All About Sales KPI Dashboards

WHERE IS DATA WHEN YOU REALLY NEED IT? 

Modern businesses use a million tools to measure a zillion variables and generate a gazillion data related to performance and growth. This data holds insights that are invaluable to leaders for assessing, managing and improving initiatives and teams. However, trawling through the sea of data - scattered across departments, business assets and workflows – is easier said than done. Important insights could be buried under layers of spreadsheets, databases and emails. A one-way trip down the proverbial rabbit hole, as it were, without any guarantees of returning with the dope you’re looking for. 

This is where dashboards come to the rescue.

Dashboards cut through the noise by curating relevant information from various sources and presenting a single source of truth – enabling decision makers recce critical business vitals and monitor numbers that matter, instantly and anytime.

Definition Of A Dashboard In The Everyday Business Context.

A dashboard is a digital information tool that employs data visualization techniques to convey  varied business information to the various actors and stakeholders involved in a particular business ecosystem. Data visualization refers to an infographic type representation of facts and figures, and is a popular technique in design. Dashboards have panels that display business stats and organizational intelligence in the form of line and bar graphs, tables, maps, pie charts, gauges, progress bars and other visually appealing graphical formats for on-the-go consumption and at-a-glance comprehension. As an instrument of information management, business dashboards provide a unified overview of organizational health across departments and functions, strengths and resources, talent and teams, markets and customers, output and outcomes, progress and growth, and so on.

Dashboards May Go By Many Names.

Dashboards  may be interchangeably referred to as data dashboards, or data analytics dashboards. They may also be referred to as Liveboards since, much like the dashboard of a car, they are dynamically updated to always show updated figures.

Dashboards Serve Many Masters And Purposes.

Dashboards may be designed to inform and empower a wide variety of roles in business such as front line workers and reps, analysts, team leads, specialists, managers and supervisors, decision leaders, associates, partners and other stakeholders.

Dashboards can also cater to different levels of expertise and hierarchy: Lay persons who are skimming for a fundamental level familiarity only, specialists who like to get into the weeds and value complex details, leaders who need deep insights filtered for simplicity and clarity.

What Are The Different Kinds Of Dashboards Out There?

Modern organizations and businesses use a wide spectrum of dashboards to meet a variety of objectives.

Function specific dashboards support individual functions and departments like sales, marketing, finance, HR, operations, customer support, and so on.

Project dashboards share a quick view of the status and progress of projects for all project members and stakeholders.

Website dashboards may keep a tab on marketing parameters like traffic, active users, visitor engagement, sharing to social, e-commerce activity and so on.

Performance dashboards span vital performance and productivity metrics mapped to both individual workers and the business as a whole.

Industry dashboards enable a holistic capture of a specific sector or industry like healthcare, logistics and retail - and may include collateral information like the cross play of economic forces within the sector, manpower trends, growth forecasts and so on.

Executive dashboards are used by the C-Suite to sift through data overload and achieve a strategic, balanced and fact-informed perspective on key organizational facets to expedite top level objectives.

Business dashboards integrate key insights across functions, categories, markets, customers and internal activities for a holistic synopsis.

Difference Between Dashboards And Reports

Dashboards provide an inclusive coverage and high level interpretation of the chosen topic. They are updated in real time for a ‘LIVE’ coverage of information. With dynamic customization, dashboards offer a flexible and interactive experience.

Reports, on the other hand, are a static, time-stamp type snapshot of business vitals at a given point in the journey. Reports tend to have a narrow focus, and shed light around a specific metric, theme or event. Reports may be generated quarterly, biannually, yearly or whenever required.

Difference Between Dashboards And Data Visualization.

Data visualization refers to a communication technique or format. It leverages visual forms like graphs, maps and tables to make information transfer simple and engaging. Data visualization can help serve a variety of end-objectives depending on the manner and context.

A dashboard, on the other hand, is an information tool that employs data visualization techniques to fulfil its objective effectively. So a sales KPI dashboard may use data visualization to make sales related information more digestible and palatable for sales employees and stakeholders.

What Are Kpi Dashboards?

KPI dashboards are a part of the broader dashboard universe; conceptually, they play the role of a report card. KPI dashboards deal specifically with progress towards goals and achievement of targets. The idea behind a KPI dashboard is to catch a pulse of how business is going. A KPI dashboard tries to address concerns like what happened, why it happened, what (was planned and) didn’t happen, what may happen, and what one needs to do in order to make the right things happen.

What Is A Sales Kpi Dashboard?

