CRM

Getting a real KPI dashboard out of Ontraport

Ontraport is a good CRM with honest reporting. It is not a KPI system, and the difference matters more than it sounds.

What Ontraport already does well

Credit where it is due. Ontraport’s Dashboard has a Trends view and a Metrics view, and between them you get live reporting on contacts, custom objects, emails, page visits and monthly recurring revenue. If you know the number you want watched, you can build a metric for it and Ontraport will track it automatically. For a lot of businesses that is genuinely enough.

Where it stops

Three things are missing, and they are the three that turn a number into a decision.

• A target. A metric showing 47 new leads is a fact. Whether 47 is a good month depends on a number that lives in your head, not in the tool.
• A direction. Some numbers should go up and some should go down. Cancellations at 12 is not “better” than 8 just because the bar is taller.
• One view across systems. Your CRM knows about contacts and campaigns. It does not know what Xero knows about whether the money actually arrived.

There is also a documented gotcha worth knowing: Ontraport’s metrics count all contacts that existed in a time frame, including ones you later deleted. If your dashboard and your sales report disagree, that is usually why. The fix is adding a “Contact still exists” condition to the metric.

What a KPI layer adds

Take one number: new leads per week. In Ontraport it is a trend line. As a KPI it becomes:

New leads this week: 47

Target: 60 per week

Attainment: 78%

Direction: up is good

Status: amber — below target, trending up

Same data. The second version tells you to do something. That is the whole difference, and it is why a chart on its own so rarely changes behaviour.

Getting Ontraport numbers into Buddzee

Buddzee does not connect to Ontraport directly. It reads business data through the Awesomate data platform, which is where your Ontraport and Xero figures are already brought together. That is deliberate: one place that normalises the numbers, one place to fix if a field changes.

Once connected, you name the metric you care about, give it a target and a direction, and it appears on a board with everything else. Every figure keeps a link back to where it came from, so when someone asks why the number moved, the answer is one click away rather than an afternoon.

The five Ontraport numbers worth a target

1. New contacts per week — the top of everything else.
2. Lead-to-customer conversion rate — where marketing spend either works or does not.
3. Monthly recurring revenue — Ontraport tracks it; give it a target and a trend.
4. Cancellations or refunds — direction down, and it should be red when it climbs.
5. Revenue per customer — the number that quietly decides whether growth is profitable.

See it on your own numbers.

Thirty days, no card. Start with your figures or a template for your trade.