Using Third-Party Data to Measure Goal Achievement

Tracking your team’s progress on OKRs relies on having the right data at your fingertips. In our previous posts we’ve shown you how Lab5 tracks and evaluates our OKRs using Axy OKR. We find that one of the most useful features of Axy OKR is the ability to pull in data directly from Salesforce into your key result records so you can automatically track your progress. Much of your business’ data may be tracked in Salesforce so it’s easy to report on and monitor in real time. But what happens when your business relies on data from other sources?

When it comes to key results, the third-party data you need to consider might be website analytics or social media metrics, customer survey responses, accounting data, or really any other relevant data from the systems you use to run your business. That data is key to understanding whether or not your team is reaching your goals.

But having that data in a separate system means that you have to dedicate time and effort to finding the metrics you need to monitor your progress. The more third party data you rely on, the more this time and effort is compounded and it can end up getting deprioritized by your busy team. But if you leverage an integration to bring that data into Salesforce, you can automatically track your OKR progress.

We build integrations all the time, for ourselves and for clients, that pull third-party data into Salesforce in order to automatically track progress against key results. In this post, we’ll run through some specific use cases from our team.

The use cases

Increasing Lab5’s reach

Under our objective of increasing Lab5’s reach, we have a key result which measures growth in the audience of our social media channels.

Analytics from our social channels are not native to Salesforce so we have leveraged a custom integration based on Zapier to pull in this data to Salesforce automatically. Now, rather than going to Linkedin and Medium and manually capturing and recording this data, we have a real time report of followers and engagement which gets pulled into our key result record. This data is automatically tracked and measured against our key result so we know exactly where we are compared to where we should be at this point in the year.

Training and growth across the team

One way we’re measuring training and growth across our team is through a key result around increasing Trailhead badges. Trailhead is Salesforce’s education platform where anyone has access to training modules about Salesforce’s products and features. Each time you finish a module or project you are awarded a badge, which demonstrates your knowledge of the topic. At Lab5, we use badges along with Salesforce certifications to monitor our team’s educational growth so each team member is responsible for increasing their badge count by a certain amount. But this data lives inside the Trailhead platform, not in our Lab5 Salesforce instance.

Fortunately, we found Trail Tracker, an app by Salesforce Labs that allows us to keep track of badges across our team and the areas that those badges represent. With Trail Tracker we were able to integrate the badge data into our Salesforce instance and connect it to that key result in Axy OKR. Now we can monitor each team member’s progress in real time.

Project Performance Metrics ‍

As a consulting agency, performance metrics like profitability and customer satisfaction are essential for company growth. We’ve set key results around both of these and rely on a variety of data sources to understand our success.

FinancialForce Professional Services Automation allows us to summarize timecard data in order to see our burn rate on each project and understand if we’re burning over, under, or right on track. We’ve integrated this data across projects directly into our Axy OKR instance so we can track profitability on each project as an individual key result.

We’re also using automated net promoter surveys through Survicate to measure client satisfaction on a regular basis. These surveys give our client an easy way to provide feedback and give us an objective measure of satisfaction we can use across all projects. This data is automatically pulled into Axy OKR and is used to track towards our customer satisfaction key result.

Leveraging data to measure OKR success

OKRs allow you to set transparent, measurable goals across your entire business. From marketing to sales, profitability to project management, the best way to measure these goals will vary with the most relevant data living in multiple systems.

By integrating these data sources into Salesforce you can get all the data you need into one place and can tie it back to each of your key results in Axy OKR. This gives you insight into your team’s progress on key results in real time, enabling you to identify issues early on, pivot your team’s efforts where needed, and ultimately achieve your goals.