentures into to the world of this. But the bar is pretty freaking low. II billions of dollars are spent every year, and the bars are pretty low.

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Derek Cassese: and you know what I mean. At the end of the day there's room for all and forever. There's room for all of those folks right. There's there's so much work that needs to be done from the perspective of.

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Derek Cassese: I like to say, ringing out that towel for customers to get the most out of their salesforce investment.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, I mean.

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Derek Cassese: you know, we're gonna do it our way. And you know, that may be a fit for some customers and some customers may like the transactional aspect of others. And

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Derek Cassese: I'm not worried about that because there's there's so much need out there.

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Andy Whiteside: He's so the the topic you brought today that we're proactively sharing the name of the the name of the presentations. Not a blog presentation. The sales metrics that matter. 6 expert 6 themes, one invaluable guide. What is this? And why did you bring it forward and and let, and then we'll cover. Go through it and cover some of the topics within it. But what? What is this? And why do you? Why do you think it matters? Well.

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Derek Cassese: yeah, I think it matters because well, I first of all, I think that this

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Derek Cassese: it's an ebook. But I think it's gonna create a pretty interesting conversation.

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Derek Cassese: But I also think that what this covers and how I found this was going through some of the material

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Derek Cassese: for certification that I'm getting ready to take. You know, this was part of a link that was in one of the, you know, one of the training

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Derek Cassese: courses that I was looking at. and I found it really interesting because it was just going through a panel of 5 or 6 individuals and talking about metrics and dashboards.

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Derek Cassese: It's not about AI right now, which is almost every conversation, which is fine. It's not analytics, which is also fine. This is like everybody that's got. Salesforce

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Derek Cassese: has dashboards, have have reports

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Derek Cassese: right, and I think that it can sometimes be overlooked at the power of those and

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Derek Cassese: how to actually deploy them. So they're really useful. So that that's kind of why I chose this. I think it's a really good conversation, and one that's often overlooked, in my opinion.

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Andy Whiteside: Okay, so like the the first slide that slide. The first page, I guess, is ebook talks about, what's the story behind in the metrics?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. well, so you know what I like about this is.

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Derek Cassese: we're, you know, we're basically talking about how we've got so much stuff, right? Says

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Derek Cassese: we're all too busy, right? We've got too much stuff to do. How do you sift through the data and get to the stuff that matters. And so that's the difference between. If if some, if you've ever seen

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Derek Cassese: any type of software where it's really busy, right? And there's just data and graphs and numbers and stuff everywhere. I mean, how do you make

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Derek Cassese: sense out of that? So that it's actually something that you can leverage to your benefit. And so, you know, this is kind of like, how do you keep your eye on the ball? But then which ball, you know. Like, how do you keep your eye on the data that's important to your business? Yeah. And and I find myself doing that every day I go down this rabbit hole and that rabbit hole and like, Okay, I didn't say, did I spend my time wisely? Was I looking at the right stuff, or was I looking at distractions? Right?

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Derek Cassese: Exactly. And you know the other thing. The other thing that's interesting is different strategies on

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Derek Cassese: creating, you know dashboards. And you know this, just to kind of put this in perspective a little bit. This article was, you know, the folks on this panel

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Derek Cassese: are all using sales cloud. Right? So we say, dashboard. I'm talking about a dashboard within sales cloud, and

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Derek Cassese: there's different lenses to that. So whether or not it be, you know, a sales rep. Whether it be an executive or what have you

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Derek Cassese: the different? There's different lenses to that. So there's different ways of approaching it, which is what this goes through.

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Andy Whiteside: Okay? So the next topic I go to says, 6 expert 6 themes, one ebook and a wealth of insight. Thoughts there.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, no, that I mean, it's really just kind of summing up what this book is about. It's and it's a book. It's 33 pages. But it's not, you know, this is.

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Derek Cassese: it's really a description of a panel so like, if this book, if this ebook was a session at one of these events, you'd see, like, you know, the the 6 people sitting up there, and they would be asking them, you know, which metric motivates reps the most, and they would start talking about it. That's how this is broken down. So we'll go through this.

