Automated Commercial Dashboard for the Leadership Team

Context

Our client was an industrial chemicals producer based in the Norway, with annual revenue of ~€200M. The company historically ran on Excel reports. The senior leadership team engaged us to develop a suite of PowerBI-based automated dashboards for them, starting with a commercial dashboard for use by the CRO and his team, and an operations dashboard for use by the COO and his team.

Objectives

For the first phase of the project, we were asked to work with the CRO to define the commercial metrics, set up the automated pipelines to pull data from the various source systems, and develop the commercial dashboard.

Project delivery

To first figure out what commercial metrics to create, we ran two sessions with the CRO to learn the client's business, specifically to understand their go-to-market strategies and sales motions. We learned that the business is predominantly driven by existing customers, with a mixture of multi-year supply contracts and spot sales, and that in recent years the revenue growth has stalled even though new customer are still being acquired, suggesting a possible worsening churn issue. Additionally, as it is in a commodities business, price per ton is an important metric for them to manage.

Based on these conversations, we aligned with the CRO on the key metrics that should be tracked in the commercial dashboard. These metrics would provide his team with visibility into all key revenue drivers of the business. To implement these metrics, we had to pull data from not only the CRM, whose data covers the new logo metrics, but also the ERP where customer transactions and pricing data are stored.

From the CRM data

1. New logo SQLs and opportunities: these top-of-the-funnel metrics serve as early indicators of the client's new logo acquisition efforts. We cut this metric by product family, region, and salesperson
2. New logo funnel size trends: in our database, we would automatically snapshot the pipeline data each week, and use these snapshots to visualize how the funnel changes over time. We displays this data not just for the total pipeline but also for individual sales stages, enabling the CRO to quickly assess which part of the pipeline might become an issue for him in the coming weeks
3. New logo conversion rates: we created a 60-day conversion rate metric (based on the client's average new logo deal cycle of 60 days)

From the ERP data

1. Bookings and invoiced sales: revenue-related metrics, with cuts by operating copmany and product family
2. Customer churn: we defined churn as customers that did not have any sales in the TTM period but did have sales in the prior TTM period; this metrics is segmented by spend buckets
3. Core customer growth: we defined core customers as those that are neither newly acquired nor churned; these customers make up over 90% of the client's business, so it was critical to track their revenue growth
4. Pricing: trends in price per ton by operating company, product family, and customer

Outcome

The dashboard was deployed to the client's PowerBI portal. We also set up a weekly automated email to send a summary page to the CRO and CEO as a PDF attachment. The dashboard is read by around 12 different senior leaders and directors each week.