Databox Review: Automated Client Reporting for Agencies — #AgencyToolbox

Hey, what's up? Welcome to episode number 15 of the Agency Toolbox podcast. My name is Gray MacKenzie. This week we are talking about client reporting and what that looks like at your agency. And specifically, we're going to be focusing around one relatively new app that helps you automate that client and internal reporting, and that app is Databox. So let's go ahead and dive in. Now. We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about what Databox is, why they do it, and some of the competitors that are out there. But for the most part, I just want to take you behind the scenes and give you exactly what this looks like to get Databox set up and walk you through what this would look like to use at your agency, specifically in the context of client reporting. We'll talk about it in a couple other contexts as well, but go ahead and hang with me here as we dive right in. Okay, so I'm here on the Data Box website and you can quickly get it. It's just databox.com you guys can quickly get a rundown of what the pricing model looks like, what the feature set is. Basically all they're trying to do is bring all your numbers in a live stream into one centralized place where you can build dashboards to be able to kind of quickly get all your business analytics without having to go pull them for all the different sources at one time. That works. You know, there's a ton of different businesses who are looking for that type of thing, whether that's in the agency space where you're trying to grab these not only for your own company, but also for your clients, but also in the software space. Any kind of team really could use this product. Before we get too deep into how Databox works, I just want to share a couple of the competitors that we've either looked at or used before. And in the agency space, the biggest one that we hear over and over is simply Google Sheets or Google Slides or Excel or whatever else they're using, but largely building out, especially for client reporting. I've been really surprised by the number of agencies I'm talking to who are manually going in, grabbing the KPIs ahead of that monthly progress meeting with a client or quarterly progress meeting, throwing them into a Google Sheet, trying to make the deck look good, and then basically taking a screenshot of that or the full report and either sharing that with a client, just sharing the whole file, or just presenting that in the context of a meeting that might be where your agency is. We did that for quite A while at Guavabox. That's really obviously that's not the ideal way to do it. It takes time for things. You know, the numbers aren't going to change. You can automate that. But the point is that's not the worst possible way to do it. So don't be super discouraged if that's what you're doing currently. But also at the same time realize there's a better way to do that. And there's a couple pain points associated with that. One is clients have visibility into those numbers. How often In a lot of cases they have visibility once a month or once every quarter into what those are looking like and they can log in and grab some of that information. But that's kind of a pain for them. So the biggest pain point, in addition to the fact that we felt like we were wasting time is it's also kind of a lack of transparency in a lot of cases, or ease of transparency, I guess was a problem for some of the clients who just wanted to as you know, well, clients always want to be completely hands on. So clients wanted additional access to be able to go grab the numbers that that mattered. So then we started looking at some other competitors. Dasheroo is the one that we used more than anything else but Gecko Board and Cypher Cyfe or a couple other relatively popular ones before ultimately coming upon Databox and now using Databox. So with that said, there's a couple competitors, there's what we've seen people using. I want to go ahead and actually just show you guys what this looks like. And so I've got a couple different examples that I pulled up from a couple Guava Box client portals on all the data here is anonymized, so not a big deal. But just to give you guys actual numbers and what this looks like, here's a very simple case. So here's a case where working with a client on marketing and sales. So we're involved on both sides and what we're trying to do is just help them visualize here's what your funnel looks like so they can get this information. This is obviously month to date for both of these funnels. Funnels, marketing and sales. Obviously at the end of the day we're trying to help them view the whole thing as just this is your growth funnel, this is your customer acquisition funnel, but have been involved on both sides of things. So here is starting at the very top of the funnel, what's happening visits wise. So given the gross number of visitors, what that conversion rate is Looking like how many contacts it's turning to and then the conversion rate into customers. Now obviously we can also pull in and we'll get into this in a little bit. We could certainly pull in data depending on how clients do this, but most clients are using an online bookkeeping platform like a QuickBooks Online or Xero or something like that. And so depending on what's out there, if it's either of those two platforms, QuickBooks Online or Xero, there's an integration with Databox where we can pull in what the actual value is from the customers and the total invoices. Not every client wants to share that with an agency. So sometimes just keeping it in terms of customers is easier. And then just going back to the lifetime value, average lifetime value of a customer, which is kind of easy to share in most cases at least. Hopefully most, most customers of your agency, most agency clients are going to be okay sharing that if they're not. Like you have to question whether that's, that's the right customer for you. But, but anyways, so visits, contacts, customers. That's the real high level view. Now on the sales funnel sides of things, what we're looking at is what are the contacts that are coming in. Now obviously this is gonna be the same thing and at the end of the day, one versus customers should match up. In a couple cases, you may have multiple deals for the same customer. So that's why sometimes there will be a discrepancy depending on your situation. But again, we're looking at contacts. What's the conversion rate from