The BrightGauge Blog

Do you use or manage Apple devices in your MSP? If so, this is an integration you're going to want to pay attention to! As Apple products continue growing in popularity, we’ve heard loud and clear that our MSP customers are ready to include that data in their BrightGauge, alongside all the other metrics that run their business. And because Addigy focuses exclusively on Mac assets, their comprehensive data helps you to maintain a secure, up-to-date Apple portfolio. How to Use Addigy + BrightGauge to Make Data Driven Decisions Utilizing your own KPIs, you can view your top-level business metrics or zero in on system views. That means everyone from your Executive team to your front-line Support can access the data they need to perform at their best, every day. Plus, keeping your Addigy data in your BrightGauge dashboard gives you the ability to see what your Mac networks are doing in real-time, making it easier than ever to increase uptime and address issues preemptively. Addigy Machine Monitoring With a machine monitoring dashboard, you’ll see drive statuses at a glance and be able to address vulnerabilities before a machine becomes compromised. Addigy Executive Report Templates Using an Addigy report template that’s easy to customize, you’ll always be able to show your clients the value of the services you provide. Client reporting is simple to set up, and each one can be automatically generated and filled with the data they want to see, when they want to see it. Customized, Complex Gauge Building When you’re managing dozens or hundreds of Apple products across multiple networks, having the ability to monitor all asset trends at once saves you the time and frustration of manually compiling the data. For example, with a System Health Details by Policy gauge in place, you can clearly see how Encryption Health is stacking up compared to Warranty Health, Security Health, and more, across all of the organizations you manage. By the way, when you connect Addigy + BrightGauge, you'll automatically get default KPIs and templates in your account. Get started with 38 default gauges, 2 pre-built dashboards, and 1 report template. Avoid any downtime and get the data you need at your fingertips right off the bat. To learn more about how you can make data driven decisions for your Apple-based networks, please visit Addigy + BrightGauge, or click here to try a free trial of Addigy's Mac network monitoring.

As you may know, we recently launched the ability to embed your gauges on public sites. This is an awesome way to show off your KPIs and let prospects and customers alike know a bit about what they can expect from you as a trusted partner. For example, embedding your Average Response Time or your CSAT scores on your marketing site can reveal to viewers that you're committed to providing excellent service. That being said, there's no need to limit yourself to external sites. We've been talking to BrightGauge users and have found that embeddable gauges are also a powerful way to boost visibility and transparency amongst your internal teams. In a recent webinar, we spoke to customer Justin Bryant, the Director of Quality Assurance for C Spire, to learn how he's using embeddable gauges to build an internal service library using the ITIL framework. The shared library allows team members from every department to see how the company as a whole is tracking against certain KPIs, which works to motivate and align everyone in the organization. Additionally, the webinar covers operational maturity, how to create the public gauges within BrightGauge, how to set up a KPI library, and how to share those KPIs. Watch now as Justin takes us through his service library and see how embeddable gauges can help make you more productive and focused.

We’re excited to welcome Vanessa Stephen to the team as a Customer Support Specialist! Join us in learning more about the newest member of our growing BrightGauge family… In the beginning In addition to her warm smile, Vanessa brings with her a bit of the Caribbean. She grew up in Cap-Haitien, a city on the northern side of Haiti, before moving to Miami just a few years ago. While she stayed in Haiti all throughout high school, Vanessa did earn her bachelor's degree in Computer Science from St. Thomas University here in Miami. During her time in college, Vanessa also worked for St. Thomas, both as a Data Science Teacher Assistant with the School of Science and as a Math tutor. In those work positions, she really got a hands-on experience working with data. Vanessa assisted her supervisors in different research involving large datasets and also created web-based applications using ShinyApp. But the most interesting project she worked on was creating a software that could generate a different exam for each student in the class, grade the exam, and submit the results, all without the instructor’s intervention. Having gotten a taste of data and technology, Vanessa hungered to expand her knowledge. Joining BrightGauge In her quest to grow, Vanessa was led to an opportunity here at BrightGauge. So what made her decide to join the team? “It was mostly the company’s culture and values,” says Vanessa. “But also, the opportunity to work in a business intelligence environment.” Vanessa’s eagerness to learn has already proven to be invaluable to the Customer Support team. She’s a fast learner, and in the short time she’s been here, has already begun helping customers like you find solutions to their issues. Looking ahead, Vanessa is excited to master all the features available in BrightGauge and to get to know everyone on the team. We couldn’t be happier about this awesome addition to the group! Out of office Vanessa takes any opportunity she can get to learn, learn, learn. So, when she’s not at work, you can bet that she’s still working diligently on expanding her mind. Otherwise, she’s happy to spend time with family and participate in various religious and volunteer activities. Welcome to the fam, Vanessa!

