“What is our role in fundamental data cleanup? What is your role?”
“Who is responsible for de-duping, normalizing and reconciling variations in field names, etc., before we start looking at dashboards?”
“Do you offer standard reports that reflect marketing best practices or suggestions for analyses to run based on best practices?”
These are just a few of the 40 critical questions your marketing dashboard partner should answer before you buy. Depending on your partner selection, you might be on the hook for some data management heavy lifting—because your marketing dashboards won’t mean much without it, and most software partners don’t provide it.
Beckon has identified six distinct processes that must occur before your dashboards will mean anything: data intake, data cleansing and normalization, data enrichment, data storage, report design and data visualization. This convenient list of 40 questions covers all bases and ensures that you won’t be met with unhappy surprises after you commit—like finding out you can’t use APIs to transfer data into the tool, you have to structure or tag the data yourself before it goes in, or that you’ll have to define (and derive) each and every metric and KPI you want to visualize.
This handy four-pager is a must-have for anyone going through the marketing dashboard RFP process. Even if a dashboard provider is something you’re just starting to investigate, these questions can help you drive more productive conversations with the software partners you’re considering—everything from which data sources your partner will accept to their benchmarking capabilities. Discuss each of these points with your prospective partners in detail and you’ll get a much more realistic picture of what life will be like for you and your team after the implementation.
Download: 40 Questions to Ask Prospective Dashboard Partners