Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Marketing Automations (2014)

Chapter 5. Marketing Metrics, Analysis, and Goals

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides platform features for active analysis and visualization of data. In this chapter, you will learn to understand key marketing metrics, how to visualize and analyze marketing data with Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2013 views, and how to use charts, reports, and dashboards. In addition, you will also learn about the goal management feature in Dynamics CRM 2013. Goal management allows the setting of goals in a hierarchical fashion for users and teams with predefined metrics. The performance can then be measured by continually tracking the metrics at regular intervals or after specific events such as marketing campaigns.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

· Key marketing metrics

· Marketing charts

· Marketing reports

· Marketing dashboards

· Goals and Goal Metrics

Key marketing metrics

Quantitatively measuring the impact of marketing activities and the ability to measure the contribution to the revenue growth are critical to bring accountability to marketing investments. They cannot be justified only by soft metrics such as the brand awareness, ranking, website hits, social likes, brand impressions, and number of attendees in an event. While it is good to track these metrics, the key is to relate them to hard metrics, such as revenue growth and returns on marketing investment.

It's important for the marketers to start thinking in terms of revenue, and they should take into consideration the following points when designing campaigns:

· Track marketing expense and estimate ROI: Estimate the campaign cost and expected returns from the campaign at the beginning

· Marketing performance and impact: Create campaigns whose response and impact can be measured and related to the revenue growth

· Revenue growth: Constantly analyze and improve the effectiveness of campaigns based on the revenue metrics

Key marketing metrics that measure the impact of the marketing effort on the revenue and profit are critical to any organization.

· Revenue impact: The following are the ways in which marketing impacts the company revenue:

· The marketing investments are made to generate prospects, nurture them to make them sales ready, and qualify them for the sales team

· Net revenue from the prospects is generated by marketing

· Marketing performance: The following are the ways to individually look at the marketing campaign and measure its performance:

· The lead volume measures the success of lead generation programs

· Closures describe the customers derived from leads showing the effectiveness of the lead nurturing programs

· Time to close describes the average time to close the leads generated by the program

· Cost per closure tells the average cost incurred in closing a lead

· Revenue per new customer signals the quality of leads generated

· Performance with time and forecast: These metrics look at the historical performance and the current progress based on the marketing programs and forecast the future performance and growth.

Effective measurement of marketing performance is possible when the impact is measurable, starting from lead generation to prospect count, from lead to conversions to customers and the velocity at which the leads move across these stages.

Marketing charts

Charts are an easy mechanism of visually analyzing data patterns and providing deeper insights into the performance of your marketing activities. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has out-of-the-box marketing charts created based on some of the trending needs for marketing data analytics. Charts also provide the drill down feature enabling the users to select a chart section and further investigate the records by selecting a drill down field and the chart type.

In conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Views, charts allow users to visualize the data from multiple dimensions. Also, the same chart can be used with various views by keeping the visualization static but feeding variable data to charts from different views.

The following screenshot shows some of the predefined charts that help analyze your marketing campaigns:

The campaign budget versus actual costs chart provides a comparison analysis of the original planned budget for the campaign against the actual costs incurred. You can explore the details either by the fiscal year or month.

Views and charts together provide great freedom to the users to slice and dice the data at various levels and visualize it from multiple angles. The views and charts can also be integrated into dashboards, which provide instant access to the user to gather real time information. We will explore more on dashboards later in this chapter.

Marketing reports

If out-of-the-box views and charts don't meet your requirements, then Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 also provides the option to create powerful reports using the marketing data you have captured with the help of Report Wizard. You can use the wizard to create a report that can render data from various marketing-related entities in a simple tabular format. It also provides features that allow you to group, summarize, and aggregate information. In addition, you will also have the option to embed charts and graphs as needed.

Report Wizard

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides a Report Wizard option that can be used to create new marketing reports within the CRM application. We will now see the steps involved in creating a simple tabular report to display the leads qualified monthly:

1. Start the Report Wizard to create a new report under the Reports section. You will have two options: you can create a new report from the ground up, or you can use an existing report as a template, as shown in the following screenshot:

Create a new marketing report

2. Next, specify the properties such as Report name and Report description. You need to also specify Primary record type for the report, as shown in the following screenshot:

3. Next, specify the filtering criteria for the report, identifying conditions using an expression tree, as shown in the following screenshot:

4. Specify the report grouping properties according to how you want the information to be grouped as shown in the following screenshot:

5. In the final step, specify the entity columns to be displayed in the report. In the following screenshot, the Topic column is selected for display:

6. Select the Table only report and click on Finish to create the new report that shows Leads qualified and grouped by month.