While every department in a business is important, the sales team can have a major impact on a company’s overall success and revenue. It is typically up to the sales team to close deals, set expectations, and upsell customers (although other team members often play an active role in this, too). Being able to track the performance of the sales team is crucial for long-term success because it helps the organization’s leadership to identify opportunities for improvement. Without appropriate information about sales metrics, any changes in sales team priorities and practices are made blindly. So, how can your organization track the sales metrics that matter? Here, we’ll provide a brief breakdown of how to pick appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring sales team performance, and how you can track them. Choosing sales performance metrics One of the challenges in choosing sales metrics is that there is no one universally-applicable list of KPIs that every business (let alone every department in a business) will find valuable. Different companies (or departments within a company) have different business models that may or may not make certain sales performance metrics meaningful. For example, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is a major KPI for many businesses with a monthly service plan/model — demonstrating their stable monthly income for monthly services. But, if a business doesn’t have a monthly service offering, then there’s no value in tracking MRR until a change in the services offered is made. When choosing key performance indicators to measure sales team performance, there are a few different general categories of metrics to choose from: Sales Activity Metrics. These metrics assess how active the sales team is in their attempts to contact leads and close deals. They include: Number of phone calls made to contacts each day/week/month Referral requests Demos requested Social media interactions Any activity that is indicative of an attempt to communicate with leads or to encourage them to move further along the sales funnel Sales Funnel Metrics. These KPIs assess the health of the sales funnel (sometimes called the sales pipeline). Tracking sales metrics focused on the funnel is important when assessing the health of your sales cycle. For example, if the lead-to-customer conversion process takes months, there may be opportunities to streamline the sales process by adding more personnel or by removing obstacles to closed deals. Metrics include: Average time to conversion from lead to customer Total new leads generated per month Total leads converted per month Average lifetime customer value Sales Productivity Metrics. What activities are your sales team members engaging in? These metrics help you see how each sales team member is spending their time. Correlating time spent on activities to their overall performance can help provide insight into which activities have the greatest impact on end results. For example: Time spent on selling activities Time spent on data entry Time spent creating content (emails, social posts, etc.) The number of high-quality leads that are followed up with Sales Training Metrics. Are lessons from training having an impact on performance? Training success metrics help establish the ROI of training efforts by tracking metrics like: Sales team adherence to the sales process Percentage of reps using sales/marketing collateral Cost of training per person Percentage of reps still applying training lessons a set time after training concludes (days, weeks, months) Financial Metrics. Tracking the financial performance of sales efforts is an obvious choice. This includes metrics such as: Total value of deals closed each month Value of individual deals Customer acquisition cost Monthly recurring revenue Other financial data Being able to choose the right sales metrics means taking a close look at your business’ goals, industry, and products/services to determine which metrics are the best fit. If a KPI doesn’t align with your goals and isn’t relevant to your process/products/services, then it may not be a sales metric that matters to you. How to track your sales metrics that matter There are a few ways to track sales metrics, though some are clearly better than others. For example, you could track your sales metrics that matter by creating an Excel spreadsheet and manually entering information into it. The issue here is that you’re manually entering in all of the information you want to track, which is: An enormous time-suck that distracts from other activities that could generate value; and Prone to errors from small typos during data entry—errors that could significantly impact the accuracy of any sales metrics reports generated. It is better to use a KPI measurement tool that is optimized to automatically collect important data from one or more datasources, then place that data in a reporting dashboard that is easy to interpret. The use of sales metric reporting automation saves a significant amount of time on preparing reports while simultaneously eliminating errors from transcription typos. For example, BrightGauge makes it easy to put all of your most important marketing and sales metrics into one convenient dashboard — allowing for easy tracking of sales metrics that matter to your business. Each item in the dashboard can be customized, rearranged, or resized with ease using a drag-and-drop system that doesn’t require any coding knowledge. Plus, filtering options let you tell your dashboards exactly what information you’d like returned to you. For example, do you want to see KPIs pertaining to a specific member of your team? Filter for that member! You can set up dashboards to monitor the entire sales team as a whole, or create individual dashboards for each employee on a rotating dashboard setup to track each person’s sales activities separately. In fact, you could even create a publicly-visible “leaderboard” to show off each sales rep’s stats and encourage others to try to outdo them (a little competition goes a long way to motivate results). You can even set up automated monthly reports that you can share with other departments (or even outside organizations) to keep others in the proverbial loop regarding sales team performance. These reports have customizable modules that allow you to add a cover sheet, your logo (or your client’s), images, text boxes for context, and more. This ensures that the report is optimized for your target audience. Once created, the reports can be set to automatically distribute themselves to a target list with updated data at regular intervals. The best part is that you don’t have to lift a finger to update the data in them — it’s all automatically pulled from the same sources as the dashboard view. For even more metrics that matter to each department in your organization, check out 70+ metrics for MSPs, with accompanying formulas. Are you ready to track the sales metrics that matter most to your success? Contact us today to schedule a live one-on-one demo of BrightGauge.

