Spring Clean Your Strategy

Hello everybody. Thanks for joining us. Today's webinar is all about spring cleaning, your strategy. I'm excited to introduce clearpoint's co founder and product manager and the audience will be muted for the duration of the webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions in the Q and A tab. Let's go ahead and get started. Ted, take it away.

Great. Hi everybody and welcome. I'm Ted Jackson, co founder of clearpoint. I'm here with Angel O, our product manager. We're excited to share some quick, practical wins to help you spring clean your strategy this year. By spring cleaning, I mean the reports themselves and the process of creating and managing your strategy over time.

Hi all. We know this time of year can feel messy. You're juggling year end reporting, planning for next year and trying to make your strategy actually work across departments. Our goal today is to give you five simple ways to reduce clutter, refocus your team and drive action.

Whether you're a clearpoint user or not, there's value here for you and we'll show you. We'll show just a few clearpoint features along the way to highlight how this can be even easier with the right tools. We're going to focus our webinar on five areas. Reporting with a purpose, Managing overlapping reports, simplifying the reporting calendar, decluttering your strategy and aligning ownership. Let's go.

Report with a purpose. Let's start with one of the biggest issues. We see. Reports that simply recap the past. You pull together performance updates, sound out a dashboard. But what happens in the meeting? Often not much exactly.

Leaders get updates but no clear direction. Typically they already know what's happened in the past. They're the leaders in the organization. They're living it every day. So when meeting reviews, when meetings review the past, people start tuning out. We call these status review meetings, not decision making meetings.

The benefit of fixing the structure of your meetings is huge. When reports include forward looking recommendations, your team comes prepared to take action, not just look backward. You can use the history and performance of your KPIs to provide input into important decisions you need to make. Those meetings run from status review meetings to decision making sessions.

Let me show you what this looks like in clearpoint. I think this is where I want to start starting here on a homepage for Upward Airline. Actually I'm going to switch accounts really quickly because I'm going to start here on a home page of Upward Airlines. And what you can see at the top is, is really just the grounding of the page and then you can see our full scorecard for Upward Airlines. It's organized with objectives. These are the the goals that you're trying to accomplish. Measures. These are our KPIs and initiatives. These are our projects. So and these are the main components of strategy that exist everywhere. They may be called different things in your organization, they might be organized in different ways, but all organizations with strategies have some equivalent of goals. KPIs and projects. Let's take a look at one of them. This one's a measure. Here you can see this measure has charts at the top and it has data at the bottom. But it also has a section called Analysis and Recommendations. The analysis looks backwards and explains what happened last month or last quarter. And the recommendations look forward and allow the owner to make suggestions for what we should be doing. If done right, these suggestions or recommendations will drive the meeting forward. It looks like someone didn't give this analysis a lot of thought. No worries. Let me show you how our AI features can help with this process. I can just ask the AI to analyze our data. We're in the future so looking at December time period and I can copy this analysis right in here and hit save and have some great future analysis that tells me what's happened. Now let's go ahead and update our recommendations. You can do it the same way and we can make some recommendations here. We can obviously modify these. AI doesn't have to do all of your thinking for you, but it can give you a nudge in the right direction. Let's just make two recommendations this time. So now our meetings can be focused on recommendations if what your leadership. If your leadership does the pre reading, they'll be focused on decisions that we should be making about revenue rather than fighting about the individual numbers in the chart. Imagine having a meeting where we're talking about whether we should be analyzing seasonal trends or investigating the competitive landscape. It'd be a lot more important than saying Is this number 3150 or is should it be 3000? The next big spring cleaning item is managing object overlapping reports. So this one is especially timely if you're on a June 30 fiscal year. How do you report on 2025 while planning for 2026?

The overlap causes confusion, teams don't know which goals to update, what data to use, and leadership ends up with mixed messages. Should we report on the end of the year or just focus on the new things in next year's strategy?

I agree this is a real challenge and there's a real benefit of solving this clear boundaries. You can close out one year with confidence while making thoughtful adjustments for the next year. You really need a duplicate copy of your strategy, allowing you to finish strong what you started while making adjustments that reflect your new goals. Your old 2025 version will be stable and consistent and allow you to evaluate full year of performance while you're focused on the fourth quarter. You'll also be able to make changes to your targets and brainstorm new projects that will help you meet your new goals with your duplicate 2026 strategy. So in this case, you can have your cake and eat it too.

