One of the most important aspects of sales management is measuring performance, and using your CRM dashboards is a great way to do this. However, all dashboards are not created equal.
Three of the most common dashboard mistakes are:
What is the purpose of dashboards? They give you the ability to get a snapshot of performance against goals that align back to your sales plan. This helps you quickly determine where you need to focus to ensure that you meet your revenue goals.
I like to separate my dashboards into 4 key dashboards:
With each of these, you want to determine the time frame you want to track (Daily, Weekly, MTD, QTD, YTD).
Let’s break down each of these dashboards:
1) Company Performance - This is the dashboard that tracks revenue, forecast and pipeline at the company level. I use this dashboard not only with the sales team, but also with the executive team, to track revenue performance vs. goal by team rolled up to top level revenue. Examples of charts you may want to include are.Here’s an example of one company’s Company Performance Dashboard. They are using “Closing by Channel” as the Forecast.
This Dashboard should be emailed to the exec team weekly (or daily depending on your culture) and reviewed in the Exec team weekly meeting.
2) Team Performance - This is the dashboard you will use to track each team’s KPIs on performance and activity. I am a big fan of ranking team members or using colors to quickly identify all team members that have hit the KPI goal, and I typically focus this dashboard on daily, weekly and monthly views to zero in on the activities that matter to drive pipeline forward (although this will vary depending on the length of your sales cycle). Examples of charts for this dashboard include:
Example of a Team Dashboard
This dashboard should be emailed to the team daily and reviewed every week in the sales meeting and 1:1.
3) Leading Indicator Dashboard - The LI dashboard ties back to your leading indicators of performance and sales model inputs over time to help you determine where you have opportunity to improve.
What leading indicators should you track? The software industry currently rallies around three unit economic goals.
These metrics provide a scientific, data-driven definition of go-to-market fit. However, unit economics are lagging indicators. It may take a year or more to assemble enough historical data to accurately calculate our company’s unit economics. Therefore, we need to understand the leading indicators of unit economics. We need to extract the long term unit economics target into short term go-to-market activity goals.
Below is an example of this approach using the LTV/CAC unit economics metric:
Through fairly simple algebra, we can express the long term goal of:
LTV/CAC > 3
...using near term activities:
For example, a company may have the following assumptions and results:
We can now instrument the leading indicators into daily, weekly, or monthly activity charts to evaluate our progress toward go-to-market fit.
The dashboard above provides monthly, and potentially weekly, updates on how we are tracking against long term unit economics. We are in good shape if the blue line stays above the red line.
Other leading indicators you may want to measure on this dashboard include:
This dashboard should be emailed to the exec team weekly and reviewed monthly in the business review.
4) Wall of Shame - Also known as the “Needs Attention” Dashboard, this is where you can park exception reports and/or things your reps need to clean up in your CRM. Your rep’s goal is to NOT appear on this dashboard to make sure that they keep their house in order.Examples of charts on this dashboard include:
One prospecting mistake teams make is not being persistent enough. The study below from InsideSales.com shows that making only one attempt against a buyer yields a first meeting 40% of the time. Making 6+ attempts yields a first meeting 90% of the time. Persistence pays off. However, the study continues and shows most sellers only make one or two attempts. Simply devising a 6+ attempt prospecting sequence can double the number of first meetings.
This dashboard should be emailed to the sales team daily and reviewed weekly in the sales team meeting and 1:1s.
By grouping your dashboards and aligning them to your sales goals and plan, it will be easier for you to manage your team’s performance in a data driven and visible way. If you don’t have the data you need to build these charts, then you can reevaluate your process to track these metrics in your CRM. When you make your CRM the record of truth, you will have more accurate and consistent data to make good decisions about your business.
If you have a chart or dashboard that is making an impact in your organization, I’d love to hear about it!