What happens when three students meet at North Dakota State University and all fall in love with the idea of being entrepreneurs? They all leave school to start their own business, of course! That’s exactly how BNG Team came to be. Twelve years later, they’re still going strong and have added BrightGauge to their stack of tools for an extra boost of support. We chatted with CEO Brady Nash to learn more about BNG Team and how BrightGauge helps their daily operations. How the BNG Team got its start When BNG Team was formed in 2007, the founders aimed to create solutions that benefitted businesses operating in small North Dakota towns, where they are based. Their roots were entrenched in the payment processing industry. “We started our own payments processing business because we learned that many other companies in the industry operated with unfair processes, like overcharging rates and fees,” says Brady. From the beginning, BNG Team has had a passion for empowering other growth-oriented businesses to achieve their goals with an expanding set of premium business solutions. With over 3,000 customers, they typically serve SMBs, MSPs, and small retail/restaurant shops with a POS system. “We consider ourselves problem solvers,” says Brady. “A customer in the SMB market who can benefit from multiple service offerings means there are more problems to solve, and that creates stickiness for us.” Over the last 12 years, they’ve experienced steady growth thanks to their smart business model which focuses on generating multiple sources of recurring revenue, plus their core values of excellence, happiness, and gratitude. Like BrightGauge, the BNG Team founders are big fans of the EOS Traction system. It’s helped them create a new level of accountability and made it natural for them to adopt BrightGauge into their stack of tools. Becoming a BrightGauge customer As another provider in the MSP channel, BNG Team saw an opportunity for a great partnership with BrightGauge. Initially, they were attracted to the idea that they could tie together data from several different tools they were already using, which made implementation a breeze. Now, BNG Team continues to choose BrightGauge because of the flexibility to customize their data and the insight they get into all areas of their company. “Plus, we LOVE the customer support team at BrightGauge,” says Brady. “They are always very responsive to our needs and happy to collaborate with us.” What BrightGauge has helped the BNG Team accomplish BNG uses BrightGauge across every business unit, getting deep insight into all aspects of the company, including sales, marketing, operational, financial, customer satisfaction, team productivity, and more. “We can drill down into areas that we hadn’t even considered until we started to visualize our data with BrightGauge,” says Brady. As a company that follows EOS Traction, BNG uses BrightGauge goal sheets to increase visibility and accountability. They also enjoy driving friendly competition within departments through leaderboards for the sales team, customer service metrics, and customer satisfaction. This has created excitement around positive SmileBack scores and also brings attention to their deficiencies, so they can be addressed promptly. Since excellence is at the core of their values, BrightGauge dashboards and reports have provided a way for BNG to measure their customer service metrics and provide constant feedback so their team can improve. “Without a plan and a way to measure success and excellence, it’s just smoke and mirrors. BrightGauge helps hold us accountable. Having this data at our fingertips takes the guessing game out of where we can improve,” says Brady. Thank you, Brady and BNG Team for being part of the BrightGauge family! Datasources used: ConnectWise, QuickBooks, SmileBack, DropBox KPIs tracked: Kill Rate, Time to Acknowledgement, Customer Satisfaction

