Does Your Sales Dashboard Provide Powerful Insight?
Your company has revenue goals to hit. Each person on your sales team has a quota to hit that relates to the overall revenue goals. There are a lot of moving parts to keep track of as individuals and the company as a whole moves toward goals. If you’re still manually tracking sales activity, you’re probably investing much of your time and generating sub-par visibility.
The small and mid-sized companies I work with all have one thing in common. They need help developing and implementing an insightful sales dashboard. Maybe you’ll find this real-world story relatable if this area hasn’t hit the top of your list yet?
Why You Need a Sales Dashboard
You might be feeling overwhelmed by the volume of data you are tracking. If you lack a clear sense of your team’s sales performance because you don’t have visible data, then you will likely benefit from a sales dashboard.
The sales dashboard is an essential tool for any company looking to improve its productivity and efficiency. A good way of tracking key points in the process, it can be used as a benchmark against which future results are measured so that you know what areas need more attention or improvement if there’s been stagnation over time.
Knowing where and when things are stuck in the sales process alerts the sales leader with real-time visibility on where sellers need help navigating a deal before it’s too late. It also pinpoints areas where sellers would benefit from additional training.
In my previous article, “How Can I Build an Accountable Sales Culture?” you’ll also see how tracking the stats and performance of your sales team naturally creates a high-performance sales culture. This is one of those invisible superpowers that top sales organizations always embody.
My clients have seen incredible success after they’ve developed and implemented a sales dashboard we created together! To give your company an edge on the competition by focusing attention on these areas.
Top 4 Benefits of a Sales Dashboard
1. Real-time Reporting
Having data you can trust at your fingertips is powerful. If your sales team is working remotely, this offers you a ‘window’ into their daily activities, struggles, and successes. You can remain in the loop and stay connected to your salespeople, even when you might go days without seeing or talking with one another.
2. Objective Conversations
Your sales dashboard is a place for you and your team to review the numbers, not opinions. The data is clear-cut so there’s no room left open for subjective thoughts or ideas – only hard truth from reality! This makes it easier than ever before in 1:1 meetings because ‘facts are facts’ when using this tool alongside coaching techniques that will help move deals through pipelines quicker while keeping the focus on securing new customer encounters at an amazing rate too.
3. Team Benchmarking
When your dashboard is designed to provide comparative data across team members, best practice sharing becomes a staple function in your sales meetings. With your dashboard, you’ll be able to study the strengths of sellers and replicate them. This includes higher close rates for certain products or services in addition to volumes from new leads versus current ones on account of deal flow over time- as well as pinpointing which member has been most successful at finding high-profit items based on their performance metrics.
4. Self-Directed Motivation
Providing your salespeople with visibility into their personal scorecard enables them to monitor their own performance. It creates natural self-motivation when they understand how much more effort it will take to achieve the next gate on their comp plan or how they are performing versus their peers, or even how they are measuring up to their own historic activity trends that led to previous success. Creating a method for your salespeople to be self-directed creates the empowerment that breeds high performance.
Learn how the score card can be positioned as a motivation tool in my previous article called, “How to Drive The Right Sales Behavior With Your Compensation Plan”.
Avoid Making These Mistakes
I’d be remised not to key in on some of the culprits that can kill a sales dashboard’s effectiveness. These are some of the most common:
Lack of Communication
By getting feedback from your team before implementing a sales dashboard, you’ll be able to make sure that it is embraced and works well with their needs. Listen carefully so any concerns or questions they ask can help shape the final product of this new tool for success.
Overcomplicated
Keep the dashboard simple and clear. Let it inform you of what work needs to be done with your sales teams, but don’t clutter up a complicated-looking report that is hard for anyone else in any company below you or above them as well! Instead, identify which key metrics are important so they can use this guide easily when working together.
Micro-Measuring
Make sure your dashboard focuses on the quality and not just the quantity of your activity. Remember, your dashboard is a high-level view. You can dive in later to assess the volume of activity running through each seller’s scorecard if you notice pipeline volume is not growing as it should. Focus on the key milestones in your sales process that are strong leading indicators that the seller is progressing at a steady pace toward their revenue goal.
Difficult Tracking
Make it a priority at launch that the dashboard will be updated on a regular basis, ideally real time through the use of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Don’t create metrics that cannot be easily tracked such as gross margin. When you have a multitude of products where costs tend to vary on a daily basis, your gross margin is a constantly moving target. Metrics need to be readily accessible to the salesperson and sales leader in order to serve as a real-time, automated guide.
The sales dashboard is a great way to track your successes and failures, but it isn’t the only step you need in order for your company’s performance. A well-executed sales infrastructure will give management insight into where they should focus their efforts next so that everyone can succeed together.
I have decades of experience building winning, results-driven sales organizations and would enjoy sharing that value with you.
If you are looking to improve or expedite your results, contact me at (404)271-6767, send an email at dan@transcendentsales.com, or book a meeting through my Scheduling Tool.
I also invite you to follow me on LinkedIn to gain exposure to future article posts that will offer more valuable selling insights.
Another helpful resource I offer is a custom report you will receive after investing 2-minutes taking my SALES AGILITY ASSESSMENT. It’s filled with tips on how to optimize your sales environment based on your unique responses, making the report individualized and insightful!
Dan Mahony
President
I am part of a national group of Senior Sales Leaders who collaborate to share insights like the examples shown in this article. We formed because of our shared passion to help business leaders exponentially grow their revenue.
