The Nine Principles of Killer Dashboards

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The nine principles of Killer Dashboards

How leading companies track opportunities and create revenue

“The un-dashboarded forecast is not worth the pixels it’s printed on.”

Kevin Jones, Salesforce Dashboard Dude

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”Socrates

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What’s a Dashboard?

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What’s a Dashboard?A dashboard is a single screen that tracks a number of key metrics in real time. That may not sound very exciting…

But, for this deck, we’ll be talking about your

Sales and Marketing

Dashboard:

The place where the entire revenue creation team tracks your progress

and collaborates around opportunities.

Now that’s exciting.

Why are dashboards so important?

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Why are dashboards so important?Dashboards are important because they align your entire sales and marketing organisation around the metrics you most need to track.

With a well-designed dashboard, you can see:

And that’s just a small sample.

• If you’re attracting enough leads• How well they’re progressing through

the sales cycle• How well you’re converting them• How much revenue is coming your way• Where the revenue is coming from• How your campaigns and sales people

are performing• How happy your customers are…

In short, if you can measure it, you can get it on a dashboard.

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A great dashboard is one that your sales and marketing people live inside.

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They’re open on screens all the time. Everyone refers to them.The most important meetings happen around them.The critical reports feed into them.

A great dashboard helps streamline, automate and accelerate the entire sales and marketing operation.

OK

That means a great dashboard is one that your sales and marketing people agree on.

∙ It’s about what they feel is important.

∙ It’s what they want to see.

∙ It highlights the metrics they’ll track every day.

And nothing else.

Here’s an example:Leads by Source: where are they coming from?

The sales pipeline: track opportunities by stage

Closed business: keep it in the green

How are we doing vs last year?

Revenue trend by type: looks like a great quarter

Customer satisfaction: if you can measure it, you can track it

Leads by Source Customer Satisfaction

Revenue by Month Year over Year

More than the sum of its reports

Each component in a dashboard represents one report. Here are some good ones:

Closed Business & TrendsBy product, over time – or any way you want to see it.

Top RepsWho’s chasing up and closing the most business?

Competitor reportWho are you losing to?

Wall of FameWho has completed the highest percentage of their assigned tasks?

Opportunities How much revenue is in each of your stages?

Other popular components you’ll find in many dashboards:

Again: anything you can track, you can build into a report and then feed into your dashboard. The key is to pick the important things.

Leads by StatusOpen? Working? Qualified?

Conversion rate by market segmentHow are you converting in each?

Deals win rateHow many are you winning?

The principles of creating great dashboards

Follow these guidelines and your dashboards will rock the business…

01 Align everyone around one dashboard.

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You can have dashboards for different teams, campaigns and purposes.

That’s fine.

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But you also want one, single dashboard that the sales and marketing folks agree on as your primary revenue creation tracker.

Make sure you use consistent, agreed metrics: it’s critical that everyone understands the definition of each metric that you’re tracking.

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A typical Salesforce dashboard has three columns with up to 20 components.

Column 1 could be used for closed business status.

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Column 2 could track the sales pipeline and opportunities.

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Column 3 looks at big deals and top performers.

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02 Map your purchase cycle and define stages.

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One of the most powerful things you can do in your dashboard is to track all leads as they turn into prospects, opportunities and deals – or whatever you choose to call them.

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We’ll get you started with the ones shown below. But you can set up as many stages as make sense for your business, then build a report that feeds your dashboard.

Stage

Prospecting

Qualification

NeedsAnalysis

Value Proposition

Proposal/Price Quote

Negotiation/Review

Closed/Won

Closed/Lost

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03 Define and agree the metrics you need to track.

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A purchase cycle stage is not an abstract idea. It’s a specific state that’s defined by the actions taken by the prospect, your sales team or both.

To track your leads and deals through the cycle, your team needs to agree on what specific actions define each stage, then build these into your reporting and dashboard components.

Report Builder lets non-techies capture these metrics and turn them into reports for your dashboard.

04 Iterate.

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We’ve never seen a great dashboard that was great in its first incarnation.

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The idea is to get one out there, live with it a while, get feedback from the people using it, and improve it over and over again.

Soon, everyone has the dashboard experience they really want.

And they can’t live without it.

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If you can’t easily create new dashboard components, edit them and swap them around, you need a new CRM system.

This stuff should take minutes (or you’ll never do it and find you’re stuck with a sub-optimal dashboard).

It’s essential to have a drag & drop dashboard builder that all of your teams can use.

05 Make sure you can drill down.

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The first generation of dashboards were just static snapshots.

Today, your dashboard needs to be a live, real-time view of your data.

That means you can click on just about anything and drill down to the underlying reports, data and customer profiles.

06 Social-power your dashboard.

@dashboard

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greatprogress!

Early dashboards were silos of information. You opened them up, got what you needed and went somewhere else to act on the information.

Today, great dashboards are the centre of collaboration for the entire sales and marketing team.

@dashboard

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greatprogress!

It’s like having your company’s own internal Facebook built into your dashboard. So people can ‘follow’ a metric or an activity, share it with other team members, comment on it or open a conversation around it.

This may sound like a bell or a whistle – but in reality, it’s hugely powerful.

Great dashboards are active collaboration platforms.

07 Integrate tasks.

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Again, old dashboards were static data slices. New dashboards are active productivity environments.

What does that mean? It means you can can capture tasks and activities in the dashboard, to make sure they get done.

All from within the dashboard. No logging in and logging out. No sending emails or chasing with phone calls (unless you want to).

We know: cool, right?

08 Make it pretty.

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This one shouldn’t matter but, let’s face it, it does.

If you want people to spend time in your dashboards, you need to add a bit of eye candy.

Yes, your data could be represented in columns and rows, but who wants to look at spreadsheets all day?

Colourful, clear, easy-to-read charts, graphs and dials make important data jump out from the background noise. And people like them.

There’s no excuse for ugly dashboards any more.

09 Make it mobile.

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Dashboards are too important to lock to the desktop.

You need to be able to access your dashboard wherever you are. So tablet and smartphone versions are a really good idea.

A good mobile app should let you do pretty much everything you could do from your desk, including:

Search for and browse the dashboards you’re following

View any and all components

Share a dashboard or component

Collaborate with colleagues inside the dashboard

Access recently viewed reports and dashboards when you’re offline

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The best dashboards are the ones that whole teams practically live inside. You don’t want to break that habit just because people are away from their desks.

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Conclusion: Dashboards accelerate pipelines.

Your dashboard should be the engine of your revenue machine.

Define some key metrics and the business processes that drive them.

Turn them into a report.

Aggregate a few critical reports into a simple dashboard.

Show it to your team.

Improve it.

Improve it again.

Add in social capabilities.

Let people assign and track tasks.

Make it pretty.

Improve it again.

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DONE

And stand back.You’ve just created a sales and marketing collaboration tool that doesn’t just report on revenue generation, it generates revenue.

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The hard sell part.

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At salesforce.com, we’re crazy about dashboards (you may have noticed).

That’s why we spend so much time and energy making sure our customers can build the very best dashboards in the civilised universe.

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Dashboards that sales and marketing people love.

Dashboards that track everything important so you can improve everything important.

Dashboards that keep sales and marketing accountable to each other.

Dashboards that help you crush your sales forecasts.

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If you’re starting to see the power of the dashboard in your own sales and marketing

operation… we should really talk.

Where do you go from here? You can watch a video with some dashboard action here>

Or a free trial here>

And sign up for free demos here>

Or just skip all the foreplay and talk to salesforce.com now so we can get you into our dashboard, convert you into a customer and get you that promotion you so richly deserve.

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