How To Communicate Your Data

We learned a lot during our customer QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) over the last month. So much so that we’ve written 2 blog articles about our learnings! In our first blog article on “Our Customers’ Top Use Cases,” we’ve already listed out the specific ways in which our customers are using Whaly - the metrics they’re tracking, the dashboards they’re creating, and why they’re important to our customers’ respective organizations.

Next, this blog article explores the data communication & distribution aspect - the ways in which our customers have been communicating data across their organizations and teams, once the dashboards are in place. Sharing data and metrics is a great way to keep everyone updated on overall progress, and encourage ideation on what adjustments and improvements can be made, so we’re loving these ideas! They’re easy to implement at your own organization as well, so we hope this inspires you. Once you get going on some of these intitiatives, you'll find that you're already on a path to boosting data adoption at your company, and spreading a data culture across different teams.

Weekly team meetings

Depending on the team, weekly team meetings are quite common - they’re likely already happening at your company and set up in your calendar. During these meetings, team leaders at our customers’ organizations have been using Whaly to present a core performance dashboard. This is especially popular and common in Sales, for example. These dashboards serve as the “anchor” of these meetings, offering a great way to structure conversations, and a visually clear way to ensure that everyone in the meeting is on the same page and understanding of the current situation and progress. These are the topics that team leaders like to go over using Whaly dashboards:

• Which team member is the highest performer (top of the leaderboard) and should to be celebrated. This adds a bit of healthy competition and makes the leaders feel appreciated and accomplished.
• Oppositely, the dashboard may highlight which team member could use as a little bit of extra help or support, as they are lagging behind.
• The dashboards give an indication of whether the level of work and productivity across the entire team is increasing or decreasing (overall deals, conversion rate, # of deals in certain stages, and more).
• The impact of the overall team’s work outputs

Daily/Weekly Digest on Slack

Our customers have told us that every week (or even day!), someone from the team grabs data from the dashboards and builds a little “narrative” of where the team is at. It usually looks like a “daily snapshot” with a few sentences or bullet points, and it’s posted to Slack (or any other company messaging system), with a screenshot of the main KPIs that support the narrative. For example, it can be an update on the # of outbound prospecting calls completed so far that week.

• This is a great way to get everyone on board with what’s going on in the team, understand whether everything’s on track or not, and encourages people to keep pushing towards their objectives.
• This gives a great “async” pulse on where the team is at and keeps everyone engaged, even if they can’t be part of the weekly meetings.

TVs on the Wall

A lot of Whaly users have reported that they have Whaly dashboards broadcasted on TV screens around their offices. We love this idea!

Projecting rotating dashboards around the room on the mounted TVs is a great way to push for data / dashboard awareness, and to communicate the metrics to everyone in the organization.

• It provides awareness into what the company is tracking, and an easy, constant way for everyone to know where they’re at with the key metrics.
• This is also a great way to foster a data culture and to boost the importance of data. Any new employee that joins the team will have the immediate understanding that this is a data-driven company, one that makes decisions based around data.

“Dashboard Gallery” Notion/Confluence Pages

Companies that rely heavily on their knowledge management system (such as Notion) for their internal communications are benefiting from creating a “Dashboard Gallery” section, with direct embeds of their dashboards. This way, everyone who has access to Notion on their team can have real-time dashboard visibility directly within Notion - a tool that they’re already familiar with using.

• Since the dashboard embeds are natively integrated with Notion, people can change filters and update the dashboards metrics directly from Notion without having to switch between tools.
• The Notion page can contain additional context and information in the form of a write-up that details who is in charge of the dashboard, associated objectives, and provide some more context around how it’s being used.
• Having dashboards embedded in the tool that everyone is already used to working in will help boost data adoption across the company.

Newsletters

Some of our Whaly customers have established a cadence of sending newsletters to their entire company periodically (Monthly or Quarterly) to give a retrospective and a current snapshot of the latest progress. Our customers that do this extract certain metrics from Whaly, and feature them prominently in their newsletters, so that their curated information is as data-backed as possible, showing stats around real progress.

• This is an ideal way to communicate company metrics to people who are not used to accessing data in Whaly directly.
• This is great for exec or C-level stakeholders to get a quick low-down on what’s going on in certain teams.

Data distribution is a key way to start “evangelizing” data across the company - to reinforce its importance and to get more people on board with tracking and learning from data. Do you have any other data distribution methods that are working well for you?

We’d love to hear your ideas! Please reach out to: anna@whaly.io with any comments or questions.