Out-of-the-box marketing reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a list of out-of-the-box marketing reports that can be directly used by marketers to analyze campaigns as shown in the following screenshot:

The marketing reports are fairly self-explanatory, and you can explore them as an exercise. For example, you can use the Campaign Comparison report to track the progress and status of your campaigns, and so on.

Reports in CRM have been extensively used to identify complex patterns in data and to provide business intelligence to support the decision making and strategic planning for organizations. Reports also provide the flexibility of being able to integrate them into the dashboard without the need for users to explicitly run the reports, making the most critical information instantly available to the users.

Marketing dashboards

Dashboard is an intuitive and powerful visualization technique that provides a real-time graphical view of the relevant information, enables users to monitor critical metrics, and helps them make the right decisions at the right time. The marketing management can extensively use dashboards to keep track of their marketing programs; the real time visualization of the key parameters enables them to measure the effectiveness and make quick corrections to their programs in order to have them aligned to the marketing strategy.

The dashboard's visibility can be personal, selectively shared, or organization wide. This provides the user with the ability to only expose relevant information to other users, in order to help them focus on the right information. Dashboards should be carefully designed keeping in mind the relevance of information. The dashboard showing the marketer's pending activities may not be relevant to the senior management and the CXOs, as they would mainly be interested in seeing a broad summary and the overall picture.

Designing dashboards

Dashboards in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 are a combination of various charts, views, HTML web resources, reports, and IFrames that are organized into various sections to display relevant information. Designing dashboards requires a deep insight into the data to understand what is truly important in order to choose the right metrics for display without overwhelming the user with too much information.

The following are some of the key factors to be taken into consideration while designing dashboards:

· The intended user

· The source and the type of information

· Choosing appropriate views and graphical visualizations

One of the key factors to be taken into consideration is the intended user of the dashboards. Dashboards designed for individuals and teams can have low-level detail that help them with their daily tasks and activities, whereas the reports for the senior management and high-level decision makers would be at a summary level, providing an overall view in a monthly or quarterly timeframe.

The source and type of information also need to be taken into consideration when designing dashboards. The data within the CRM application can be exposed using views, charts, and reports. External data can be directly integrated into the dashboard using IFrame or by creating custom HTML web resources. It's important to consider the level of detail required to decide whether we should show actual records in a view or rollup the data to show trends and comparisons using graphs for a bigger picture.

Intuitive visualization of data is another key to creating a successful dashboard. The list of pending activities can simply be formed using a custom view, but when we are tracking the progress and looking at changing trends, a line graph is considered ideal. Bar graphs are great for comparisons, and pie charts are best used to describe the share of the whole. The drill down feature helps us to investigate the actual records that are being rolled up in the graph. It's good to have the drill-down feature in the reports and charts developed for use with dashboards.

Out-of-the-box marketing dashboards in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013

Marketing Dashboard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM displays Campaign Type Mix, Campaign Budget vs. Actual Costs, Leads by Source Campaign, and Revenue Generated by Campaign along with the list of activities and campaigns, as shown in the following screenshot:

We will now explore the goal management features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, which can be used to track the performance of the marketing team against various marketing metrics.

Marketing Goals and Goal Metrics

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides a goal management feature that can be used to define and track goals at various levels. The GOALS feature can be used to define and track goals for the marketing teams and measure their performance based on the metrics defined.

The following two key entities are provided for goal management:

· Goal

· Goal Metrics

Goal Metrics

Every organization needs to identify key parameters that are critical for the measurement of progress towards its objectives. These parameters can be defined as Goal Metrics within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. This is a numeric measure of specific field values within a record type in CRM. The Goal Metrics defined by the organization becomes the yard stick for measuring the performance of the teams and the individuals within the organization and their progress towards the organization's goals. Every marketing department needs to come up with Goal Metrics that align with the objectives of the organization, as these are the parameters measured as a part of a goal. Some of the sample Goal Metrics could be the revenue generated, number of leads generated, activity count, and so on.

Each Goal Metric specifies the type of data being measured along with the rollup fields. The rollup fields specify the entity and the field being measured to track the in-progress and the actual target values for goals. For example, a Goal Metric used to measure sales revenue will have the Metric Type field set to Money and one Rollup Field would be the actual revenue field on opportunity with status Won to reflect the actual target and another Rollup Field with opportunity status Open to reflect in-progress target values. You need to specify the following properties to define a Goal Metric:

· Name: This is used to specify descriptive names of the Goal Metric that signifies what is being measured.

· Metric Type: The metric type can be Count or Amount.

· In case of financial goals, the Amount metric type is used, for example, the revenue from the sales team.

· The metric type Count is used to track the number of records and not the value from a specific field. A good example would be the number of qualified leads generated by a marketer, as tracking revenue is not possible until the sales cycle.