Let's jump into Clearpoint Great, so I'm in Clearpoint. You can duplicate your scorecards to start building your next year strategy without disrupting your current reporting. So I'm starting from the Manage Scorecards page and you can go ahead and just pick which scorecard you want to duplicate to get started with reporting out on your next year strategy. I'm going to go ahead and start with this Upward Airlines corporate scorecard and click the three dots icon and select Duplicate Scorecard from here. Now a couple of options will pop up and you'll see that in the title it goes ahead and adds the copy in. So I'm going to replace that with 2026 and we have a couple additional options to also make sure that you bring in all of the right data and pieces from your original scorecard. So I'm going to enable Copy Scorecard status and I'm also going to enable Cascade Copy Scorecard and this is going to also copy any child scorecards of the scorecard that I am duplicating with that it goes ahead and adds in a few more options that I can add in a scorecard prefix to those cascaded scorecards or a suffix. So I want to go ahead and for consistency Also add in 2026 so that all of the child scorecards also have that suffix. And finally I'm going to select Copy Scorecard Links. Once you're ready you can go ahead and hit Duplicate and in just a moment those should go ahead and populate on the screen. So we'll give that just a few seconds here. So as that loads, I'll go ahead and move into the next piece and we can jump back here and check out those new pieces once they're complete. But another option that you can try out in Clearpoint is to take a snapshot to capture exactly where you stand at year end snapshots. Create a frozen record of your entire account before you shift into planning mode so you can create a snapshot of your clearpoint account to track progress over time, compare different versions of a plan, or create a historical record of your account. And it looks like those scorecard duplicates have also made it in, so we'll check those out afterwards before we wrap up here. So I'll go ahead and scroll down and I'm going to look for the snapshots tile under Professional Features here. And I'm just going to go ahead and add in a brand new snapshot. You'll see that it adds a snapshot date of when you capture it and when you're capturing exactly where you stand. So I'll go ahead and start that. But fortunately over here we do already have one completed. So once you do have a snapshot added you can go ahead and edit it. And you can also grant access to any of the to the snapshot for any of specific users and the next time they log in, those users will be prompted to select whether to access your live account or the snapshot. So I'll hit cancel here and close. And just before we wrap up on this slide here, I also want to go ahead and show that those duplicated scorecards have also trickled in on this page. So we can now see that Upward Airlines corporate 2026 as well as all of the children with their 2026 suffix, that's it for this one.

That is awesome Angel.

Let's keep spring cleaning let's talk about calendars. When your reporting schedule is unclear or non existent, everything feels last minute.

No calendar leads to late updates, missed deadlines and rushed commentary teams. Disengage leaders stop reading the reports. So when you think about reporting, do you know when your next four reports are due? Do you have a published plan to get those reports completed?

The next quick win will be to simplify the reporting calendar. Having a clear rhythm changes the game when your team knows what to expect and when reporting becomes more consistent and way less painful. Imagine this. You have a clear reporting schedule. You will report quarterly during the first month after the quarter ends. The executive team meets on the fourth Thursday after the quarter closes, so now you can work backwards. Set reminders for your team to update their information. Define your reporting window. Say weeks two and three after quarter end. Send a draft of the report at the end of week three so you can spot what's missing. Then send a final preread on Monday before the Thursday meeting. Do this a few times and people will look forward to a productive meeting.