A sales KPI dashboard is a specific type of KPI dashboard; it carries indicators considered important to an organization’s sales and GTM (Go-To-Market) functions only.

A sales KPI dashboard is a customizable information management tool popular with professionals and teams across sales and revenue generation. Sales KPI dashboards are usually created by sales managers, sales operations teams and sales leaders. They are normally located inside a company’s CRM or sales analytics software.

Sales KPI dashboards…

1. Invoke data from a variety of different sources such as marketing platforms, CRMs, accounting books, third party sources and others.

2.  Crunch and analyse them on the basis of pre-set formulae and calculations

3.  Generate a consolidated and interactive snapshot of relevant sales metrics, performance parameters and health indicators.

Sales and revenue leaders use Sales KPI dashboards to solve for

·  Information overload.

·  Lack of visibility.

·  Planning and prioritization.

Impact Areas Of Sales Kpi Dashboards.

Depending on the purpose it is designed to address, a sales KPI dashboard may fall under one of four principal niches, each niche fostering a specific kind of knowledge and clarity.

Strategic.

For empowering critical decisions and guiding long term roadmaps - used primarily by top leadership.

Analytical.

For scrutinizing and evaluating progress, refining programs and targets, making forecasts and predictions, and other tasks that demand quantitative support.   

Operational.

For monitoring and measuring ongoing and short term activities.  

Informational.

For telling a story with data - particularly useful for simplifying the narrative, branding initiatives, pitches and presentations.

What Are The Benefits Of Sales Kpi Dashboards?

Let’s list out the main advantages of a sales KPI dashboard in business and revenue-first organizations.  

LIFTS IN-THE-MOMENT AWARENESS.

Sales KPI dashboards monitor, measure and showcase key sales health indicators (such as efficiency, performance, teamwork, customer satisfaction and ROI, to name some) in an easily consumable and agile mode – amplifying actionable wisdom and informational readiness across hierarchies and roles in near real time.

ADDS SPEED TO EVERYDAY OPERATIONS.

Sales KPI dashboards shave precious hours and days off time-suck activities like information curation, coordination and analysis, markedly accelerating tasks and outcomes.

INFORMS DECISIONS WITH DATA.

Sales KPI dashboards democratize visibility and access to relevant and high quality data across the organizational rank and file. This adds rationality and discretion to every sales decision and judgment, infuses forecasting with predictability, helps negotiate change and combat ambiguity with confidence, and hikes the probability of success across sales and revenue initiatives.

UNIFIES AND CENTRALIZES DATA.  

As a single point hub for the entire sales department’s data, a sales KPI dashboard turns the act of information structuring, locating and sharing simple, quick and convenient.

BRINGS EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE.

Sales KPI dashboards unify teams, campaigns and initiatives on a common data denominator, aligning goals and ensuring everyone is pulling in the same direction.

BRINGS SANITY TO THE DATA ECOSYSTEM.

Sales KPI dashboards bring order to the chaos and confusion of structured, unstructured, streaming and random data pools.

FACILITATES SWOT ANALYSIS.

Sales KPI dashboards are a great way to obtain a holistic sense of the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities at any given point in time – significantly lifting the quality of strategy, forecasting and planning.

AFFORDS GRANULAR COMPREHENSION.

With actions like selecting, filtering and masking, sales KPI dashboards allow strategy leaders and team supervisors to isolate parameters individually and study variables selectively - adding depth, range and texture to understanding. 

UNCOVERS SECRET SIGNALS. 

By employing a sales KPI dashboard, it is possible to deduce connections between apparently unconnected metrics. This helps sales and revenue leaders understand correlations between various sales activities, connect invisible dots, fathom data outliers, identify signals, process patterns and predict disruptions.

FOSTERS HOLISTIC UNDERSTANDING.

With a sales KPI dashboard, leaders can drill down to the lowest granular level or zoom out for a bird’s eye perspective, blending the micro and the macro for a 360 degree grasp.

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BUILDS DATA DRIVEN CULTURE.

Easy, on-demand access to accurate information in line with team targets and business priorities encourages teams to integrate data more actively into everyday workflows – right across the monitoring, analysis and decisioning landscape. This leads to a more connected and collaborative team fabric, greater transparency in every action and choice, an agile framework where tweaks are made on-the-fly, a more resilient sales ecosystem and enhanced  predictability and ROI across endeavors.

How To Create A Sales Kpi Dashboard?

No two sales KPI dashboards are the same and each warrants a tailored approach. That said, there is a thumbnail map of best practices that’s universal, no matter what kind of dashboard you want to design. Let’s take a look at the main steps.  