Are you an Autotask Professional Services Automation (PSA) user? We have some updates you may be interested in hearing about. A lot of our users have talked to us about ways they feel our integration with Autotask could be stronger, and we’ve taken note. We’ve been hard at work making improvements that’ll help you get better data insights out of Autotask + BrightGauge. These changes are now live, so we wanted to make sure you were in the loop! Easy-to-create reports Something we heard time and time again was that you wanted an automatic way to generate Autotask reports. With BrightGauge, this couldn’t be simpler. The reporting feature takes the Autotask data you’re tracking and converts it into custom, interactive reports with plenty of personalization options. You can add a cover page, your client’s logo, an image module, view the report in landscape versus portrait mode, and so on. To add to that, the Autotask + BrightGauge integration comes with 8 report templates that are a huge time saver. They include a Daily Member Scorecard, Weekly Project Work Summary, a Service Calls report, and more. You can open a template, choose your client recipients, and send it off in just a few clicks. Whether you start from scratch or use a template, you can schedule your reports to go out on a recurring basis to the clients you want, on the date and time you choose. Set it and forget it, but build trust with your clients all at the same time. Default gauges All available datasources in BrightGauge come with pre-built gauges, dashboards, and reports, so you can get to your data on day one. With the Autotask integration, you now get almost 200 default gauges pre-loaded into your account. In other words, as soon as your account is connected, you’ll be able to start viewing lots of KPIs that matter to you and your business. We’ve added a bunch of KPIs based on direct feedback from many of you. Highlights include SLA statistics filtered for business hours, Live Ticket SLA Data (see what’s about to breach), Service Call Details, and lots of KPIs pertaining to resources (like Tickets Due Today Per Resource). Pre-built dashboards You’re likely tracking multiple KPIs at the same time, so you’re going to want to see them side-by-side on a dashboard. With the Autotask + BrightGauge integration, you’ll get 9 pre-built dashboards to get you going. They include a Member Scorecard Dashboard (gives great insight into employee efficiency), a Projects Overview (see tasks and projects by project phase), Service Ticket KPIs (everything you need to know about your tickets), and more. Plus, if you use another PSA, RMM, BDR, finance, or other tool, you can see those KPIs right alongside your Autotask data. How do I know which version of Autotask I'm on? In your BrightGauge, head to your datasources and take a look at the logo displayed. If the logo says 'Autotask Professional Services Automation', like the one shown below, on the right, you're on the most up-to-date version. If you see the old logo, then you'll need to migrate your data to the newer version of Autotask. Watch this video to learn how to migrate your data from one datasource to another within BrightGauge. If you want to learn more about these Autotask upgrades or want to get connected to BrightGauge ASAP, please reach out to our team. We’re happy to answer your questions and get you started.

You may want to display multiple dashboards on TVs around your office, giving everybody visibility into the important KPIs you are tracking every day. With BrightGauge, you can easily create dashboard playlists to see your dashboards as a rotating carousel throughout the day. Set your playlists up in just a couple minutes by following the steps in the video above. For more help, see our support doc or submit a support ticket.

