Sales dashboards can be helpful for organizations of any size, so don’t use that as an excuse if you’re a small company not using one. You might consider instead asking why you are not using one since it’s such a great business tool.
Let’s face it: Sales dashboards are critical for meeting your quota. If your sales reps don’t see the real-time and historical data at their fingertips, they’ll be less likely to meet or exceed their goals. Luckily, there are a number of options for building highly customizable dashboards that give users exactly what they need when they need it.
What is a Sales Dashboard?
Sales dashboards are a collection of online, real-time sales data that is tailored to the unique needs of sales reps and teams. This can include reports on things like pipeline status, forecasted sales, top accounts, best customers and average order value. In other words, the information users see is as much as possible about their daily tasks as a sales person. It’s also typically presented as a series of graphs, tables and charts that can be customized to their specific needs. Dashboards are designed to provide users with an at-a-glance view of the information that is most important for them, giving teams greater visibility into what’s going on in their department and helping them make better, faster decisions.
Important Features of a Sales Dashboard
Sales dashboards generally offer a number of important features such as:
- Highly customizable layouts and graphics that allow users to see what is most important to them.
- Real-time data that can be customized to their specific needs, such as which accounts they want to track or the fields within those accounts. This ensures they don’t have to wait for reports to generate or update.
- Historical data that can be pulled from a number of different places, including back-end systems and third-party websites, but is most often segmented into something that is most relevant to them such as regions or product categories.
- Something that is often overlooked when it comes to a sales dashboard, but can be very important in achieving maximum performance, is how frequently the data refreshes. Sales reps may need fresh data or they may want it updated once a day or a week. Either way, the feature should be included.
- Customizable reports designed to meet the unique needs of your sales reps.
- Reporting frequency options for users who need data more frequently.
In many cases, sales dashboards are dependent on the data being fed into them. So it’s important for users to have access to data that is timely, accurate and complete. This includes ensuring the proper training on how to update the sales dashboard with relevant information.
How to Get The Most Out of Your Dashboard: 5 Tips
Here are five tips for helping you get the most out of your investment in a sales dashboard:
1. Implement a Sales Productivity System
You’ll need to make sure you have the right tools in place before embarking on your dashboard journey. One of these is a sales productivity system that organizes all the pieces of information about each opportunity into one, central location. Without this it can be difficult for users to see which deals are in which stages and how they compare to the rest of their team.
2. Involve Sales Reps From the Very Beginning
It can be difficult for some departments to get user buy-in when implementing technology, but this is especially true in the case of sales teams. Because users need to interact with their dashboard constantly throughout the day, it’s important for them to be involved in the development process from day one. Getting them involved in designing features and giving feedback on prototypes can make a big difference when it comes to successful adoption of the tool.
3. Make Reporting Easy
If users have to spend too much time preparing data or reports then they won’t use the dashboard as much. And if they don’t use it, then you’ve wasted a valuable asset. So one of the most important things to do is make reporting easy, with features such as auto-refresh and automatic email distribution for reports.
4. Don’t Create Too Many Dashboards
At this time there aren’t any industry standards or best practices for sales dashboards, but it is important to be mindful of how many dashboards you have. Some companies have tried creating a separate dashboard for each function such as pipelines, customers and regions. While this can be helpful in some cases, too many dashboards can overwhelm your users and make it difficult to see the larger picture.
5. Don’t Forget to Train Users
Dashboards can be very useful, but they won’t help anyone if your sales reps don’t know how to use them properly and update the information that goes into them. It’s important that you set up a training program for everyone who will be using the dashboard and ensure there is an ongoing communication plan in place so users feel they can ask questions when they come up.
Sales Dashboards have the power to revolutionize a sales team’s ability to track and analyze data. But they can be difficult to implement effectively if you don’t know what you’re doing. So be sure to follow these five tips before you embark on your dashboard journey.
Sunvera Software develops next-level software applications from start-to-finish. We are a premier software and mobile app development agency specializing in healthcare mobile app development, custom mobile app development company, telehealth software, sales dashboards, custom mobile app development services, retail software development, supply-chain software, ecommerce, shopify, web design, iBeacon apps, security solutions and unified access software.
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