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Derek Cassese: You've got the chapter guide up there right now, right? And it starts with how metrics and dashboards give you an edge.

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Derek Cassese: Then you move down to what? What motivates reps.

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Derek Cassese: how can sales? How can sales and marketing team up.

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Derek Cassese: What makes a killer dashboard is one that they'll get to and then sales critical metrics, the ones that got away. And then the final one is top 3 metrics

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Derek Cassese: revealed. Those are the those are the questions that we're going to dive into, and we'll kind of touch on some of the stuff that was mentioned.

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Derek Cassese: Okay, so when the first one is how metrics and dashboards give you an edge? Yep, so

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Derek Cassese: I'll I'll start with this, because so how do you use the dashboard on a day to day basis? I know you just created a new one. So

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Andy Whiteside: how do you use it? And II want some visual representation of our things getting better or things getting worse.

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Derek Cassese: Okay? And when you say things, what? What? What are you mostly looking at?

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Andy Whiteside: I mean at this point I'm really looking at. are we defining strategic objectives in our accounts? That's that's the one I'm most focused on at the moment, because

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Andy Whiteside: I honestly feel like we've done a lot of kind of wandering around in the forest and finding business, you know, like gathering nuts and berries. But we gotta get strategic about hunting and farming. And that's that's gonna take us to next next level.

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Andy Whiteside: Even though a lot of cases, people find a lot of nuts and berries and do really well, which we are right now. But when it comes to key technologies like a salesforce, we gotta get strategic.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah.

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Derek Cassese: And so what I found interesting in here. so I hope I did the name right. But Nick Mcclellan, from RAM tracking was one of the one of the folks that they talked that is

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Derek Cassese: quoted here, and saying that the metrics and dashboards is given us enhance control, visibility and accountability, and I like the word accountability there. Right? So what the dashboard, what what they're doing is they're using a dashboard which.

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Derek Cassese: so everybody knows, dashboards are made up of graphs or visual representation of data with an underlying report.

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Derek Cassese: But what they're doing is creating a dashboard so that they know and have accountability on what they're trying to achieve right? And so what they say is, they've adopted a holistic view

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Derek Cassese: to monitor business activities.

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Derek Cassese: So I started thinking about them like, all right. Well, that's interesting. Because, you know, back in the day of Citrix, when I was on teams like that, we were measured on stuff like that, right? How many activities did you have per quarter, etc., etc.?

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Derek Cassese:  So that type of information in a dashboard at quick glance

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Derek Cassese: can actually do a couple of things right? And there's 2 different approaches to this. Now, you could actually have a dashboard where you just literally have account and add number activities, account number activities.

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Derek Cassese: or you could take a couple of different approaches where you have a completely holistic view of the entire company. It's open to everybody.

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Derek Cassese: And so you can see from a rep or from a team perspective, the level of activity that's going on right and that

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Derek Cassese: so it kind of goes to do you, wanna do you wanna create this like fully transparent view of the company, so that everybody is on the same page. So if you're on the team that has, you know.

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Derek Cassese: the smallest amount of activity that doesn't necessarily mean that. You know, you're going to get fired tomorrow, because if everything is achievable, it's okay to have somebody last. Somebody has to be at the at last.

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Derek Cassese: right? But what it does is it brings visibility into who's doing what? And then

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Derek Cassese: correlations can be drawn from that on the dashboard. Okay, well, wait a minute. This team has has more activities, and yet they have more closed. One deals. There's gotta be a correlation right?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah,

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Derek Cassese: and that, you know, that's what they're talking about, as far as that, giving you the edge right? It's being able to quickly. And it's not quickly right. Instead of like sifting through reports. How do you quickly look at this stuff? Right?

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Andy Whiteside: We had a conversation today as a leadership. We're talking about hire you salespeople. And my response is to be successful here. All you have to do is be active.

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Andy Whiteside: If you. If you're just active enough doing what we do and adding value to customers the way we do it.