1. Determine the big sales outcomes you want to measure.
2. Make sure they are aligned with the larger organizational journey to stay focused on business goals.
3. Construct KPIs that support your larger sales vision and outcomes.
4. Prioritize KPIs that are impactful and remove the rest – too many can defeat one of the core purposes of a sales KPI dashboard, which is to generate clarity.  
5. Have a clear understanding of who will use your Sales KPI dashboard, to track what, and how frequently.
6. Identify your data sources and ensure data integrity – that is, make sure the data is clean, accurate and recent - to minimize flaws in calculation and errors in interpretation.
7. Mine reviews and feedback from markets, customers and teams regularly to keep your data in actionable shape.  
8. Connect your Sales KPI dashboard with all your data sources (data warehouses, spreadsheets, databases, cloud platforms and so on), sync for seamless data pulls, keep data sources updated at all times, enable refresh at regular intervals, and set to automate.  
9. Choose a software or platform for your sales KPI dashboard that is customizable, supports real time data integration and possesses an intuitive interface for teams to navigate easily across screens, panels and features. Some customer relationship management tools (CRMs) let you build dashboards in a few clicks with drag-and-drop tools and pre-built templates.
10. Some essential features your Sales KPI dashboard must have are customizability, formatting options, interactivity, customizable alerts, exportability and shareability, annotation and notes for collaborative teamwork, parameter filtering, data drill downs, comparative analysis (across time periods, data range and segments), cross device optimization and web compatibility.
11. As you build your sales KPI dashboard, arrange information in a logical sequence with a clear hierarchy for quick comprehension, use visualization formats that are easy to interpret and keep the design and layout simple and minimalistic.
12. Ensure security by restricting access to data (especially sensitive ones) to authorized personnel only, build different levels of permission for viewing and editing, and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and standards.
13. Generate reports from your sales KPI dashboard from time to time for a focussed, structured and detailed capture of information.

To generate reports:

-  Select the data set under consideration: that is, specify time period, outcomes, data source, etc.

-  Customize the report appearance.

- Finalize the visualization style - graphs, maps, bars.

- Choose  the output format - CSV, PDF and so on).

- To make your report actionable, ensure it features key numbers, comparisons and trends.

- Make sure the report explains itself at the first level, without requiring the viewer to click on links for a deep-dive.

Examples Of Different Kinds Of Sales Kpi Dashboards.

Every organization will design the KPIs of its sales dashboards in line with its specific journey, and tailor it to the milestones it has set for itself. We share some of the more popular KPIs that are generally adopted by sales functions and revenue driven businesses across industries. The sales KPI dashboards covered here can be used for assessing current sales programs, as well as for giving shape to future ones.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD EXAMPLE #1

Sales Rep Dashboard

This is a sales KPI dashboard that helps individual employees and frontline members track their own sales performance. It reinforces clarity on the broad purpose of their roles, builds ownership towards outcomes, enforces accountability, helps organize and prioritize activities, and boosts overall focus and productivity. Every sales related activity, small and big, can potentially feature on this dashboard. It is upto the team to customize the data visualization on this dashboard for personalized practicality.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD EXAMPLE #2

Lead Generation Dashboard

This is a sales KPI dashboard that visualizes the efforts of sales teams that have a direct or indirect impact on the organization’s lead generation funnel. While lead generation is primarily a marketing task, often, sales teams can make a perceptible difference to the outcome with innovative outreach tactics, social discovery, content driven exercise and so on. Some KPIs that may be tracked here are total number of leads generated, lead-to-customer ratio, ratio of MQL (leads generated by marketing) to SQL (leads generated by sales), lead attribution, churn rate, bounce rate, opportunities claimed, conversion rate, quote-to-claim ratio, opportunity value, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost and others.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD EXAMPLE #3

Sales Activity Dashboard

This is a sales KPI dashboard meant for the evaluation of day-to-day activities of a company’s frontline sales force such as reps, employees and agents. Metrics in this dashboard span calls made, emails and messages sent, appointments booked, average response time, social engagement, product demos, follow-ups, opportunity stage progression, sales pipeline value, and so on. The impact of these activities can be felt across stages like lead generation, lead nurturing and lead closure. Health and progression of SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) and MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) – as well as supportive activities rendered to accelerate collaborative outcomes – are some of the important considerations to track in this sales KPI dashboard.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #4

