As the world of sales becomes more competitive than ever, more companies are relying on astute data management and analytics to optimize their process.
By leveraging technology and key metrics, you can enhance visibility into your sales teams performance and identify any gaps or opportunities on which to focus. While many solutions can help, none are more adept at analyzing sales performance than a well-crafted sales dashboard.
What is a Sales Dashboard?
A sales dashboard centralizes, standardizes, and visually represents all your sales data in an easily accessible platform. A sales dashboard provides transparency into your sales KPIs, enabling sales teams and managers to assess performance against their goals and objectives in real time.
This kind of unobstructed visibility empowers managers to forecast and set accurate sales plans, and use accurate data to implement proper coaching or training on processes, unique deals, and more.
Sales dashboards cover your most critical sales KPIs, such as:
- Quota attainment- Detailed measurement of a sales person’s or a whole team’s target attainment; whether they are meeting goals, achieving their target, falling behind, or otherwise. This helps assess performance and the realistic nature of your goals against your resources.
- Win rate- Allows you to assess marketing and sales alignment when it comes to qualifying and closing leads, respectively. High win rates indicate an effective process, while low win rates indicate changes must be implemented.
- Average deal size - Enables teams to accurately set budgets, maintain cash flow, and plan for growth. Sales dashboards break deal sizes down to give you accurate rundowns of what kinds of deals you are closing and at which level of frequency you’re closing them.
- Revenue - Measures revenue per sales rep or total revenue and offers insight into how much money you have coming in during any specific period. This is helpful when assessing sales reps or matching your projected vs. actual goals.
Why are Sales Dashboards Essential for Success?
Sales dashboards provide many advantages that enable you to hone your sales process, but, most notably, they empower you to:
- Gain a holistic view of key sales data - a sales dashboard provides you a macro-level, comprehensive view of all the relevant data you need when assessing your sales process, evaluating reps, and more. A bird's-eye perspective helps managers to easily break down every aspect of your sales process—including activities, sequences, and overall performance—to get a clear view of what’s working and what isn’t.
- Free up time to focus on selling - dashboards can eliminate the burden of manual processes for data entry, report creation, digging up account information, and more. When they have all the information they need at their fingertips, your sales reps have more time to do what they do best: sell. Inefficient processes cause reps to spend 64.8% of their time on non-revenue generating, administrative activities, but the right dashboards free up their time for more impactful tasks.
- Have a centralized place for data for better-informed decisions - By centralizing all your sales data in one platform, your team won’t have to track, manage, and analyze data coming from disparate sources. An easily-accessible, single source of truth houses everything in one place and ensures clean, reliable data that can be used to make insight-driven decisions to improve your process.
- Enable teams to work toward common KPIs and other goals - Intuitive, comprehensive dashboards let managers and their sales reps easily view team and individual performance metrics in real time. That level of total transparency helps both managers and individual reps measure performance through the same lens. This is key for assessing where your reps need more training or coaching, but also where managers should give recognition for high-achievers. Managers and sales reps can use insights to motivate one another toward reaching individual and common goals. After all, It's always more fulfilling to share success with a supportive audience.
- Save time from manually exporting data from a CRM to spreadsheets - Manually digging up data and exporting it from your CRM to spreadsheets to create reports is a tedious, time-consuming task. Not a single sales rep in the world would prefer going through that drudge rather than selling, and a sales dashboard relieves them of that burden. Dashboards also mitigate the human error that accompanies manual data management.
- Produce more accurate sales forecasts- Forecasting is one of the most complex parts of a sales manager’s job. Market trends, rapidly changing consumer behavior, and economic variations make it difficult to adequately forecast upcoming sales. By having accurate, high-quality historical and real-time data, however, you are able to decrease the margin for error and produce more precise forecasts.
9 Examples of Helpful Sales Dashboards
Sales dashboards come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the specific objective. These are the 9 most common that will have the biggest positive impact on your sales process.
Sales Rep Dashboard
This dashboard centralizes data relevant to your sales rep so they can track their individual performance. They can instantly access critical metrics, such as their conversion rates, revenue (both historical and forecasted), open opportunities, disqualified leads, number of deals in the pipeline, and more. This is a great tool that arms your sales reps with everything they need to work on their personal development and address areas in need of improvement.
Sales Manager Dashboard
This dashboard provides sales managers with the data and metrics they need (like number of leads, wins, and new accounts) to make decisions, set goals, and track performance. Through analysis of historical and real-time data, sales managers are able to make informed decisions and ensure their team is on track to meet their goals. They gain actionable insights in a single glance to easily identify performance gaps, which they can address through proper training and coaching. A good sales manager dashboard also gives you visibility into buyer sentiment, so you not only understand the high-level activity metrics (i.e. email open or reply rates), but can also make better coaching and strategy adjustments based on those sentimentswhether replies were positive, negative, or otherwise.
Target Account Dashboard
A target account dashboard is extremely useful for businesses that adhere to an account-based marketing strategy. It provides you with a detailed view of your accounts and relevant information, such as current and potential accounts, accounts with open deals, account deal values, and more. This sales dashboard ensures your account sales management process doesnt miss a beat.