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Derek Cassese: If you're just active, you'll be somewhat successful, if not wildly successful. Well, and that's a starting point, right? Is all right. Let's track the activity.

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Derek Cassese: And then, once once we get to a point where the activity is being really well tracked. Then you can get into the let's track the quality of the activity.

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Derek Cassese: and then you can track the response or outcome of the activity.

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Derek Cassese: Right? And then you can start really, because what then you can start doing is understanding where you need to move resources around, if need be right if somebody is really slammed and doing a lot of activity in one spot, and they're getting a lot of activity and a lot of opportunities.

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Derek Cassese: Well, maybe they maybe we need help in that space. So that as a collective whole, we can actually do more. In those locations, etc. I found it. I mean, what's interesting, too, as you read through this is the different approaches from a different like from different business perspectives. Right? So like RAM tracking there, it's about. It's about pieces. It's about

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Derek Cassese: finite items sold, whereas, you know, a couple of these other ones was about.

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Derek Cassese: you know, like services and making sure that they're offering the right, the right things to the right people at the right time. Things like that.

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Derek Cassese: So it's it's not a one. Size fits all. It's got to make sense for the business. And then it's got to make sense, for, you know. What do you try? What are some of the really important things that you're trying to see? Not just let's put the data there because it's there, right? It's all about what you're trying to see.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright, next section talks about which metrics motivate reps the most.

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Derek Cassese: yeah, that's a very interesting topic. Yeah. yeah, this is one. Because.

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Derek Cassese: okay, so I'm just gonna jump right to the one that jumped out at me. First it was Bruce Bradley from first mile. First line of this, says, business development people are motivated by money.

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Derek Cassese: Right? As like Yup, there you go! In some cases exclusively motivated by money. Right? And so in that in that case, right? He's talking about total sales, not just from wins, but profitability cash collection like in that in his. In that business

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Derek Cassese: those are really important to the reps that's important and to the point where.

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Derek Cassese: you know they're they know that if they don't have cash flow, then they don't get bonuses right. And so there's accountability again to these dashboards, whereas one of these other individuals was talking about

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Derek Cassese: like leader boards.

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Derek Cassese: Now II personally feel like the majority of sales folks that I've worked with in the past are very competitive, right? There is a competitive nature for the most part amongst sales individuals or sales minded individuals.

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Derek Cassese: So

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Derek Cassese: a leaderboard concept is also something that I see quite a bit in the salesforce world, however, and I've touched on this a little bit. It's gotta be

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Derek Cassese: correctly done in that. What you don't want to do is

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Derek Cassese: like, throw people under the bus per se. So you don't wanna have like a leaderboard, and then just focus on the people. They're always at the bottom. So I think that

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Derek Cassese: while doing that you need like, I think it's important to make sure that what what they're supposed to be achieving is equally achievable across the board. And then, like, I said, it's okay to have somebody be at the bottom

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Derek Cassese: cause this is, you know, this is about true representation of. you know the business. And

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Derek Cassese: well and and hopefully, you're using that to lift up the ones that are at the bottom, if, in fact, they want to compete and get lifted up right. The other thing that mentioned in here. Right is the leaderboard people like, if you have a leaderboard up there. And let's just say a leaderboard is on activities with customer like there's certain. So activities with customers closed one. Maybe it was a combination. And whoever's on the top of that gets

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Derek Cassese: $100 gift card or something like that, right like that. That

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Derek Cassese: competition is something that can make dashboard metrics. And this type of stuff much more rewarding for folks as opposed to just sitting there. And you know, looking at numbers. And

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Derek Cassese: you know, mundane reports.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, certainly a a funer way, a more fun way job and doing your job and hopefully financial rewarding as well, absolutely. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: This next chapter talks about, how can sales and marketing team up? And when? How does that align with this conversation.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So

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Derek Cassese: if you look at the key takeaway on this section.  before I even get to that. So when I read that my my first instinct was the easy ones to think about are

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Derek Cassese: know when you've got marketing and you're spending money on campaigns or events. or you know

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Derek Cassese: anything related to a marketing budget that's gonna help drive sale.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, pause there for a second, because that's what that's the number one objective is to drive sales for the company and the sellers. That's why we do the marketing, and, as you know, we do a ton of marketing investment in that. So

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Derek Cassese: with that being said. it's extremely extremely important to understand the return on all of that. And so.

