How Succesfactor.nu Uses Databox to Streamline Client Reporting and Save 100 Hours Every Month

No matter the specialty, agencies have more in common with each other than not.

The realities of managing, working across, and reporting to multiple clients bring their own host of challenges at a scale few other businesses experiences.

That’s true for Succesfactor.nu, a marketing agency founded in 2015.

Succesfactor.nu helps businesses with online strategy—everything from search to social media to digital ads and more. To serve and satisfy all of its clients, the agency has to work efficiently, stay agile, and refine its reporting processes.

We talked with Olav Wolters, founder, and co-owner of Succesfactor.nu, to learn more about how they’ve used Databox to overcome some of those challenges. Olav walked us through how they chose Databox and shared some of the results they’ve seen since then.

The Challenge

The key to growing Succesfactor.nu, Olav told us, was refining their reporting, both internal and client-facing.

Before Databox, they were spending way too much time building out Databoards and reports—time they could’ve spent actually improving results for clients.

After trying a whole host of other reporting tools, Olav and the team ended up with the same challenges they started.

Here are the challenges Succesfactor.nu faced before Databox:

• Creating client dashboards: Despite testing several other reporting tools, Olav wasn’t able to build client dashboards that were quick, simple, and flexible. That took up too much of Olav’s time and locked the Succesfactor.nu team into a cycle of retrospective reporting and action.

“We’ve been active for five years—and for four of those years, we were looking for a really good tool to make performance dashboards for our clients to monitor our results,” Olav told us. “We tried a lot. We tried Klipfolio and a few more of those tools. Every time, there was something that wasn’t flexible enough or was too complex.”

• Working efficiently across clients: Without a way to make customer data accessible, the team couldn’t effectively prioritize Clients or channels. They were working toward billable hours, not goals.

“I always had the feeling that we were not working efficiently. A customer pays for ten hours a month to manage their campaigns, and we felt like we had to make those ten hours a month happen,” Olav said.

• Measuring performance: The Succesfactor team needed a way to measure performance in real-time—a way that enabled them to make in-the-moment decisions and adjustments to maximize the results they achieved for customers.

Olav reflected, “Overall, we have better control over the results now. Normally, we’d make a report and after some months, you decide whether you had a good or bad period. Now we’re really looking forward, instead of back.

The Solution

“We chose Databox because it’s easy to use,” Olav told us. “It’s very easy to set up a KPI dashboard and also to make custom metrics. With Klipfolio, it was far more complicated, which took us way more time.”

The team moved all of their client reporting over to this business dashboard software, building project overview dashboards, along with more targeted marketing dashboards for each marketing channel.

They connected Instagram Business, Harvest, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, LinkedIn Company Pages, Google Search Console, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Google Analytics.

Succesfactor.nu’s Top Integrations

Here’s how Databox solved Succesfactor.nu’s challenges:

• Creating client dashboards: Using existing and custom Databox dashboard templates, Olav is able to create client dashboards in a fraction of the time. Largely the same across clients, the team spends about a quarter of the time they used to set up dashboards for new clients.

“We have one overview dashboard which is much the same across clients, and we have a dashboard for each channel that’s 90% the same across clients,” Olav explained.

• Working efficiently across clients: Now, in their weekly standups, the Succesfactor.nu team prioritizes client work based on real-time client performance data, allotting their time where it’s most needed in order to reach client goals.

“Every two weeks, we’d take a look at everything and decide whether or not to perform some action. Now, we let the data decide,” Olav said. “Now, every Tuesday, we have a standup meeting with the whole team—we check which clients are on track for their goals and which are behind. The ones behind get our attention for the week.”

• Measuring performance: Olav and team rely on custom Data Calculations to measure performance that’s truly meaningful—to them and to their clients.

Olav told us, “For us, it’s really necessary to use custom calculations—to show the customer how much you invest in something and what is the result. It’s really important for us to show that in one number instead of six different numbers, which was really confusing to the client.”

The Results

According to Olav, deploying a client dashboard software like Databox across their client portfolio has changed the game, even allowing them to change how they bill clients and communicate and measure performance.

Olav summarized that Succesfactor.nu is “more in control, more accountable,” adding, “ everybody is aware of the results of every customer because we talk about it every Tuesday. Everybody is aware of what’s going on, so no matter who the client is talking to, everybody can give them the answer.”

Here are Succesfactor.nu’s Databox results:

• Creating client dashboards: Databox dashboards, along with the dashboard template feature, save the Succesfactor.nu team around 100 hours each month across their portfolio of around 50 clients.

“We don’t have to put any time into building business dashboards or reports—it’s really quick,” Olav noted. “With the new Templates feature, setting up a new client takes 15 minutes, whereas it used to take maybe an hour. We save around 2 hours per client per month now that we don’t have to do manual reports anymore. ”

• Working efficiently across clients: The ability to better gauge and react to performance across clients has allowed Succesfactor to switch up their pricing structure to a more efficient model.

“We’re more effective with our time now. The client pays a fixed amount per month, and we will spend as much time as needed to get the results the client wants,” Olav explained. “We’re spending our time more effectively, which helps us and our clients to get better results.”

• Measuring performance:  Measuring performance in a more meaningful way has helped the team grow more confident, both in reporting and in taking the risks that can pay off for their clients.

“That kind of control makes us more confident that we do our job well,” Olav concluded. “It also enables us to make mistakes. Sometimes you try something and it fails, but if you’re on top of it, you can try something else that works.”