Industry Case Study: How SPM Dashboards Power Financial Services Sales
Selling financial services effectively requires a highly motivated, deeply knowledgeable team that can keep up with all the shifting recommendations, regulations, and investment options endemic to the industry. In this kind of a chaotic atmosphere where priorities change by the minute, it’s crucial to know with certainty that your sales organization is not only taking action to secure new customers but is also targeting that action and optimizing it to have the largest impact possible. One of the top mutual fund and financial services groups in the world engaged with Ironside to put this kind of transparency in place and establish strong sales performance management (SPM) strategies that would drive effective actions from the executive level down to the individual field reps.
Client Information
Industry: Financial Services
Size: >$1 billion in revenue
Area of Engagement: Sales Performance Management
The Challenge
Every stakeholder at the client wanted an answer to the same general question: How is sales doing? There was no central place where executives, finance managers, and sales managers could go to get a holistic picture of the sales team’s activities and view important metrics like current performance, past performance, and pipeline. Instead, executives and managers had to access multiple systems and perform outdated manual reporting tasks to get at those pieces of information. This process, of course, was time consuming and imprecise, and the client asked Ironside’s SPM team to help them find a better, more integrated way to generate sales effectiveness reports.
The Journey
To get the client the information they desired in a consumable, intuitive format, the Ironside SPM team decided to craft an executive sales effectiveness dashboard that unified the client’s different data sources and provided drill-through details when needed. This modern SPM dashboard linked together CRM data, production data, and other relevant pieces of information to generate meaningful visual displays that quickly delivered valuable insights. Beyond just giving a fast look at the key facts the executives needed, the dashboard was also interactive, enabling users to dive deeper into more specific areas of interest and see detailed views of different dashboard components.
Getting the dashboard up and running required the Ironside SPM team to carry out several different activities:
- Provided implementation services, including project management.
- Designed visualizations and KPI displays for quick and meaningful data consumption.
- Collaborated with the client’s internal resources to find the best methods for sourcing, managing, and controlling the flow of data into the dashboard from desired sources.
- Discovered reporting use cases, designed report options, and built and deployed finalized report designs.
- Supported the testing and deployment process for the dashboard.
The Results
Having easy access to all the sales data they needed to determine the health of the department changed the client’s approach to monitoring and acting on sales data. They could now instantly answer their questions about sales performance and get more details in a simple format that supplied quick, actionable insights.
Ironside provided the following major benefits to the client over the course of the project:
- Delivered a successful implementation using an agile development approach, and came in under the client’s initial budget.
- Provided never-before-seen insights to client stakeholders through combining data sets and centralizing analysis.
- Supplied the client with easy-access, automated, and current sales effectiveness reports targeted to their priorities.
- Introduced new ways of thinking around sales effectiveness, leading to new questions and improved managerial focus.
With a mature SPM reporting strategy in place, the client was well-placed to maintain their leadership position in their industry and expand their influence through high-impact sales activities. If you’d like to learn more about how Ironside SPM can jumpstart your sales strategy, please feel free to get in touch. We’d be happy to work with you to design your ideal solution.