Let me show you what this looks like inside of clearpoint, the reporting calendar runs around the workflow. So as an administrator, what you want to do is create a workflow with that calendar that angel described in this case. Let's say we want our end users to make their updates sometime between the 12th and the 23rd. So this two week period and what we're going to be doing is making our updates on the last reporting period and we're going to write some instructions for our end users. We're going to say for your objectives, make sure to update the status, the analysis recommendations like I showed you before for measures. Also make sure to update your data if you're not automatically pulling it in. For initiatives, your percent complete and your status. And then we want to send this out to all of the owners for everyone in Upward air. We can now also see all the duplicates that angel just made. Those aren't ready to report. That's going to be for next year. We're updating our objectives, measures and initiatives and we're going to send everybody an email out to to make those updates. So what does this look like for an end user? Let me jump over to that view, what you would get in that view. Outside of my notifications that angel made her duplications, we're going to see a very simple page that shows you the items that you need to update. Right? The same instructions for your for your objectives, do this for your measures, for your initiatives, make all of your updates. I've made five of my six updates so I just need to make one more for revenue so I can click into revenue. I can see my awesome analysis and recommendations, my instructions on what I should be doing. Look, since I've already made my updates, maybe I'll send a quick note out to, to a teammate, you know, Mark, please review recommendations. Because I mentioned Mark, he's going to get those, you know, a notice that tells him to, to go ahead and, and make those reviews for me and then I'm going to mark this as complete. So now that I've completed my task, that was my last task, so I get confetti. It's great. I can move on to my, my other jobs. My manager who set up this workflow, they can go in and see how we're doing with all of our workflows. Right. How are people doing and making their updates? We've seen Ashley made a few updates. James Mark finished his stuff so we can see all the way through the different updates that people make and we can nudge people as needed so we could say, hey Ashley, And James, maybe you need to to to make sure you complete all of your updates. And if Ashley emails us back and says oh I made mine, I just forgot to mark them as complete, I've already left for the day. Can you mark them? You can go ahead and mark them for her. That will add to the completion and, and update our task complete. So, so this is pretty awesome. And the nice thing is when you're here we could also go over to our calendar and we can see where we are in the reporting process. Everyone has this two week period and we can see that that executive report, the pre read for this is going to go out on Friday. Right? So we're going to be sending this report out on Friday and you can imagine it's going to be a media report. But I got to make sure I get everyone to make all of their their updates along the way. The great thing is you could duplicate your workflow and your briefing books and your schedules. Set it up once and you know you can plan it for your next four reporting periods. Everyone has a common calendar. They know when they're going to be busy. They know when those pre reads are going to come out and know when that report's going to be. Looks like we should have a lot of good stuff to review over Memorial Day. Now let's look at the next spring cleaning item. It's called decluttering. One of the easiest wins for your strategy is simply removing what you don't need.

Yep. If you're tracking too many fields or using templates that don't get updated, you're just creating noise. Plus, most teams only review what's above the fold, so I waste time updating the rest.

When you clean up your reporting, people actually engage with it. They see what matters, they focus on their update, they focus their updates on what counts. You should go through this three step process. Look at your goals and KPIs. Are there any that make you think this is saying the same thing I said on the previous goal or we never have any data about this one. Should you double down and clarify these or is it time to archive them? In the simplest world, you can remove them from the presentation or the briefing book to give time to the important information. Finally, look careful at those fields that never get filled out. Are you asking too much of your team? Does it matter if you never fill in your milestone details or update your business plan? Actions strategy discussions can be high level and allow you to focus on what matters.

Clearpoint makes this easy. You can archive or delete unused fields, goals, or measures without needing to rebuild your reports. Let's jump back into clearpoint. We can start by archiving a scorecard from the Manage Scorecards page and we'll use Western Division as an example. Click the three dots on the left hand side of the scorecard you want to archive and simply click Archive. Once that's confirmed and a scorecard has been archived, you can still leverage the Show Archived toggle to just view and unarchive any archived scorecards that you do have access to. Go ahead. So that's already enabled and we can see that archived scorecard hanging out in our table here, but we can also turn that off and remove it from our view. Another great way to declutter your account is by archiving any unused custom fields. So from this control panel I've headed over into System Setup. And from here I'm going to click Custom Fields under Standard Features. I'm going to jump into the Measure tab as an example. So we'll be able to view all measure custom fields and see which ones are being used or not used. But once you're viewing those Measure Custom fields, you'll see a tag on every custom field which indicates if it's being used in a summary report or in a detail page and how many. And these tags will only appear if the custom field is being used in a Reporter detail page. So it looks like the first custom field that isn't on any detail page or summary report is Success Criteria. So I'm going to go ahead and archive this item here. I'm going to start by clicking that Edit pencil for Success criteria. And from here I'm just going to select Archived and click Save. Once the custom field is archived, you can also leverage the Show Archive checkbox here to view and unarchive any custom fields. Let's also check out if we can clean out this image field that's in just two detail layouts. I'll head directly to a measure to see how else we can declutter these low used fields. So first let's go ahead and edit Image and then I'm going to go over to this Detail Layouts section here. You can see that it's just being used in this revenue measure. And we also duplicated this into another scorecard. So it's going to be over there as well. But let's just focus on our main scorecard from 2025. Going to jump over there now and let's check out where that image field is and how it's being used. So Image is over Here, and it's blank, so it isn't being used on this layout. So let's go ahead and simplify the layout and remove the image field from it. I'm going to use this dropdown by the Edit button and click Edit Layout and simply remove this pod from the page. When you're ready, you can click Save. But we also have the options to save to an entire scorecard. Update all measures, Name Revenue, or Update all measures in this account. And as we saw earlier, this was duplicated into that new scorecard. But since the field is not being used, I'm going to go ahead and update all measures named Revenue. Awesome. So now the image field has been decluttered from my measures. And keep in mind that you can still edit the element and access this field until you archive or delete it from custom fields.