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Derek Cassese: being able to accurately

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Derek Cassese: show the influence of those of those marketing events, what have you against the sales? The closed one, opportunities, etc. Is extremely important, right? And that's where you know, dashboards that focus on

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Derek Cassese: successful campaigns. Or.

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Derek Cassese: you know camp segments like they talk a lot about, you know, segmenting out from a marketing perspective. You know certain areas where you've done events, for example, you could have events say the same event in one location versus another, and you could get, you know, 10 opportunities. And you know, 5. You know, 5 close one opportunities out of one and nothing out of the other. And it it helps kind of shine, a light on where maybe it makes more sense to focus, moving forward for various reasons. But

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Derek Cassese: you know, having these dashboards that have that information on there

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Derek Cassese: it again, I like to do the holistic view right? So let's have shared dashboard. So everybody in the company can see this

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Derek Cassese: so that you know a sales rep or sales team, or anybody in the company knows why it's so important

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Derek Cassese: to make sure that data is accurate in salesforce because it's shown up on this dashboard because it's important to marketing.

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Derek Cassese: because it helps

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Andy Whiteside: continuing to fund the marketing budget stuff, in my opinion, is one of the easier ones to really wrap your head around this. This whole conversation is so interesting to me because we are a salesforce partner, and we are a marketing and sales organization. So all these things we're talking about, I cease show up is relevant in our business every single day, where, you know, you may spend $10,000 on a marketing event.

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Andy Whiteside: but nobody ties the opportunities back to that marketing event. You're like, okay. Well, we just won't do that again. No, no, let's do that again. Let's do it again. It was awesome, like, well, there's there's no correlation of the picture that should be painted. That shows that it was worth it.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, and that's you know, the other thing not to not to lose here is that it's it's metrics, and it's dashboards and metrics, right? The metrics are important, because

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Derek Cassese: that's what's going to help make sure that you're putting focus attention and effort in the right spot.

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Derek Cassese: You know, you're putting events in locations that make sense. So, for example, a metric may be attendance

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Derek Cassese: right and like, if you've got one person at an event, that metric is not really a positive sign for an event in that location and or

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Derek Cassese: attendance generation in that location, as opposed to the metrics, saying, We've got 35 people standing room only, etc. So it's the metrics. In addition to the dashboards up that really create that powerful view of the business and help folks understand? You know

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Derek Cassese: how to make decision like data driven decisions.

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Andy Whiteside: Next chapter talks about what makes a killer dashboard.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So this one is probably subjective. I think.

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Derek Cassese: I think that you know it's interesting. So

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Derek Cassese: you know, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I think that what I feel like a dash, a killer dashboard for me is one that's not too busy.

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Derek Cassese: I see a lot of dashboards that are created that have Mike

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Derek Cassese: 12 gauges like 6 or 7 numbers, 5 tables.

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Derek Cassese: And to me, the way that II work. That's very distracting to me. I would much rather

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Derek Cassese: have that dashboard be kind of segmented. and have a couple dashboards.

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Derek Cassese: then have all that stuff just kind of smush together.  Now, the the art, and that's me. That's my opinion on some of this stuff. I think that what this article is saying is that

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Derek Cassese: you know

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Derek Cassese: a killer dashboard is one that addresses the problem. And what you're trying to show right? And so focusing at like. For example, this guy Bruce at first mile focus on customer sl like lifetime sales value.

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Derek Cassese: You know. Don't chase the headline sales, but look for bottom line. So what he's focusing on are things that are important.

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Derek Cassese: Put that on there, that's important like that's not. Let's not chase like I think you touched on this a little early. If there's so much data like, make sure that if you're putting something on a dashboard

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Derek Cassese: like it's really it makes so much sense about why it's there that you wouldn't have to tell anybody. And it's very easy to understand why it's important to the business.

