The Inbound Growth Blog

The Inbound Growth Blog covers all topics relating to an integrated marketing strategy. We write about inbound marketing, social media, integrated marketing strategies and the sales process.

Databox: The Scorecard For Data-Driven Sales And Marketing | Product Review

New Call-to-action

Posted by John Beveridge on Sep 6, 2017 9:35:30 AM

DataBox Product Review.png


Sales and marketing is both an art and a science. Businesses that consistently hit their numbers lean more on the science side of things than the art side. As with any other function in your business, harnessing the tremendous amount of data available from your sales and marketing activities allows you to set business development goals accurately and realistically, evaluate the effectiveness of your sales and marketing, and adjust your tactics to optimize growth. Simply put, if you treat revenue generation as an art, you're in trouble.

In the past, we've struggled with providing useful data reporting to our customers because:

  • Most businesses use several different software products for different areas of their growth function. Consolidating this data into easy-to-use reporting was challenging to say the least. In our case, we use:
    • HubSpot for inbound marketing
    • HubSpot for CRM
    • Google Analytics and Search Console for SEO analysis
    • Wistia for video marketing
    • Facebook, LInkedIn and Twitter for social media promotion
  • In order to nimbly manage sales and marketing, data needs to be updated frequently (at least daily) so that you can adjust campaign tactics and sales outreach based on actual results. Although snippets of data were available on an ongoing basis, consolidated reporting was done on a monthly frequency.
  • Sharing data with executives, sales and marketing teams and agency teams was mostly done with cut and paste Powerpoint reports. There were data reporting tools available like Klipfolio and Tableau, but they were difficult to use and weren't purpose-built for sales and marketing.

Enter Databox. Databox provides online and mobile KPI dashboards that are easy to set up, easy to use and easy to share. Some of you may know Databox's CEO, Pete Caputa. For those of you who don't, Pete is the guy that built HubSpot's partner channel marketing program and was a key player in taking a software start-up to a $270 million dollar business.

Pete is the kind of guy who's not afraid to roll up his sleeves and work with customers. He and his team have built a great product that addresses pretty much all of the issues we have had with reporting sales and marketing KPIs. In the interest of full disclosure, we like Databox so much that we've joined the Databox partner program and will be rolling out Databox dashboards to all of our customers.

With that said, let me share with you my review of Databox and why we think it's an essential tool for a data-driven sales and marketing process.


Rapidan Inbound Databox Partner


Databox is easy to use

Databox delivers templated and customized dashboards that can be shared with everyone involved in the sales and marketing process. For executives, Databox delivers an up-to-date KPI dashboard that lets them know which KPIs are on track and which are not. Data is updated at least daily - managers can see current data while sales and marketing campaigns are in progress. This allows adustments to be made when they can have an impact on campaign outcomes, rather than waiting to apply lessons learned to later campaigns. While Databox dashboards are available for desktop, the mobile app makes it easy to monitor results frequently.

For marketing teams and agencies, Databox's pre-configured templates and designer tool make it easy to create meaningful dashboards for themselves and for management. As of the writing of this article, there are over 150 pre-configured templates built from over 50 data sources, ranging from HubSpot to LinkedIn to Google Analytics to YouTube. The template library is growing daily as Databox partners create new templates for their customers and add them to the library.

If you can't find a template you like in the template library, Databox's designer tool makes it easy to build customized dashboards. A simple drag-and-drop interface lets you pull data feeds into an 8 x 4 dashboard grid for a possibility of 32 data feeds. No custom development is required - if you want to pull in a data feed, you simply choose the data source and then choose the data you want to include. For example, you could choose Google Analytics then choose Bounce Rate and that data will be fed into your dashboards. Other tools allow you to build custom dashboards, but the process is cumbersome and often requires a developer to accomplish the task. With Databox, someone who has a moderate level of skill with software like Excel and Word can build custom dashboards easily.

Databox updates dashboards frequently enough for managers to take action based on KPI results. Databox uses a freemium business model. For the free version, most data sources update daily with HubSpot updating hourly. As you move to the paid versions of Databox, update frequencies increase. Even with the free version, the data on the dashboards is no older than 24 hours.

Databox dashboards can be built using multiple data sources. For executives keeping an eye on the big picture, the ability to pull in KPIs from different data sources provides the ability to create "30,000 feet" insight into sales and marketing performance. This was one of the biggest problems we found with other tools we used. Often, one KPI resided in Googe Analytics, 3 more were in HubSpot Marketing and 6 were in HubSpot CRM. Databox lets you pull data from disparate data sources into comprehensive dashboards that accurately paint the data picture. 


Get a free Databox account access to over 150 templates

 


Databox is the perfect tool to keep your data-driven sales and marketing process on track. With an extensive template library, an easy to use dashboard builder and a mobile app that encourages data sharing, Databox helps you add science to your sales and marketing. With its free entry-level version, there's simply no reason not to use Databox. Need a little help building a data-driven sales and marketing process? Schedule a free consultation with us.

Topics: Business Management, Marketing Strategy, Sales Process

Download 5 Essential Metrics To Measure Marketing ROI


Learn the 5 metrics that move the needle and how to interpret them.

Marketing Metrics Blog CTA.jpeg