All right, let me get back to my screen.

Awesome. And finally, our last spring cleaning tip. Let's talk about ownership. Shared ownership often leads to no ownership, right?

When something is everyone's responsibility, no one really feels accountable. But the answer isn't just assigning one person. It's about clear roles. You know you have a reporting challenge when you come to meetings and everyone's saying, I thought you were going to make this update.

Exactly. Maybe one person is the analyst who enters data, while another is the executive sponsor who reviews and adds context. As long as you have clarity and a process, you should be able to save time and energy with your reporting. Look at where you're struggling the most with strategy execution, and see if you have too many people participating and too few people leading the process.

I already showed you how to engage different user roles in the reporting workflow. Let me show you a few other places where we bring users to life. We're back on our favorite measure, Revenue. That's been picked on a lot today. I can now edit this layout the same way that angel was editing it before. And I can pull out some additional users like a Measure Analyst, as well as collaborators. Pull them out on the screen. I'll hit Save. Then I can edit the Measure Analyst, make it Ashley, add an additional collaborator. We already know that we were asking Mark for help on this. Let's add Greg. Let's quickly clean up this report. Let's make this a little bit cleaner, make our fields just a touch smaller so they look good on the screen. And now we can see we have an owner, we have an analyst, we have some collaborators, and we can also reach out to these people, just like I've reached out to Mark. We can be we can reach out to Ashley separately in a separate conversation and a new year to date calculation. So we can use the features inside of clearpoint to collaborate with this group. It's just a really nice way to to to interact, have ownership and bring your strategy to life. One last feature that I'd like to show you that many of our enterprise users enjoy. Let me find it is called approvals. And approvals can be found in any of our scorecards that basically you can require approval for a variety of things in clearpoint. So if you want to make sure that when you know new initiatives or projects get added, or you want to make sure that no KPIs get deleted, you can require approval for these. And the typical approval is a scorecard owner, let's say myself, or a scorecard collaborator collaborator like Clarice. These folks can be responsible for doing the approvals along the way. And if you're really a nice control freak, you can require approvals for updates every single quarter to make sure that you've seen them. I was joking about being a control freak, but you might have someone like your analyst making their updates. And then you want to make sure that you do approve those measure updates, that it does match the new formulas or the ways that you're describing information. Or another good case is when someone's putting in that really light level of analysis like we showed at the very beginning of this webinar, you can go in and make sure that those get approved in the right way. So you do have quality reporting at the executive team level and you're making sure you're focused on those recommendations along the way. So these are really great features if you ever feel out of the loop on your strategy, or if you want to make sure you're doing those high quality reports along the way.

Before we wrap up, let's quickly recap the five spring cleaning wins we covered today and why they matter. Report with a purpose. Don't just recap the past. Use reports to spark decisions, drive action, and create forward momentum. Manage overlapping reports. Eliminate confusion during the year end transition by creating clean boundaries between planning and performance. Simplify your reporting calendar. Set a clear, repeatable cadence so reporting becomes routine, not a fire drill. Declutter your strategy. Cut through the noise by focusing only on the goals, measures and fields that truly drive results and align ownership. Clarify who's doing what so updates get done and the right people are ready to lead the conversation. Spring cleaning, your strategy isn't just about tidying up, it's about removing friction boosting focus and setting your team up for real execution. When you reduce clutter, you create space for clarity, momentum and impact. That wraps up our five quick wins. We'd love to hear your questions, drop them in the chat, and we'll take a few live.

And thanks to everybody who joined us today. Whether you're a clearpoint customer or just here for some inspiration, we hope you walk away with a few ideas to try this month.

If you want to dive deeper, you can download our Spring Cleaning ebook or schedule a quick call to see how clearpoint can help.

Thanks again and happy Spring Cleaning.