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Derek Cassese: just because we can put something on. There

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Derek Cassese: doesn't mean it needs to be on there. And I think also.

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Derek Cassese: you know the the the feature of salesforce where you can subscribe to these things so that every morning in your inbox you can see a snapshot of the dashboard because it's updated. Always got the latest type of data in there.

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Derek Cassese: you know, you want to make sure that you're you're able to kind of look at that stuff and digest it without having too much, because I feel like if there's too much on there. it devalues what you're really trying to get across

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Derek Cassese: what I mean. Let me ask you. So when you look at dashboards, what is your how do you?

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Derek Cassese: How do you consume them? Does it matter? The layout, the look, the feel to you? Or is it really? You're just going and hunting around and looking for the data that you're looking for?

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Andy Whiteside: You know, I think it depends if I created it, or if I'm using someone else's.

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Derek Cassese: yeah. So I would bet the ones you create you feel much more comfortable with and the ones that somebody else has created. It may take you a bit of time, or you may have actually even gotten to a point where you're just like man

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Derek Cassese: like not for me. Or I just go create my own to look for what I'm to put together the information I'm looking for. and I think we also need to remember that

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Derek Cassese: for any of this stuff was around, it was all spreadsheets, right? It was all like spreadsheets and different locations for this data. So I think that because of the fact that it's so easy to make these to make reports. It's so easy to make dashboards.

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Derek Cassese: you know. I think that it's

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Derek Cassese: it's I think we're lucky in that sense. But again. taking the time to really think it through is important to make sure that you're actually putting the things on there that makes sense the things that you know you really you really need in the dashboard as opposed to knowing. You have a report and pull it up when you need it.

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Derek Cassese: Well, and if you're not careful, people use dashboards to just basically aggregate spreadsheets. And you really want to take it to the next level, where it's graphical representation of what that report showing. So you're not digging through spreadsheets. You're getting surfaced up some visual of what you're looking for? Yeah, like, I think I think you know, if I had, you know, a dashboard for overall health of a of a business or a company like understanding

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Derek Cassese: customer value and having that right there upfront. Everybody sees it

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Derek Cassese: is important to me like that is something you put on a dashboard. I don't know if I need to know necessarily like that. There's, you know.

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Derek Cassese: 4 opportunities that didn't close last quarter, like I need to know the value of this customer that that's the type of stuff. And and it depends. Right now, if you're looking at quarter opportunities, then fine, then you're gonna have, you know.

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Derek Cassese: cool. You're gonna have opportunities that that were lost. You're gonna have opportunities that were still in, you know the the deal cycle, etc. I don't know, like from an overall holistic dashboard. I think you need to be careful putting too much of everything in there.

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Andy Whiteside: Right?

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I'm literally listen with the dashboard I created for me. And you, right now over, have this conversation, and I'm evaluating what I was in there, because, literally, it needs to tell a story, I think is what really your dashboard supposed to do.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. And that like, that's my thing with me is that if you can do it and not have to tell people why something there, or what it is.

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Derek Cassese: They got to tell somebody what it is that I think it needs to be reevaluated. Personally. But II do agree with you, and I think like making it.

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Derek Cassese: you know, visually appealing to just look at so that you're not overwhelmed by all these numbers and stuff is important.

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Andy Whiteside: So I like, I'm doing this literally right now as we talk. But you see a picture, and you see a name of the the the widget. That's part of that dashboard. And then when you click on the data, and if you click on all 3 of those things. It should be obvious what this one's trying to

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Derek Cassese: highlight for. You. Correct? Yeah.

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Derek Cassese: And you know. And some of this is also just, you know, dashboard creation. If you will like putting correct titles there. And you know, having the right, you know. Cause there's there's

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Derek Cassese: graphs that are right for data and graphs that are not correct for data. And then, like making sure that you have the appropriate graphs and things like that are important. And do you even need a graph. Do you even want a table?

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Derek Cassese: You know, things like that are important as well?

