In order to optimise at best the resources and proceed with the most relevant next steps to gauge success, I have demonstrated reporting skills in my missions. The common goal was to build an easy-to-read relevant format of report.
Project 1: Improving the report on lead-generation
🔍 Background Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company, coming from the split of the Hewlett Packard group in 2015. The business is split between the direct and the indirect (named "Channel") sales.
Part of the sales enablement program for resellers and distributors is the marketing support, with the issue of co-marketing budget called Marketing Development Fund (MDF). One of my missions as Partner Marketing & Communication Executive was to handle this budget release and follow its life cycle - from the split between activities and partners, to the claim and KPI analysis. To track this circuition, each marketing activity had to be captured on the CRM Salesforce, which generates a code. This code is then used:
By HPE to attach a certain budget to it
By the partner to claim the amount once the activity is executed and then to associate the leads generated
Previously, the local Channel Marketing had to send the partners a file with all the codes of their marketing activities of the quarter. They then needed to fill the document with all the leads generated by this expense. The general complaint was that the document was unreadable, that the codes were "HPE lingo" (not all of them use daily Salesforce) and that the partners did not have the opportunity to track the leads after each activity, as it was mostly handled by their own sales teams.
🧭 Problem Definition In terms or reporting, the challenge is to find the most optimal way of displaying all of these data, and provide each stakeholder (headquarter, local management and partner) the information they need. What kind of format would be digestable to improve the efficiency of lead-generation reporting?
📝 Contingencies Large amount data. Take into consideration all the resellers from HPE globally, multiply it by the number of marketing activities performed by each, and multiply all of this by 4 quarters, you can almost picture the number of codes generated each year, for this part of HPE's activity only. In parallel, all the leads generated are entered by the sales teams from HPE and the resellers. The common segway between both ends is Salesforce, which will be the main basis to build a useful report.
Argument to leverage the relationship with the partner. On one side, resellers are handling multiple brands, so if our process is too complicated and tideous, it weakens their interest working with us. On the other side, HPE is entitled to monitor the ROI on the support they are providing. There is therefore a constant balance to have when implementing a process or introducing a new tool: imposing a behiavour while still demonstrating its value and ease to use.
🗺️ Solution Optimising the internal resources. I spent a lot of time digging trough the CRM, either submitting the marketing activities, or exporting the leads generated. Thanks to this tricky work, I had a better understanding on the relevance of the data - that is why I was asked to collaborate on building the report and coming up with a new process.
By discussing with the rest of the marketing team, we reversed the way of working, not starting by the activity but by the leads generated. Indeed, each lead ID page has a box to be filled with the marketing activity code. We realised that by extracted them from the CRM, we already have a frame to work on.
Source: FAQ Salesforcedevelopers.com [LINK]
Once all the marketing activities codes with their description were extracted, we linked it with the leads generated over the passed semester. More precisely, there were two tabs in the the file of each partner:
In the 'lead generated data' tab, each row had a scrolling menu with all the marketing activities listed in the first tab. That way, instead of digging through the leads, check their "HPE code", and report them in a report, the reseller has all the information gathered in the same file and can easily navigate.
A quick note needs to be pointed out: the leads generated were not taken over a quarter but over a semester. Indeed, especially with digital marketing activities, it is difficult to expect a precise ROI within 3 months - just imagine if your marketing activity occurs at the end of the quarter, you won't be able to provide an exact picture of the leads achieved. Expanding the timeline gives more flexibility for the current customer journey trends.
✅ Assessment
The dashboard was a good start and definitely improved the efficiency in the tagging process. As a matter of fact, the number of partners providing their leads within the timelines increased significantly.
However, it is only a tool to a larger discipline, which is lead-generation marketing, and there is definitely room for improvement, notably to improve the accuracy of the data.
Project 2: Building an entire inventory basis
🔍 Background Destination Beverage is a start-up importing and supplying foreign beverage brands in Singapore. In order to process the order and manage the inventory, they use MYOB.
Despite the existence of product codes in the software, its use was limited in the day-to-day operations. Even for pricing and margin calculations, they were done using product names and often on different files (generally split between agency brands and the others solely meant for distribution). When it came to upload all of the items on the e-shop, I realised the difficulty which we would be facing.
🧭 Problem Definition
The goal is create a complete report gathering all the spreadout data about the stock (inventory, pricing, product picture, volume...).
If no preemptive work has been done to gather the inventory, there were still documents available to work from. The predicament was determining what the finale file would need for the e-shop for other evolutions, and optimising the current resources to be as efficient as possible. 📝 Contingencies
Building from scratch. Because I had no set of references in the companies database, I decided to base myself on other e-shops, and curate the categories of information that were relevant to our products. Once that was clear, it was easier to add whatever category our daily operations required.
Working with 2 resources with no common linkage. As mentioned, the version of MYOB used is quite limited since it dealt with the products individually. The difficulty is when analysing data brand per brand, it does not provide a view per brand, you have to tick product per product the items to consolidate the report. Moreover it does not have product page containing volume, ABV (percentage of alcohol per bottle), nor product description.
When it comes to the prices, they were entered in MYOB but more often dealt with on Excel sheets available on the company Google Drive, using product name and not product code. 🗺️ Solution Audit of the information available. While building the marketing SOP, I gathered a better idea of the information at end. That is why I knew that the MYOB version used did not allow us to build even a basis of what we needed. The timeline for delivering the inventory was therefore easier to provide to the management.
Bringing a new document still useable by the rest of the company. I concluded that there was no point bringing an entire new CRM or software if it took too long to implement. Instead, I opted for a simple Excel which the company is familiar with, solely relying on the product code. With many - many - VLOOKUP formulas, I included :
Product identity (product code, product name, description, ....)
Stock available from MYOB
Pricing calculation from the various Excel files (including both wholesale and retail, with their costs and margins)
Eventually the longest part was completing the qualitative data - ABV, volume, country of origin, etc... - because there were no basis for it.
✅ Assessment
Within the two weeks set to build the timeline, half of it was dedicated to building this inventory. Indeed, even without experience on Shopify, the e-shop builder eases the technical aspect and provides integral templates.
Building this inventory plus including the photoshoot for product pictures was a intricate work but necessary. The document could be updated and still used in the next years, if the activity remains roughly the same. However moving forward, I brought my recommendation to use a different software than MYOB or moving to another version, if the company was growing, and looking at handling large quantities of products and remain retail oriented. Indeed for instance, there is still a manual update when it comes to comparing the inventories from the e-shop and the warehouse.
Another element that could improve the file is adding the purchase data. Indeed, it would be interesting to bring the information regarding the supply chain (country of import, tax, timeline for delivery...), thus completing the lifecycle of the product.