Sales Conversion Dashboard

This sales KPI dashboard focuses on activities and progress along the sales pipeline and customer funnel that directly or indirectly influence closure. This sales KPI dashboard helps judge metrics like sessions held per channel, lead conversion rate, win rate, total sale per product, average deal size, monthly or quarterly closed deals, sales cycle length, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value and others.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #5

Sales Performance Dashboard or Sales Impact Dashboard

This sales KPI dashboard offers visibility into the general health of sales programs, and their impact on overall business revenue. Some metrics showcased in this dashboard are revenue per rep, revenue per unit, revenue per product or category, revenue per region or territory, sales conversion rate, average deal size, sales cycle length, monthly sales growth, customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, customer lifetime value, ROI on sales investments and others.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #6

Sales Manager Dashboard

This is a sales KPI dashboard specifically designed to serve sales supervisors and sales managers. It provides data driven ‘big picture coverage’ of key sales milestones and revenue targets that matter to CEOs. This is a sales KPI dashboard that helps the leadership review roadmaps, plan improvements and lift probability of goal attainment. In addition to current stats, the dashboard may also include past impact as well as results brewing in-the-pipeline, enabling a holistic assessment across time horizons. Major domains scanned in this sales KPI dashboard are top performing team members, bestselling products and services, outcomes of ongoing initiatives, major challenges ahead and big growth opportunities. The dashboard can display a mix of metrics including new customer acquisition, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value and similar ones.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #7

Sales Leaderboard

This sales KPI dashboard displays the relative performance of sales reps, employees and channels. It typically showcases common sales activities such as cold calls, demo bookings, new accounts won, clients retained, quota attainment, revenue generated and so on. Sales leaderboards offer a great opportunity to incorporate gamification in sales workflows. In a survey, 89% of respondents confessed gamification made them more effective at work. Gamification is the process of applying game mechanics – such as challenges, rolling contests like Salesman Of The Month (SOTM), social interaction, public recognition like progress bars and special rewards - to everyday sales related tasks. Gamification drives competitive spirit, focus and morale, bringing out untapped potential in individuals.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #8

Deal Performance Dashboard or Sales Pipeline Dashboard or Sales Opportunities Dashboard

This is a kind of sales KPI dashboard that helps sales staff and supervisors understand how deals are progressing along various stages in the pipeline. Particularly effective in high touch funnels where information is abundant, this sales KPI dashboard provides versatile snapshots of metrics like volume of opportunity or total number of leads, average opportunity (deal) size, total sum of potential opportunity, lead-to-opportunity ratio, methods of opportunity acquisition, position of specific opportunities in the pipeline, opportunity-to-win ratio – in addition to a holistic profile assessment of prospects. This sales KPI dashboard accelerates deal closure by enabling  information exchange and collaborative efforts amongst team members at key stages along the pipeline.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #9

Sales Forecasting Dashboard

Here is a sales KPI dashboard that is extensively used by sales, revenue and business leaders to anticipate outcomes and adjust approaches. It tracks calculations like revenue forecasted, probability of successful closure and pipeline-to-target ratio. The goal is to foresee contingencies, crunch historical trends, identify patterns, isolate signals, fine tune decisions and lift the overall quality of strategic planning, so that sales teams hit their targets more frequently and have a healthy deal pipeline to work on at all times.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #10

Compensation dashboards

This sales KPI dashboard is used to map compensation with performance. It may be used by leaders and team leads to analyse motivation, adjust compensation frameworks, and ensure sales reps and channels are suitably incentivized and rewarded at all times. The big goal is to build innovative compensation strategies that allow the business to meet sales and revenue targets without straining the budget.

SALES KPI DASHBOARD #11

Platform specific dashboards

Organizations may also create custom sales KPI dashboards around the tech platforms and software used by their sales departments. Examples of leading platforms used by sales teams are Hubspot, Google Analytics and Salesforce, and dashboards can be designed around each. Platform specific sales KPI dashboards help…

- Simplify and organize learnings and reports generated by tech platforms and software.

- Streamline and summarize KPIs and metrics for quick reference and actionable interpretation.

- Optimize value generation from tech investments in sales and revenue functions.

Be it to flag changes in real time, get a heads up on future decisions or heal business health holistically, sales KPI dashboards are an essential weapon in the arsenal of modern sales and revenue teams. Build one mapped with your specific journey to leapfrog over rivals with the power of accurate, actionable and on-time knowledge.

SALES KPI DASHBOARDS DISPLAY BUSINESS HEALTH SYMPTOMS. 

INCENTIVES AND REWARDS DELIVER THE CURE.

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