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Derek Cassese: And but at the end of the day you you really, you've got to have the right metrics and stuff like that. And it's got to make sense for the business.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, yeah, I'm super excited to show you this one. I don't know if I've showed you the one I was working on in the day or not

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Derek Cassese: not yet. That's why this is a kind of a timely discussion, right? Because it's

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Derek Cassese: it. It it makes you take a step back because what everybody does right, if you're sitting down, you've got the power of salesforce that you're, you know, click of a button. You can create all this stuff, and more likely you're just gonna sit down and start creating

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Derek Cassese: you're not gonna I mean, take a step back and really and and you know.

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Derek Cassese: whiteboard it out right, I mean, or plan it out

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Derek Cassese: and then go and put it together as opposed to doing the stuff just kind of on the fly and iterating, which I mean, that's a perfect world, right? Sometimes you just need to go at it

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Derek Cassese: and do the iterative model.

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Andy Whiteside: But the thing about dashboards is as long as the data is good and the reports are malleable. If they are, then you can just your dashboard, can morph and morph and morph until you tune it up to the way you wanted to be

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Derek Cassese: yeah, like, for one thing, I think would be a pretty interesting metric.

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Derek Cassese:  to see from a company perspective for us.

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Derek Cassese: And you know anybody listening to this, podcast I mean, so you know, the salesforce partner piece of this integral puzzle is still very new, and it'd be interesting to get a pulse on the

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Derek Cassese: level of

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Derek Cassese: Like, if I was to ask anybody in the company, what's your comfort level on what salesforce does? Yeah, right?

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Derek Cassese: Like, just seeing that like, and then and then also tracking like enablement. So if we're doing enablement stuff like does, I would expect that the more enablement we did, the higher that score would go

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Derek Cassese: right, and being able to kind of track. Things like that are really interesting to put, you know, on

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Derek Cassese: on screens and keep track of. And, you know, subscribe and get the emails and all that good stuff. So just it, you know, there's just a lot of different ways. You can do that, and it makes it it makes it interesting when you put it all together.

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Andy Whiteside: Oh, it's it's again. It's so powerful that your company can have dashboards. Your department have dashboard, and you, as individual, should have a dashboard or 2 or 3 that helps to motivate you and helps you understand your day, your week, your month, your quarter, your year, how it's going! Everybody could have it. Alright next one talks about sales, critical metrics, the ones that got away. What does this mean?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, so essentially. let's see, which ones are we on? We're on 5.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So I mean, so this is essentially talking a little bit about what I've already talked to about. But like so

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Derek Cassese: with so much data, right? They're talking about, it's easy to overlook important things. so, and I've touched on this before. But customer lifetime value. What is that?

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Derek Cassese: As opposed to.

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Derek Cassese: you know, tracking the top 5 deals of, you know, like like some of that stuff is great and all. But at the end of the day, what is that going to do in 2 quarters I mean, it's a point in time of the existing situation of your deals.

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Derek Cassese: But I want to know. You know, I wanna know the value like I mean, we could have. We could add twice as many customers that buy half as much right, I mean. And so

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Derek Cassese: it doesn't move anything really. So. That's why I want to know.

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Derek Cassese: like the value of my customers, what's the satisfaction of my customers?

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Derek Cassese: that is, I think, the ideal for like company, wide, holistic dashboards given if you're like in charge of sales and you need to drive sales, then obviously, there's gonna be a point. That's why I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast there's different lenses. Then it makes sense to understand from a rep from an account perspective, what's the you know? Where are we with, like, you know, the funnel, the opportunities, leads, etc.

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Andy Whiteside: And and I think that really depends on what kind of company are you? Are you? A, you know private company trying to be bought? Well, then, you're trying to drive certain metrics. So you're a public company. It's trying to be bought because you're trying to drive your stock price up. Then, you know, maybe similar metrics. You're like us where you're private company. You're looking for a long term customer for life type scenarios. So you know, customer value customer satisfaction is more important than you know. Quarterly revenue number. Yeah, I mean, I would think that from my perspective.

