Today’s marketplace favors businesses that can move fast, stay nimble, and leverage data to hone in on the most effective ways to sell their products and services. For agencies trying to keep pace with clients in complex industries, facilitating real-time data and alignment with clients makes for a challenging reporting environment.

That’s the situation Weidert Group (Weidert) was in before they found Databox. An inbound marketing agency catering to clients in complex industries, Weidert needed reporting software that was up to agency-usage—one that allowed them to access data in real-time.

To learn more about how Weidert uses Databox to create more value for their clients, we talked with Frank Isca, strategist at Weidert, and Reid Trier, a consultant at Weidert.

Databox has been huge for advancing inbound marketing programs for all my clients,” Reid said, “allowing us to track everything we need in either a single databoard or several that we define.

The Challenge

“Our mission is to do everything in our power to transform and profitably grow clients’ businesses,” Reid and Frank told us, “and a big part of that is how we leverage data to make data-driven decisions. Databox has helped us harvest these insights in real-time and in a visual way for our clients to see the value we’re providing.”

Prior to implementing Databox, the Weidert team was spending hours every month pulling data from various sources into a cohesive monthly report for each client. Their reporting process was manual, time-consuming, and—worst of all—delayed.

That built-in feedback delay put a hard cap on how flexible and nimble they could be as an agency. In other words, it limited the value Frank, Reid, and the team could create for their clients.

Here are the challenges Weidert faced:

• Spend less time compiling manual reports: Before using Databox, the Weidert team spent in excess of 3 hours every month on reporting. They spent those hours pulling data from several platforms and wrangling it into a cohesive report.

“It was a lot of pulling manual screenshots and putting them into a Powerpoint deck and also grabbing things from Google Analytics, Search Console, and other platforms,” Frank said. “It was very laborious. It took us a lot of time, and it wasn’t a good use of our clients’ budgets and our support time.”

Reid added, “Pulling in all this data from different sources into a cohesive report took 3, maybe 4+ hours at the end of the month. It was a lot of manual work.”

• Bring real-time data into planning and prioritization: Once they’d wrangled all the right data, monthly reports were still backward-looking, based on delayed insights.

Without Databox, they said, “we’d still be doing manual reports with static screenshots, which was a very time-intensive process. This also led to delayed insights and reports that our clients didn’t find value in.”

As Reid explained it, they thought “There has to be a better way to do this—to get automated insights in a single location and give clients easy access to their program performance.”

• Align with client’s objectives and KPIs: After all the time and elbow grease Reid and Frank put into client reports, they didn’t always align with the KPIs that really mattered to their clients.

“I had a recent case where I built the initial databoards for a client—and come to find out, they didn’t necessarily care about all the metrics on those boards,” Reid explained. “[Databox] allowed us to go back and refine our KPIs so that we only showed them metrics that mattered.

The Solution

Once the Weidert team found Databox, their whole reporting reality changed.

“When we found out that Databox could make this more real-time and pull in data-points from different platforms into one view and easily share that with clients, it was a big, welcome change,” Frank said.

They connected Google AdSense, Google Sheets, HubSpot Marketing, Google Analytics, QuickBooks, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Instagram Business, Wistia, Google My Business, Jira, Facebook Pages, Google Search Console, YouTube, Google Ads, Twitter, HubSpot CRM.

The team completed the Predictable Performance training program and set about building up their library of core dashboards and templates—many that started from existing public Databox dashboard templates.

“We check the dashboards regularly,” Reid noted, “and if we see that we’re not on track to reach our goals, we dig deeper into the reasons why.”

Weidert’s Top Integrations

Here are the solutions Weidert found with Databox:

• Spend less time compiling manual reports: Frank and Reid set about building out a library of the core databoards they use for every client. Now, when a new client signs on, the templates make quick work of setting up their reporting system.

“We’ve made a lot of progress this year in establishing some core Databoards that we use across the team,” Frank told us. “That has made setting up new clients very efficient. We pull some of those core Databoards that we know we’re going to use and then we customize from there.”

• Bring real-time data into planning and prioritization: With real-time data at their fingertips, the Weidert team has turned their focus to being more agile and working every day to build more value for their clients.

“Making a point to check in on data more frequently really allows us to be agile in how we function. Being an agile agency, that’s important,” Reid explained, “and Databox really aligns with that with those real-time reports. Being able to have visibility every day versus once a month or once a quarter makes a big difference with clients.”

• Align with client’s objectives and KPIs: With their baseline databoards templated, the team can spend more time tailoring individual databoards to better align with the objectives and KPIs each client cares about.

“The possibilities are endless in terms of what you can include,” Reid said. “You can get extremely granular if you want to or you can look at 10,000-foot metrics. Query Builder allows us to get granular with paid ads and track very specific metrics.”

The Results

Since implementing Databox, Reid and Frank have seen a shift in how the team spends their time—and a matching shift in the value they’re able to create for clients. Less time spent on manual reporting means they can use more of their billable hours to actually work on client campaigns.

With less time spent looking backward at old data, they’re able to make better data-driven decisions about client programs. Plus, Frank notes that the real-time data, along with the ability to easily share it directly with clients, has led to greater engagement from clients and alignment with their team.

Here are the results Weidert saw using Databox:

• Spend less time compiling manual reports: For every client Weidert works with, Databox has saved them 3-4+ hours per month—hours they now spend creating results instead of reports.

“With Databox, we’re saving on average 3 hours per month for the end of month reporting for each client,” they said. “This is huge not only for maximizing our clients’ budgets but also for our team’s capacity, and for turnaround time on these reports.”

• Bring real-time data into planning and prioritization: With real-time data included on their client calls, the team is able to better align with clients, keeping them engaged while ensuring they’re prioritizing the right efforts.

“When we started using something real-time that we could refer to on client calls,” Frank explained, “clients got more engaged and got more value out of that reporting. That was a big, welcome change, knowing that they were actually paying attention to it.”

• Align with client’s objectives and KPIs: Reid reported that, with Databox, reporting has shifted from a once-a-month task to an ongoing process that pulls in real-time insights and engages the client on a more regular basis.

Databox has “allowed for ongoing conversations with clients around metrics. The client is on top of the information in real-time, which has helped advance the conversation on their inbound performance.”