contacts into deals? How many do we close now we have closing in here. Basically this is one way that we look at sales velocity. So there's a couple of the dashboards that we use here, but how, what does the sales cycle look like? So one of the big goals is and Ryan Herman and I did a podcast episode on this recently on Inbound Sales Journey. The second best answer in sales. If you just Google that, you'll find that resource as well or go to the show notes@doinbound.com agencytoolbox and you'll be able to grab the link to this episode and grab that as well. But we're looking at the second best answer in sales is the answer no, it's not a good fit at this time. So that saves everyone from wasting more time and allows you to move on. So look at how many are closed. Now obviously if we won seven, then we closed lost five deals as well. So that's just a very simple from the top of the funnel, kind of full funnel, super quick analysis on some very basic metrics. And the reality is that this is in a lot of cases, these are the big items that you should be looking at. And it's just really nice for a client to not just get this, this is one that's not hard to pull on a monthly basis. You can automate those reports or spend 15 minutes each month to come up with these reports. But the ability for a customer to just have access and anyone at that customer's organization just have access to this URL and go in and see and I may have to blur out this URL now that I've said that to go in and see the performance at any given time is really nice. They're able to grab this on a consistent basis. They can even see when that was last synced. So that is number one, just a simple client funnel reporting example here for you. Now my next example that I wanted to pull you into is what does it look like if we get a little bit more in depth and maybe take it at different stages of the funnel. So the last one is kind of here's a full funnel. Now here's an example of some of the data that we can pull in and stream in in live, roughly live time. And this is specifically for a top of the funnel example. So we're able to look, we're able to pull from Google Analytics and see over the last 30 days, over the last month what, what channels are sending us the most traffic. So we can see the breakdown here between organic search, what's coming directly, referral, social, email, those breakdowns and have that in real time. So this is a client who wants to see where's my traffic coming from and have, have some quick insights into that. Now there's some social reporting down here, page likes, reactions, LinkedIn followers, some more Google Analytics data with specific page views and a couple KPIs that we're looking at. So bounce rate having some specific goals around increasing user engagement. So unique page views, obviously we're going to get to our ultimate bounce rate from a combination of some of these other metrics, but being able to grab our bounce rate, how many page views you're getting and the average time on page. So increasing engagement is a combination of obviously increasing page views and traffic overall, also increasing the time on the page and reducing the bounce rate that we have here. So this is just a quick example of what you can spin up. This one obviously is specific to top of the funnel and I don't have Any Twitter metrics on here, but you can customize this based on what channel the client's on and pull this all in. So Data box has been really convenient. That first example, if you're a HubSpot user, this is something that's pretty easy to go in and get. Going in and grabbing all this is not quite as easy. You could certainly take the time to build out custom Google Analytics, Google Analytics reports and jump over to Facebook real quickly to try and grab these numbers and over to LinkedIn to see what your latest update is. But the more platforms that you start adding into things, obviously the more complex this gets and the more valuable having one centralized dashboard to pull it in. So that's why a tool like Databox or Dasheroo or one of the others that I mentioned is really simple and easy to use for this. So I also wanted to show you guys, I wanted to give you specifically here is here like two specific examples of how to use this in the agency space. But also want to show you guys the back end of Databox and how this works. And there will be more resources coming out of this or out on this podcast and from us here at D.O. inbound around this, but wanted to give you an initial overview. So basically, if we're looking at our simple funnel here, this is what the designer looks like. We're able to go in and sort through whatever connected accounts we had and I'll show you just a quick glance here at what accounts you can connect. So when you're inside the data manager in Databox, you'll be able to quickly see by category, filter down and see what's available now versus what's in beta. So if you're using Drift, which we've talked about, agencies using Drift quite a bit and the value in Drift, big Drift fans, we also use Intercom at Do Inbound ourselves. You can connect those sources right here and get all kinds of metrics like what's your average response time? So as an internal team, or if you're working with a client specifically, a lot of clients in the in the SaaS space will look at things like what's our average ticket response time? Or if you're trying to figure out. We've had Josh Harkis on Inbound Agency Journey to talk about the magic number getting back to people within five minutes when they start a conversation or fill out a form. And so having a tool like Drift or Intercom and monitoring what's our average response time can help you get to those goals financially. You can hook up with things like Stripe, PayPal, QuickBooks. So if you're invoicing via Stripe, you can go in and see what your monthly recurring revenue looks like, what your overall charges are. QuickBooks, see what overdue invoices are out there that you need to take action on. Obviously a lot of tools that you'd expect to see in here and then a really strong integration. This is one of the things that sets Databox apart specifically in our case and in a lot of agency cases is the really, really tight integrations with HubSpot, the marketing side and the CRM and sales side. A lot of that has to do with the team. They've got some ex HubSpotters on the team. Pete Caputa, formerly of the HubSpot Partner Program, is now running Databox and he's also been on the Inbound