· Amount Data Type: When the metric type is set to Amount, the Amount Data Type field is used to specify the data type of the field. The possible values are Integer, Decimal, and Money.

Rollup fields define the record type and the fields for which actual and in-progress values are tracked. Rollup fields let you specify how the status value of the record maps to goals in-progress/actual values. For example, when measuring the revenue goal of a sales representative, the revenue of all the opportunities in Won state would roll up to the actual achieved against the goal, whereas the opportunities in Open state would roll up to specify the revenue in progress currently being worked on by the sales rep. The following are the properties used to define Goal Metric:

· Rollup field: The possible values for this field are Actual, In-progress, and Custom, which map the actual achieved against the goal. In-progress are the ones being worked on, and Custom can be used to track a custom status other than Actual and In-progress. Only Actual and In-progress are generally used.

· Source Record Type: This is used to specify the CRM record type to be counted or whose field is used in calculating the amount.

· Source Field: This is relevant only for Amount metric type and is used to specify the field whose value rolls up for amount calculation.

· Source Record Type State and Source Record Type Status: This is the record status to be used for the specified rollup type, which decides if the record values or the count will roll up to goals in-progress or actual values.

· Date Record Type and Date Field: This is used to specify the date field on a record whose value will determine the goal period in which the record will roll up.

The following screenshot shows the Revenue Goal Metric in Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

The Goals entity

Goals are the manifestation of the objectives of an organization with respect to a team or an individual. An organization with an objective to increase the sales of a product might want to start selling in new markets, which can be achieved by assigning geography-specific revenue targets to the sales team.

Companies need to have clear objectives for corporate leadership, business units, and departments. These objectives have to be represented as specific goals, which are measurable, achievable, and realistic in a specified time frame. Goals should be such that they can be traced back to the objectives of the organization and the overall vision.

Goals are created around the key Goal Metrics defined by the organization, and various goals can use the same Goal Metric. For example, the sales reps, the sales manager, and the sales department can all use the revenue metric, but the number of records taken into consideration for target calculation varies based on the level. CRM enables the creation of hierarchical goals where goals can have child goals defined, and the values from the child goals can roll up to the parent goal.

The following are the fields used in the definition of Goal:

· Name: This is used to specify the goal name, for example, revenue for the first quarter.

· Goal Metric: This lets us choose one of the Goal Metrics defined by the organization.

· Goal Owner: This is the user responsible for achieving the specified goal.

· Manager: This field can be used to specify the manager of the current goal owner.

· Goal Period Type: This lets us specify the goal period; it can be Fiscal Period or Custom Period specified using the Fiscal Period, Fiscal Year, and From and To date value fields.

· Target (Money): This is used to specify the value to be achieved against the Goal Metric; the data type of the target is based on the parameter measured by the Goal Metric.

· Actual (Money): This field tracks the actual numbers achieved against the goal target based on the Actual Goal Metric.

· In-progress (Money): The numbers based on records being currently worked on are tracked in this field using the In-progress Goal Metric.

· Percentage Achieved: This keeps track of the overall goal progress expressed as a percentage of the actual achieved of the goal target.

· Last Rolled Up Date: This is the date of which the current actuals, in-progress, and the percentage values are shown.

· Roll Up Only From Child Goals: Goals in CRM can have the parent-child hierarchy defined; if the only values that contribute to the rollup calculations are from child goals, then select Yes, else select No.

· Record Set for Rollup: If the only values that contribute to the rollup calculations are records owned by the owner of the goal, Owned by goal owner is selected. If the Owned by goal owner option is selected, the system will automatically roll up all contributing records owned by the goal owner. If All is selected, a criteria other than the owner must be used to determine which records are rolled up, and rollup queries must be specified for the actual and in-progress goals.

The following screenshot shows a sample Goal in Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

Goal charts and reports

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides various charts and reports to visualize the goal's progress and track the progress based on the count or revenue. This helps the marketers keep track of their progress and work towards specific goals, while the management can easily analyze the performance of their marketing departments and calculate the returns of marketing investments.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides out-of-the-box charts for analyzing the goal's progress as shown in the following screenshot:

The goal's progress report in Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a detailed listing and a bar graph depicting the goal-wise progress, as shown in the following screenshot:

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides rich features for data analysis and visualization, along with a large set of out-of-the-box views, charts, reports, and dashboards, which provide a great starting point for the marketers. Using these tools, they can begin to identify hidden patterns in data and start to analyze the performance of their marketing activities. The data analysis and patterns provide continuous feedback to the marketers so that they can constantly improve their programs. The goal management feature provides a transparent system based on metrics to measure the performance of the marketing teams and calculate the direct impact on revenue, which brings in accountability to the money spent in marketing by the organization. In the next chapter, we will see how we can use additional third-party marketing tools to enhance the marketing automation features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.