We’re excited to welcome Byron Peeples to the team as a Sales Development Representative! Join us in learning more about the newest member of our growing BrightGauge family… In the beginning Byron Peeples is a fellow Floridian, born and raised on the west coast of the state, in Fort Myers, Florida. After school, he decided to stick around, attending Florida Gulf Coast University. While there, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies, and was active in organizations like Student Government and the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. Byron had such a positive experience with Pi Kappa Alpha that, upon graduating, he accepted a role to work at their headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. As a leadership consultant, Byron spent two years traveling North America, visiting 56 schools in 37 states, and even recruiting a group of 124 to create a new chapter of the fraternity at Coastal Carolina University. For Byron, traveling the country and working with undergraduate leaders was one of the greatest experiences of his career. Most recently, Byron was the Senior Partnership Executive at Millennium Alliance, where he focused on offering business leaders high-level learning opportunities and access to powerful networking connections through their assembly platform. In that role, he really honed in on his business development skills. Joining BrightGauge While at Millennium Alliance, Byron’s extensive research introduced him to BrightGauge and news of the acquisition by Continuum. In his experience, an acquisition usually means great things. Couple that with the fact that there was an opening for a Sales Development Representative, and his interest was piqued! “The SDR opportunity fit many of the tools I’ve developed over the years,” says Byron. “From the time I reached out to the recruiter, to the final interview in the BrightGauge office, I felt welcomed and at ease. This was definitely the place for me.” Clearly, we all felt the same way. Byron is excited about learning the product, getting to know the company and culture, and trying out all the great food spots near the office. Out of office What’s the best part about living in Miami? A lot of people say it’s the beach, and that’s where Byron calls home! Most weekends are spent in the ocean or at the pool, hosting out-of-state family and friends and showing them what Miami is truly all about. Aside from that, Byron loves good food and craft beer (all guilt-free, thanks to his dedication to exercise). We think he’ll fit right in!

When it comes to choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, there are a lot of factors involved and it really depends on your organization's goals. But one KPI that mostly all business managers make it a priority to track is Profit Margin. Everyone wants to know how profitable their business is, and looking at Profit Margin as a percentage is a great indicator of how well you're doing. This quick tutorial video shows you how to build a simple Profit Margin Percentage gauge within BrightGauge. If you have questions at any time, please feel free to reach out to our support team! For more KPIs and tutorial videos, check us out on YouTube.

Becoming familiar with the ins and outs of BrightGauge can take some time and practice. Hopefully, you’ll find some guidance in our knowledge base and through our blog posts, but we know that seeing BrightGauge in action can make a huge difference. In our new webinar series, Mastering BrightGauge, we’ll help you really nail down your use of BrightGauge while improving your workflow. This series is meant to give you a deeper training of our BrightGauge features, whether you’re a new user or could stand to use a little refresher. What’s up first? To kick off the Mastering BrightGauge series, we’re going to talk all about building gauges. Lots of our users want to know how they can better customize their KPIs in order to achieve stronger data insights, and this is an excellent place to start. In Getting Familiar with the Gauge Builder, we’ll cover: The basic structure of a gauge Various gauge types (think: number gauge, list gauge, snapshot gauge, etc) How to format your gauges How to filter your gauges to get more granular info Design tricks (like adding thresholds and colors to your gauge) Bonus: our top 5 most requested gauges from customers You’ll walk away feeling a lot more comfortable customizing your own gauges and getting to the data that speaks to you. How do I join? Here’s what you need to know about Getting Familiar with the Gauge Builder: Date: Thursday, April 18th Time: 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT RSVP: http://info.brightgauge.com/mastering-bgs-gauge-builder We highly suggest you RSVP because even if you end up missing the live webinar, we’ll still email you a recording of the training, which you can keep on hand to reference any time you need it. To find out about future episodes in the Mastering BrightGauge series, keep an eye out for emails from us, follow @BrightGauge on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our blog. As always, we love your feedback and your questions, so shoot our support team an email if there’s anything you need.