The greatest insight often comes from unexpected places. We think that's true of the mixture of metrics you'll eventually select for your marketing dashboard. Here, we look at some critical metrics you may not have considered for your marketing dashboard but that may be among the most insightful and predictive you'll install.

There are quite literally hundreds of prospective dashboard metrics to consider, but only a few that will provide any leading-indicator insight. The goal here is to point out some of the places where we normally find high correlations to company profitability.

Some of these measures are often viewed as tangential to "marketing" but are, in fact, very much related to the quality and effectiveness of marketing activities. Others are frequently dismissed as "softer" measures, but are nonetheless critical to a foundation of success. Keep in mind that only you can determine which of these are right for your dashboard.

Let's begin with one of the most often overlooked areas: channel management.

Channel Metrics

If you have various distribution channels for your products, then your success is largely dependent on the strength of those channels. The right channel metrics can monitor your progress at shaping, influencing, and managing your business to ensure that the end customer is getting the best brand experience and you are getting the best return on your channel investments. Here are a few potential channel metrics to consider.

Channel Coverage

If you're selling wireless phones through independent retailers, you'll want to make sure you're covering all the places where people are buying those phones. Companies that manage their distribution chains contractually—through independent agents, sales representatives, or other partners that help them get business done—can get clarity on prospect reach and market penetration from a dashboard metric on this issue. It can be even more forward-looking if coverage incorporates prospective channel partners in various stages of finalizing agreements and building out facilities.

Channel Relationship Mix

With the level of decentralization and outsourcing in business today, companies may not have full control over the players who staff their distribution channels downstream. Major oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil don't manage every stop on their distribution chains anymore, but they still have to keep track of how their products are selling at the consumer level. Monitoring the evolving mix of channel relationship types helps to keep the focus on the strategic importance of channel leverage strategies.

Relative Channel Performance

When you have multiple types of channels, you can often structure ways to look at marketing returns by channel—which gives you a view toward opportunities to optimize investments across channels. You might, for example, find that the cost per sale in one channel is significantly lower than the others.

This raises the question of how much more money could be spent in selling through that channel before the returns begin to diminish (an optimization challenge). Monitoring these relative channel performance measures can provoke key questions about how resources are being allocated and help forecast the need for revitalizing efforts or planning capital investments.

Channel Stock Positions

Stock-outs can be a critically limiting factor to growth. Customers get annoyed when they go out of their way to come in only to find you're out of something they think you should have. The loss can be permanent. If monitoring and forecasting in-stock and out-of-stock ratios is crucial to your business, then it's relevant for your dashboard. The forward-looking component of this measurement relies on good sales forecasting to help you spot problems with your inventory before they happen. It can also help you better manage the range of merchandise you carry and watch your inventory turns more closely.

Channel Perceptions of Marketing

There's been very little dashboard activity in this area to date, but this is a measurement category worthy of careful consideration. Many of the same companies that spend millions on research to understand customer and employee views spend nothing on capturing channel perspectives.

This is not only crucial to businesses like fast food franchisors and automobile manufacturers who must coordinate local marketing activity with regional co-ops of franchisees, but can be equally important to manufacturers of all types selling through Lowe's, Target, or other retailers for which the opinions of the category buyers and the sales floor associates can make or break marketing effectiveness. It's also important to industries that distribute through agent networks, wholesalers, or independent sales organizations.

Channel Power Measures

There are a number of different ways you can measure channel power, but the most compelling is how much margin you're keeping vs. your channel partners. If the markup to the final consumer is greater than the wholesale markup, it stands to reason that you have ceded some significant power to the channel. Reclaiming some of that margin is a worthy pursuit for marketing and monitoring and forecasting channel power gives you some sense of how effective you are at changing bottom-line performance through brand building or product innovation.

Organizational Metrics

The strategy map is a tool for aligning the role of marketing with the company and clarifying the requisite business processes, information flows, and organizational skills, tools, and culture.

It seems paradoxical that the same companies that spend millions of dollars each year on training and development completely overlook marketing organizational effectiveness on their marketing dashboards. We don't hear too many arguments that the relationship between employees and customers is critical to the business, nor do we hear anyone bemoan the value of a better-skilled, more efficient workforce. So if it's really important to you that your organization is staffed with the right people with the right skills focused on the right things, you should be looking for dashboard elements to measure your progress.

But which organizational dashboard metrics tell you the most? The following are just a few examples.

Staffing Considerations

A dashboard can highlight whether you're working at full complement and deploying the available capital effectively. You might elect to reflect this as a simple percentage of approved headcount filled, or perhaps segmented on a percentage basis by newly filled vs. trained vs. highly experienced people. Or you might choose to be more forward-looking by monitoring hours worked by current staff vs. approved complement as a means of forecasting overtime costs or just highlighting potential staff burnout by correlating total hours to historical and forecast turnover or tenure rates.

Another important dimension of staffing is skill sets. Many companies emerge from the strategy-mapping process with great clarity on the skills their department will need to hit its objectives. They then engage a training company or university to develop a curriculum to improve the specific desired skills either broadly across the marketing organization or in narrow pockets of specific expertise. Using the dashboard to monitor penetration of your target employees that have achieved the requisite or desired level of training, education, certification, or skill proficiency is mission critical and very appropriate. Skill proficiency is actually a great metric for the dashboard if you believe that training is a forerunner for success.

Succession eligibility is another great monitoring metric for the overall health of the organization. There are two ways to view succession eligibility: first, as the percentage of your senior staff who have groomed replacements ready to step in for them; second, as the overall percentage of marketing staff who are ready to step up to the next job if they had to. Either of these can be presented in stages of readiness, ranging from not-at-all to ready-to-go, which will give you a more dimensional feeling for the progress your organization is making.

If success in your organization is directly related to employee proficiency and satisfaction, then monitoring employee feedback on your dashboard can be a terrific leading indicator. Many organizations have formal voice of the employee (VOE) programs that survey the employee population frequently on their knowledge, understanding, and enthusiasm for the company's mission and strategy. Others choose to measure overall job satisfaction as the likelihood of referring a friend or family member to buy from or work for the company in the next 90 days. These make strong dashboard metrics to the degree they can be correlated to marketplace success.

Innovation

Currently, growth is the predominant component of most CEOs' strategies. They are looking for new products, new customers, new markets, and new sources of profitable revenue. So why aren't more CMOs putting metrics for their product pipeline on a dashboard?

You can use a dashboard effectively to monitor the risk-adjusted revenue forecasts for products or services in various stages of market readiness. At a glance, this will give you terrific insight into the probability of meeting your long-term organic growth objectives. If the pipeline looks like it's stalling, you'll get an early warning indicator with sufficient time to put more resources on solving the problems or expanding the search for new opportunities.

Your dashboard is also an excellent way to track the percentage of marketing resources being spent on new product work. It helps to forecast the expected return from product development and compare it, at a glance, to the return derived from other marketing initiatives. In the end, the dashboard helps determine if innovation is being taken seriously in your organization.