How to Create the Perfect B2B Event Dashboard for Your Marketing
By: Ricky Wolff
Tags: B2b Marketing, Marketing, Reporting, B2B, SaaS

How to Create the Perfect Event Dashboard

The ideal B2B marketing event dashboard will vary per company and per event. In any case, the steps below will guide you in developing the ideal dashboard for your company.

Select the right reporting platform

As a marketer, you’ll have access to a lot of tools. These tools generally provide reporting capabilities. But still, this might not be the ideal platform for you to report on.

Why?

You need to create reports with your stakeholders in mind. They need to be able to view the reports and work with the data.

Let’s say you develop a dashboard on a marketing automation tool such as Marketo. Only the marketing team will have access to this dashboard. But your sales team also needs to see the data. This raises the question “how valuable is this dashboard?”

You need to find common ground. Generally, sales and other commercial functions have access to your CRM. This is common ground and provides a single source of truth.

At most enterprise organizations, this is Salesforce, but there are many CRMs out there such as Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. The dashboard examples that I’ve shown earlier in this article are on Salesforce. My sales and management team use Salesforce, and that’s why I choose to create an event dashboard there. They can work with the data and see all the details they need to do business.

An event dashboard looks great, but you need to make sure people can work with the underlying data. Looking at data doesn’t make sense. You need to understand the reasons and details behind that data. This way, you can act on it.

Understand what metrics are important to the business

What are the right metrics for an event dashboard? This is a question that 54% of marketers ask themselves before creating a dashboard.

Ask yourself this question: “What is the ultimate goal of this event?”

By understanding this, you can develop a dashboard with the ultimate goals in mind. Keep in mind that your ultimate goal might differ from other stakeholders in the company.

It’s crucial to understand all the goals of your stakeholders. You can then implement this on the dashboard, and it will be more useful for everyone.

Generally, these metrics are important to any business:

Return on event investment

(Marketing qualified) leads created

Pipeline generated and pipeline velocity

Audience demographics such as industry, job role, and country

Actuals vs. targets

Understand what reports are important to the viewers

As mentioned, it’s important to understand the ultimate goals of your stakeholders. You also have to understand what reports are important to those stakeholders. What is it that they want to see?

Teams such as customer success and the partner team might have different reporting requirements. For example, the sales team wants to see which leads you’ve generated for them. The channel team wants to see which partners registered for an event.

These reports need to be actionable for the various teams. The dashboard should include the ultimate goals, but also actionable reports.

Make it easy to see the source data

Bar and pie charts are visually appealing. But sometimes they don’t paint the full picture. You need to understand the data behind a graph. You need the data to be actionable.

When developing a B2B event dashboard, make sure that it’s easy to see the source data. This is why I often choose to create dashboards on our CRM. The entire commercial team has access to the CRM, and they can drill through to the details.

Imagine that sales are looking at your dashboard. They notice event registrations from target accounts. They want to see exactly who this person is and access details such as the person’s email address.

Make sure that people can work with your data.

Design source reports with your viewers in mind

You should also design the source reports with your viewers in mind.

Let’s say you’ve developed a dashboard for an event that you’ve sponsored. You share this dashboard with the sales team. What do they want to see?

Sales want to see the generated leads, so when developing the source report, make the first column the account owner. This way, sales can see which leads you generated for them.

The columns need to be in the right order, depending on your viewer. The below-listed column order generally works well.

Account/lead owner Company name Go-to-market strategy (target account or normal account) Company type First name Last name Job role Country Industry Email address Phone number

Always include targets vs. actuals

No matter what B2B event you are reporting on, you will have a target. The target might be the number of registrants or the amount of business generated.

Management should be able to see the current status compared to the targets defined. This should be at the very top of your dashboard.

As a manager, the first question that I will ask is, “how are we doing compared to the event target?”

Guaranteed, you will get the same question. Anticipate these questions and be proactive in including graphs that answer them.

Get your dashboard checked before sending it to everyone

One of the mistakes I made earlier in my career was sending dashboards to people too fast. Be sure to first ask feedback before sending your dashboard to all your stakeholders!

I get it, you’re proud of your dashboard and it’s looking amazing. The first thing you want to do is show as many people as possible.

Don’t do this.

Before communicating your dashboard to all stakeholders involved, first, get it vetted. Ask a couple of people to review your dashboard — preferably one person from each team (sales, customer success, marketing).

After collecting and processing the feedback, get the dashboard approved. This is often done by the senior management team.

Once approved, communicate your dashboard to all stakeholders involved.

Develop a template

Architecting the perfect dashboard is a lot of work. Once you’ve achieved the perfect dashboard, you want to reduce work in the future. You need a template.

When creating a dashboard, always think of scalability. You need to compose your dashboard so that it’s easy to copy and use for another event.

Also, if you want to score some points within your company, share the template with other teams. This way, your entire company benefits from your work. To top it off, you will receive some well-deserved credits.