The Sales Dashboard: an Essential Tool

Your sales organization’s dashboard is not just a reporting and evaluation tool. Nor is it merely a document reserved for management, or a way to penalize your sales reps.

Properly designed and well-utilized, the dashboard can become the best ally for the sales manager and their teams.

But what can a sales dashboard truly do for you?

The Benefits of the Sales Dashboard

Provide Guidance to your Sales Team

The reason the sales dashboard is so undervalued is that it’s also often misunderstood. Sales reps see it as an evaluation tool, or even a way to penalize their work. They read objectives that can influence their career prospects within the company.

What if you encouraged them to look at the sales dashboard with fresh eyes? In reality, the indicators are there to guide their actions, to show them the way. The objectives, meanwhile, are simply benchmarks, indicators of effectiveness.

Demystify the numbers. They are not there to penalize or punish, but rather to guide and support your sales reps towards achieving objectives.

Measure the Effectiveness of your Sales Force

The primary function of a sales dashboard is to measure the effectiveness of sales actions undertaken, by comparing the results obtained with previously set objectives.

This tool will therefore give you an overview of your company’s sales activity, as well as the objectives to be achieved. It will also indicate your team’s shortcomings, areas to review, or those that will require training, with a view to constant progress.

Better Understand your Company’s Customers

If you detail your dashboard sufficiently, you can use it to study the behavior of your company’s prospects and customers.

By adopting KPIs that reflect the expectations and needs of your prospects, you can prioritize your customer files, as well as your sales actions. Your dashboard is the ideal tool for testing and adopting new methods, new sales approaches: it will allow you to compare their effectiveness and share these results with your team.

Lead your Sales Team through Change

Leading change (internal link: “Sales transformation: how to get change accepted in my sales organization?”) within your organization can prove difficult. It is likely that your employees will initially be resistant to a new marketing automation tool or a new prospecting method.

If you find it difficult to implement change within your team, you can introduce it by highlighting the benefits it offers your sales organization. The dashboard can help you with this, as it will allow you to compare the results of the old method with those of the new tool.

Concrete results, gathered during test phases with some of your collaborators, will allow you to convince all the others.

Limit Reporting and Meetings

Contrary to popular belief, your dashboard should allow you to limit reporting work and the number of meetings with your sales force.

Carefully selected and limited KPIs (beyond 10 key indicators, you risk getting sidetracked) will allow you to limit internal information flows, by selecting only relevant information. Time savings guaranteed!

Refine and improve your team’s sales processes, thanks to a clear and well-understood sales dashboard. And to help your sales force adopt it, why not involve them in its design?

How to best use dashboards to drive performance in the digital age? This is the subject of our new White Paper: Driving Performance in the Digital Age