Agency Journey podcast. Big fans of Pete and what he's doing with the team at Databox right now. And so that insight coming from the agency background has helped them really gear this for the agency space as well. For tools that aren't listed here, one of the things that we've played around with is Zapier and you can grab an awful lot of data out of Zapier. It's certainly easier to use the built in integrations because then you don't have to do any of the math or any of the back end stuff, but you can grab almost anything via zapier Zapier. So let's jump back in here real quickly and just walk you through what this looks like. You're basically going to pick what your platform is. There's a whole bunch of pre built templates that you can just drag over. So if I were to reduce the size of this block right here just by dragging and dropping, then I can open up my data blocks and pull in deals. Closed one and lost, grab an initial block and go ahead and resize that and we'll be able to see quickly what's happened over the last month to date and get some numbers in here. You can set different time intervals so people will be able to click through. There's a whole bunch of features I could go on and on for, for a long time about that. If there's something. One of the questions that I've heard quite a bit is, well, this isn't exactly what I want. You also have the ability to change the visualization type and to create your own custom metrics so you can do math in the back of data box that then is going to get pulled out. So for Example, if you don't want a funnel, maybe you pull in like we had on the other dashboard there, we pull in a gauge. So you kind of have the ability to customize this for your customers. Now in the agency space, specifically where you're going to gain a ton of value from is building out templates that you're going to use to report on a standardized basis with clients. That helps you for quite a few reasons if you have that by default and you might have little tweaks. But one, obviously the process of setting up these initial reporting templates is substantially accelerated. But number two, you get used to and your team is going to be used to what we're reporting on on a monthly basis and we'll be able to adjust to some little variants, but largely understand exactly what we're reporting on so you don't get caught off guard. It's one of the things that that has been challenging for a lot of agencies who wind up doing the relatively manual way of Google sheets or slides or throwing it all in an email is trying to remember what we're reporting on for every single client. So automating that process with a tool like Databox has been really helpful for quite a few agencies who we've been talking to. Last thing I'm going to share with you inside Databox here is the design now, right now, there's not a ton of customization on the design itself. You can't change the fonts, you've got some limited color customizations. So I think that there's an opportunity in the agency space, so many of us like to have our things completely branded for our agency. I think there's an opportunity for improvement here for Databox to continue to tighten this up. But you're able to quickly preview, you can change up some of the visual settings that they have here. So you can change the background image right now. Oh, just kidding. Look at that. We've got an update here. So there you go. They're already onto some of this. You can actually put in your own custom images or colors rather here and images. So that's a great improvement that they've made even since initially setting this up in our case. So we already have some of those things down. How about this? We're learning on the fly and you can change up some of the streaming settings that you have. So if you want to have limit ip, limit certain IP addresses to have access to a platform. So for example, you don't necessarily want this long URL to be just publicly available to anybody. You May want to restrict that to certain IP addresses. Password protect it. You can loop multiple data walls together. So maybe you have the simple client funnel and the top of the funnel dashboard put together. You can also just email these reports over to people or copy that URL and share it. And then here's where if you have a template, you're going to be able to duplicate the data wall as well. Databox has an awesome mobile app, so that's actually been one of the most helpful things is being able to put together being able to put together some of your data sources and throw it on the phone. Personally, I do not use the mobile app very frequently. I'm also sitting in front of my computer or standing at my standing desk most days. So it's no problem to just have that pop open as my new tab screen or go to it from the book bookmarks bar. But clients love the idea of the mobile app and being able to have access to those metrics at all times. There's a whole bunch, I mean there's multiple episodes to come in the future on the going a deeper level, I guess, a lower level, more granular, more technical on how to actually set this up and some of the features of Databox. But there's also a level up that I'd like to go and get into how to leverage this, how to sell this reporting, how to include this in the differentiator for your agency versus other agencies and specifically what metrics you should be pulling, how you decide on metrics in the first place and getting clients to buy in on certain metrics and obviously positioning the end goal here is more transparency, more visualization into the ROI that your clients are getting is going to help you continue to retain and grow business. So that is Databox in very well, not that brief but but somewhat brief nutshell for you. If you guys are using Data Box right now, I'd love to hear about what tips or tricks you're finding or how it's how it's working for you. Any, certainly any requests for improvement. Would love to hear about that. If you're using an alternative, would love to hear what you're using, how that's going for you and then obviously any questions that you have, don't hesitate to share as well. In the meantime, if you've not yet subscribed on YouTube or on iTunes, go ahead and head whichever one you prefer. The Agency2Walks podcast is on both of those, so go ahead and head there and I look forward to coming back and speaking with you guys next week. When we dig into yet another productivity app for agencies and agency team members. All right, talk to you then.