Sales Team Performance Dashboard
Have a senior vacancy to fill? Do you want to give out incentives to your top performers? Looking to coach any struggling sales reps? The sales team performance dashboard provides a comprehensive view of each sales reps performance (and overall team performance) in relevant areas. It offers visibility into completed deals, generated monthly recurring revenue (MRR), number of cold calls and/or presentations, conversion rates, and more, so managers and reps are always able to identify whats working, what isn't, and what they'll need to adjust for success.
Deal Performance Dashboard
A deal performance dashboard gives you unencumbered insights into the status of your deals, which stage each deal is in, how many deals have closed, the alignment of closing to your target, and how much revenue is expected to come in. This is crucial for sales leadership and your c-suite, who benefit from being able to view performance in one lens; then easily report numbers out to stakeholders interested in the dollars and cents.
Sales Pipeline Dashboard
A sales pipeline dashboard is the ultimate tool for assessing your sales process on a stage-by-stage level. It acts as a microscope for your pipeline, highlighting stages where deals are getting stuck, clients are pulling out, or otherwise. This thorough view of your process allows you to constantly monitor, evaluate, and update your sales pipeline through data-driven and objective decision-making.
Win/Loss Dashboard
This dashboard tracks your win/loss rate and creates reports highlighting why certain deals were closed while others were not. This is great for identifying no-no actions that can lead to a lost sale or pinpointing best practices for your team. It also provides you with insight into your teams close rates during specific periods.
Sales Activities Dashboard
Speaking of best practices, a sales activities dashboard breaks down the activities your sales reps are completing on a daily basis. This can include number of calls, presentations, emails, deals closed, and more, and gives you a broader view of what activities yield the best results while monitoring the utilization of your team.
Performance Overview Dashboard
The performance overview dashboard gives you a holistic view of the most relevant and critical KPIs for your entire team. It is simple to use and presents data in an organized fashion that ensures every team member is on the same page. You can use this information to assess a teams performance as a whole and monitor any dips you need to address.
Checklist for Creating a Sales Dashboard of Your Own
A sales dashboard should be purposeful, useful, easily accessible, and meet the needs of its users. Use this checklist to create a valuable dashboard for your teams unique needs and objectives:
- Determine how (and for whom) the dashboard will be used - Knowing who will actually utilize a dashboard makes a big difference when designing it. CEOs for example, probably don’t need to know detailed information about the activities their salespeople are completing, but would benefit from a holistic view of revenue and performance. Sales managers, on the other hand, need precise information about their team, any given rep’s performance, and more micro-scale data. Determining who will use the sales dashboard, why they will use it, and what information they need will go a long way in creating optimized dashboards for quick and accurate reporting.
- Identify the necessary sales metrics to track - You don’t want to stack your sales dashboard with useless information, nor do you want to exclude any important data that could affect your understanding or decision-making. Hence, identifying and prioritizing the metrics that help you achieve the nuanced understanding you’re after is imperative. Include the metrics you usually talk to your team about, your KPIs, and the most important metrics that affect revenue. These metrics could address productivity, conversion, pipelines, revenue, buyer sentiment and more. The important thing is that they align perfectly with your use case (e.g. not only who is using it, but why they want the information in the first place).
- Utilize the right tools for your team - As the number of salespeople using sales intelligence tools continues to increase, it’s crucial to remember that not all technologies are created equal. Make sure you’re evaluating your tools based on their ability to help you better align objectives with actual results. Robust, modern technologies can consistently feed high-quality and relevant data (from a variety of sources) into your dashboards to help you meet your goals. Traditional spreadsheets and disparate toolsets, on the other hand, will make the process of creating dashboards more painful than it is valuable.
- Gather data into your dashboard - Bring data from across your existing tech stack into one centralized view.. This gives you more flexibility and better options for accessing holistic or detailed reports that fit your unique needs. The right technology should be flexible and open-enough to make the process of gathering actionable data seamless and scalable.
- Build helpful reports for the sales dashboard - There are a plethora of ways to configure helpful reports for sales dashboards. You need to know what it is you are looking for in a report: be it trends, compositions, comparisons, etc. The way the information is presented in a report is equally essential, so make sure you identify the most appropriate data view in your dashboard, which will help make that data as useful as possible. Spider charts, for example, are great for comparing sales rep performance, while bar charts are better suited for tracking revenue growth. Just keep in mind that the right tool should offer the flexibility to configure easily consumable reports based on how you’ll be using them.
How The Right Technology Can Take Your Sales Dashboards to The Next Level
Leveraging technology can elevate your sales dashboards, optimize your sales strategies, and provide transparency and control over your sales process. The use of the right solution impacts the entirety of your sales process - guiding salespeople through their day to complete sales activities according to best practices, which, in turn, drives revenue.
Modern technology also helps by sorting tasks by their respective priority, ensuring the most important matters are addressed in a timely fashion. It also gives you real-time insights from live activity feeds to guarantee your decision-making is always up to date, data-driven, impactful, and objective.
Powerful Sales Dashboards for Better Insights
Sales dashboards are valuable tools that provide you with comprehensive information about your end-to-end sales process. They centralize and present historical and real-time data in a simple, effective way to help you make data-driven decisions.
Sales dashboards are most effective when they're thoughtfully created, contain relevant metrics, and are paired with the right technology. Outreach makes it easy to create dashboards that help sales managers and reps gain actionable insights at a glance. Learn how Outreach can empower your sales teams with intuitive, extensive dashboards that offer full transparency into your valuable sales data, or request a demo today.
