Dashboards are not new, but should be revisited in the modern business era. As remote work becomes the new normal, businesses are adopting digital go-to-market strategies and affective asynchronous communication, and I think company dashboards will serve as the communication platform where company leaders receive relevant, up-to-date business updates in order to assess risk, monitor performance, and navigate future trends.
A few months into the shelter-in-place, a couple of my learnings about the challenges of remote work are affective collaboration between team members and visibility into up-to-date departmental KPIs.
Interdepartmental Isolation: collaboration can be challenging without multiple departments and team members being physically present at the same time in one location. By working remote, our work is siloed, which makes it difficult to collaborate with team members and to focus on company priorities. Let’s take a customer at churn risk as an example. In a company dashboard, the Engineering org may list the week over week changes in customer product engagement. The Customer Success team would then have up-to-date visibility into the customer low engagement, and then follow up remedy and prevent churn.
Business Opacity: With siloed work, business priorities can get murky without cross functional updates and direction. A dashboard should provide all relevant departmental KPIs and trends that impact the current business objectives. Each department should provide visibility into their current business goals and metrics that are aligned with the main company goal so that all departments have clear visibility into the company objective and prioritize as needed.
I believe an affective dashboard that ties departmental key metrics updates to the current business goals optimizes collaboration between team members by being able to go to one place to view relevant and refreshed business trends for each department.
Company Dashboard’s should provide the following:
Provide daily KPI tracking to forecast
Identify business levers to minimize risks and exploit successes
Provide visibility into trend and variance analysis
Information should be easily digestible and actionable
Departmental KPIs Tracking:
Bookings Trend Analysis: New, Upsell, Downsell, Churn.
Retention Trend Analysis: ARR up for renewal, ARR currently renewed, ARR pending, ARR Risk, gross dollar and customer churn, Average revenue per account growth.
Cash Burn Trend Analysis: Cash burn trend to forecast variance, customer past-due updates, Cash runway, Customer payments tracking.
Sales Pipeline Trend Analysis: Current new business closed to forecast variance, current quarter pipeline, current win rate, current sales cycle time, Customer Acquisition Cost.
5/04/2020
SaaS Finance Blog 