The Opportunity & Challenge:

A client in the B2B SaaS space came to Obsessive Analytics wanting better insight into their sales, customer success, and marketing processes, as they were unable to do that effectively themselves given the disparate tools and workflows they had in place.

There were two main areas of focus that the client wanted to have more information at their fingertips: understanding their top of funnel leads who entered their sales process through their website and understanding how the nature of their customers changed over time, both from a trial, onboarding, and retention perspective.

The Process:

1. We centralized the data from various sources like their CRM and Customer Success Systems, as well as product analytics tools. Following that we prepared a number of cleaned datasets which enabled us to prepare trendline and cohort analyses from joined data, rather than individual systems.
2. We enriched those datasets with extra dimensions in order for the client to investigate in numerous methods what was working and what was not. These dimensions included: user type, source (Facebook Ads, Google Organic, etc.), department, sales rep individual, and product package.
3. In order to relate current metrics to business objectives, we incorporated static data, such as their marketing budget and spend. This allowed for information access alongside the rest of the automated workflows we established for the client.

The Results:

We designed a dashboard that helped our client monitor, measure, and predict Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) all the way from lead acquisition, down to the entire sales process. Below you can find a selection of three pages of that dashboard.

Top of Funnel Performance

This page displays the very top of the funnel and is aimed at a marketing / growth audience to help them understand, not just how many users arrive at the top of the funnel, but also where they came from, how many of them engaged with the first touch point of the sales process (the demo request) as well as what the quality of those leads ended up being (cost per SQL). Almost all of these charts are either expanded on in later pages, or have filtering / drill-down capabilities built into them directly. The following three items demonstrate this:

1. The scorecards at the top provide metrics to the user on the current performance of their TOFU efforts. These have comparisons for MoM and YoY for a quick understanding of how current performance compares to previous efforts.
2. The time-based graph displays new and returning user volume, alongside the two main TOFU conversion rates. This allows the client to adjust advertising spend per channel, as the volume of users doesn’t necessarily correlate to the successful conversion of their users.
3. The pie graphs on the right display channel-based information for the total users and the website conversion rate for demo request form submissions to help the user identify the channels with the highest user intent.

Cohorted Pipeline

Keeping an eye on how many new opportunities were created / closed in the past week or month is of course important. However SaaS companies, especially business-to-business (B2B), often have longer sales cycles and evolving sales processes. In order to reflect the influence these changes have on business performance, looking at opportunity cohorts, based on their creation date, is just as valuable as the current opportunity metrics. This page displays exactly that cohorted pipeline data. It can be filtered by Department and Sales Rep to understand how both the current and historical state of opportunities are influenced by these dimensions, as well as to easily surface individual Sales Rep performance. Key features are:

1. The vertical scorecards on the right display all current stages for all opportunities to understand where potential customers are in their sales process.
2. The Historical Cohort timeline graph displays all stages opportunities were in based on the month they became an MQL, as well as key conversion rates of the sales funnel.
3. The Cohort Conversion table displays conversions by each cohort month to see historical performance and to help get a better understanding of the current month.

Funnel Cohort Opportunities

Sometimes you just need a single page that shows your sales funnel’s overall performance. This page displays the same cohort-based sales funnel information, visually highlighting both conversion and drop-off rates from one step of the process to the next. Additionally, the filters at the top of the page provide the option for the end user to narrow down to see the cohort funnel by the source (Google Organic Search, Lead Generation, etc.) and by the individual on the sales team that the opportunity or lead is with. Our client found this page particularly helpful in analyzing a given Sales Rep’s performance and to develop individualized coaching plans! Key features of this page are:

1. The green coloured scorecards show the amount of opportunities that have entered each stage during the time period selected. These coloured scorecards are displayed in order of the steps in the client’s sales funnel.
2. For each step in the sales funnel, a user can drop out of the sales process and become a disqualified or lost opportunity. These are visualized here with red arrows, to indicate the conversion rates for opportunities that are no longer active.
3. When an opportunity moves through each step in the funnel, this is displayed with the conversion rate between the sales process stages.