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Derek Cassese: looking at where I feel there's a massive need from a salesforce perspective, which is, let's let's help people get out of the game of hiring a salesforce, admin losing a salesforce, admin, hiring a salesforce. Admin. Let's

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Derek Cassese: let's outsource that to to

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Derek Cassese: us, to a partner like Zintigra, and if that's the. But if that's the business model, then customer satisfaction is gold.

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Derek Cassese: because I mean.

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Derek Cassese: there's too many options in today's day and age for people to stay with

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Derek Cassese: partners or companies that are not satisfying the requirements or the expectations. Now, what's odd

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Derek Cassese: is that we do? I do see people staying with partners and stuff that are still not meeting expectation. But I think that that's because

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Derek Cassese: I don't think they feel that there's any difference amongst their options. Right?

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Derek Cassese: So yeah, I think that

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Andy Whiteside: they just got in use. So that's how it is. And this anemic result that I'm getting is that's normal. And it's not.

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Andy Whiteside: It's common. But is it right? I guess maybe that's a better way to say it.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah.

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Derek Cassese: So that you know really what they're trying to drive here is to just think it through. Make sure you're not overlooking something that's really really important to the overall success of the business

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Andy Whiteside: alright. And finally, the last section here talks about dashboard essentials my top 3 metrics revealed, I guess they asked the individuals as part of this panel with and that. And that's where you know, you start thinking about lens and an individual role and things like that.

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Derek Cassese: you know, I've mentioned it a couple of times like for me that the things that are that I think are

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Derek Cassese: really good from a dashboard perspective is overall overall business health.

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Derek Cassese: you know, customer satisfaction pipeline lead gen, like that stuff is

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Derek Cassese: important because I need to. It's almost like, how are we today? But how are we gonna be a year from today.

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Derek Cassese: right?

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Derek Cassese:  and I think that

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Derek Cassese: I feel like the pandemic kind of shined a light on businesses that didn't take or put enough time and effort into that last statement

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Derek Cassese: in that. What is it gonna look like in a year like? Do I have the relationships

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Derek Cassese: that I need to maintain and continue to, you know, support my customer base

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Andy Whiteside: definitely was the difference between people that could survive in the industry that wasn't highly sought after in the pandemic versus the ones who could not.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: And you know nobody saw that coming. But you had to see.

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Andy Whiteside: Nobody saw that really coming, but there was certainly plenty of opportunities to see what

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Derek Cassese: to know you weren't doing it. The way you should have. I also think that

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Derek Cassese: what what it forced people to do is, you had to kinda you weren't, you know, getting taken out to lunch, and you weren't getting all that other stuff.

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Derek Cassese: So you were looking at. Basically, the the actual work right and the actual return on investment. And I think that it people finally said, Okay, well, maybe we need to make a change here and and find another. You know another company, whereas if you had had, you know, if you have really strong relationships.

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Derek Cassese: that should never be something that's brought up right if you have a true partnership.

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Andy Whiteside: if you have it like. In this case the partnership between the the partner salesforce the vendor and the customer. If all 3 of us are at the table knowing we're doing what's right all the time for each other, then, if it fails at that point. Well, there's nothing you could have done. It was just the scenario.

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Derek Cassese: So yeah, so I mean, hopefully, I mean, this is kind of an interesting one, I thought, I think it's a good topic for people that are that are have, you know, dashboards are often just there, right. You may not even given it a lot of thought like, okay, well, let me actually take a step back and think about this for a minute, because I look at it a lot of times dashboards, the first thing you see when you open salesforce right? And is it actually helping you?

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Derek Cassese: And then to take that one step further in a feature pod. Right? We can contrast that to what does an analytics dashboard do for you? Right? What's the difference?

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Derek Cassese: So

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Andy Whiteside: yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: I'm excited about that.

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Derek Cassese: So so, Derek, I think I think we're good here. I think we've covered the topic well and excited to get this one posted. I'm also excited to get off your stop sharing my screen and show you this dashboard I created. Send your feedback on

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Derek Cassese: well, with that we'll wrap this one up. Thank you for listening. And, Derek, thanks for being part of this. I appreciate it till the next time.