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When sharing important information with clients, the presentation is just as important as the substance. This was the case for the Marketing and advertising consultants at Sellian. While the team was able to create serviceable reports, the process took hours and didn’t deliver the professionally-looking results they wanted.
The team began looking into a solution that could offer a more professional-looking design for their monthly marketing reports. The integration capabilities and high-quality Databoard design features within Databox turned out to be exactly what the company was looking for.
We sat down with Ernst Wallinga, Co-founder of Sellian, to learn more about the competitive advantage the company has found with Databox, and how they’re using it to strengthen their operations both with their client base and with internal teams.
Sellian, founded in 2015, is built around serving the marketing and lead generation needs of mid-sized companies in the Dutch market. The company’s BDRs and marketing professionals design campaigns and content for inbound strategies, and also act as a sales team, developing relationships from inbound leads, identifying best-fit prospects and decision-makers, and performing outbound prospecting on behalf of their clients.
The company, like all sales and marketing departments, is responsible for showing its results, course-correcting when necessary, and delivering great value for its clients. It’s able to serve this purpose through a keen understanding of the customer life-cycle including funnel development and effective sales & marketing practices.
“Lots of companies are looking for better-quality leads… They don’t have a proper sales process in order, and a proper marketing process in order. The alignment, usually, is missing.”
The company saw the opportunity to take up these functions in order to boost their clients’ revenue.
In a sea of marketing and advertising agencies, Sellian has found a way to differentiate itself using a simple, but highly effective idea. Sellian takes its accountability and reporting for clients to the next level, installing a real-time Databoard right in their offices that features their metrics on a custom-created Databox Databoard. It’s an incredibly effective tool for showing their commitment to transparency and results. It also creates instant loyalty with clients, who come to rely on the ease of having data available at a glance, provided as part of their retainer contract.
Wallinga first came across this idea on a site visit to a client. On a tour of the office, they came across 50” TV displaying metrics data in real-time. Seeing this highly transparent method of tracking metrics (literally) on display got Wallinga thinking. “It was really by coincidence, but just what we want, and our customers are happy with it.”
The power of the in-office display is two-fold. First, it serves as an excellent means of communicating progress and value in real-time. This manner of reporting is so effective, says Wallinga, it’s actually reduced the amount of time Sellian spends on in-person reporting. Where an in-person monthly meeting used to be standard practice, the instant information available through the display means that monthly meetings can be reduced to a monthly report delivered by email, requiring only quarterly meetups to discuss strategy and address any concerns not covered in the Databoards.
“The customers are more involved now. If they see changes in the data, the call us and say ‘what’s happening?’’’ Even though the team is on top of everything, that saves them time, as they can sync with the client right away and agree on any changes that are necessary.
Flatscreens full of valuable data also serve as a powerful marketing tool. Visitors to their clients’ offices naturally encounter the displays—with prominent Sellian branding— and immediately take an interest in the data and the concept. “Who is delivering this? Their clients love the professional, eyecatching design, and the ease with which they can get up to date on the relevant numbers for campaigns and initiatives underway, as early as the first day.
The Databoards have also made clients more engaged and responsive. Where they now have visibility into their metrics at a glance, they can partner actively in the success of these campaigns, ask questions and collaborate on needed changes in an agile way, and get in touch with the results on an ongoing basis.
“We try to make a forecast for what they do, instead of looking back and seeing what we did. The customers like to see the funnel growing.”
This ability to see what’s ahead has created predictability in the numbers— a hot commodity in the current, unpredictable climate of COVID-19.
At first, the team was reluctant to overhaul their reporting functions in such a profound way, content to rely on the data in Hubspot as they had been for some time. Wallinga saw the benefits, though, and recruited some internal champions who were optimistic about the potential.
Soon, the team began to see the value in educating their customers directly and in real-time. It made for less effort to report and discuss campaign effectiveness and “debriefing,” leaving more valuable time for discussing next steps and proactive measures.
The team also uses the data to streamline its internal meetings and communications. The sales and marketing team tracks several metrics on an ongoing basis, including activity-focused metrics such as calls made, emails sent, discovery meetings set, as well as quotes, closed-won, closed-lost, and website traffic.
Having this data available on Databoards makes internal communications and goalsetting more productive.
“Its a really good starter for the conversation. We start with sales and then go back to marketing,” says Wallinga, describing it as a bit of reverse engineering. “We look at what we did, what does that mean, and where can we improve.”
Having this information available at a glance in a sales reporting software means the sales and marketing teams can arrive at retrospectives more prepared, with a better understanding of the numbers up for discussion.
The team is looking forward to expanding their internal use of Databox in the future, and Databox is ready to help as it expands its integration capabilities and offers custom solutions to solve novel reporting needs.
If your business could benefit from realtime data like Sellian has, create an account and chat with our team.
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