RON: I'm going to go back and see if I can take a snippet of that video and just play it for you guys here in this video and just let it run on the screen so you can just get a quick idea of what we're talking about. This video that Chris did and this reporting that he showed was as complex as our weekly sales report here at Clarity that we go through, where we're literally shredding every analytic and where every lead comes in and where it is in the process, and what was the source of the lead, and all the traffic. I mean, everything we've got. These great reports in HubSpot, and these great business analytics reports that we go through and shred every week to monitor the business and plan for the business and maintain the pipeline and all that stuff that you would want on sales.
Well, this one does it for an auction site and you can have this same reporting for online marketplaces. Now, you can't report on what you don't know, right? I mean, that's the simplest thing. So when it starts—I'm going to turn it over here to a minute to you so you can talk about this from a technical aspect—it's very difficult when you come to me and go, Hey, Ron, how are things going? It's very difficult for me to drill down and tell you if I haven't collected any information about all those things, because then at that point it's just anecdotal. Well, I think it's going great, right? I mean, we're making revenue.
Well, did you happen to sell one big tractor on the marketplace website? And so your revenue this month so it was up but you sold one-tenth of the normal products that you normally sell? That's a big difference. Obviously, I used an extreme example to show you that things could be skewed. So what do you want to report on? What can you report on? And more importantly, before you can even get to that—and I always start at the end game.
So I always like to start what do I want reports on, what would help me. I like to think about it as BI, right? I make business-intelligent decisions if I have information to help me make those decisions. If I see a trend going down, I make an adjustment. If I see a trend going up, I make an adjustment. If I see something potentially going stagnant, I might make an adjustment, right?
So I start at the end game going, “What would I like to report on?” Then your vendor can come back and go, “In order to produce that report, these are the three pieces of data that we need to have. Two of them you get automatically, just by what the people are doing. But this other one, we have to actually start tracking their browsing, because we can't track that for people that have it logged in unless it's actually in a session cookie that's tracking with them. So we actually have to add the collection of those analytics up into the cookie because that has nothing to do with logins or sales."
So there might be particular pieces of data that are more difficult to get that you need to make sure to collect that data. It's better to collect too much and not need it than not collect it and then need it when you want to report on it. I know I've rambled there, but that's how I go at it when I do this. Why don't you start in on how you attack analytics and reporting?
CHRIS: Well, I think that was great. And I think it should be simple things that you're able to monitor consistently. And there is a really interesting blog and discussion forum from some of the folks at HubSpot—and really this propagated across other companies that are similar—where they found that, like you said, it's better to have and not need than need and not have. As far as data analytics, but as far as what they were internally auditing and reviewing, they found that if they basically picked a few topics that they were consistently reviewing, this was much more potent for them than having a bunch of data that was overwhelming.
Now, as a marketplace, you get to deal with the opportunity of dealing with mixed thoughts and different thoughts. The other point that I would share here, is that if you consider your vendors and sellers who are listing items within your marketplace platform, they may have different analytics that they're going to want to look at, and you're going to want to have a baseline for them that you can provide reporting against, and make it so that you can provide extreme value to them.
Again, the baseline for a great marketplace is making it so that there is a ton of traffic of credible buyers that are coming to your marketplace. And in order to really establish that, you really have to have amazing vendors and really strong relationships with those vendors and sellers so that the logistical aspects, the execution is consistent.
Just like the example you gave earlier with that one step in the process with the carrier, that could just break your relationship with that marketplace. And a lot of folks, they're going to spend more money and they're going to not worry about the extra costs of working with an existing marketplace that they trust and they believe is credible.
You want to consider that with your reporting. So how does this tie back to reporting, you might ask? Well, you want to be able to understand each step in the pipeline and really be able to visualize this funnel in this process and really understand this customer journey going through your marketplace software, both from a seller perspective and from a buyer perspective.
If you're not able to get at the data and then if you're not able to consistently boil it down so that your team can analyze it and review it consistently, you're not going to be able to take advantage of the analytics and reporting. This will literally stymie your growth. This goes hand in hand with governance, It's the gamification and some of the “bumpers in the bowling alley.” That's what a lot of governance does. The analytics and reporting tells you, “Hey, you need to put more pressure in those bumpers in the bowling alley.” I mean, what good does it do if your bumpers in the bowling alley are halfway inflated and the bowling ball still get stuck in the gutter? It's like you had the intention, but you didn't execute.
The analytics and reporting really need to be able to have this persistent feedback loop that your team is getting so you can truly understand accurately what your performance is, and this needs to propagate into your vendor relationships as well. They need to be able to see accurately what their performance is and be able to tune that as they go. Any other thoughts on that?