3 Essential Sales Dashboards to Manage Your Organization

These days your executives demand visibility into significantly more information than they have in the past. With the right data at their fingertips, they're empowered to be more proactive and make decisions based on forecasts and real-time data. But you're no fool, figuring out exactly what information to expose to various groups can be challenging.

Salesforce reports and dashboards are generally structured for analysts or sales operations - providing too much detail without context for CEOs, but not enough granularity for regional VPs and sales reps.

The good news is, there's a solution. Advanced sales analytics (such as GoodData) make it easy to create separate dashboards with just the right level of transparency for each of your stakeholders.

Here's our roundup of dashboards that top sales leaders use to run their organizations, share insight with executive leadership, and manage direct reports:

The CEO

Bottom Line: What is the overall outlook for the quarter/year?

Dashboard best practices: There's a reason we call it the executive “summary”. The CEO needs a a red/yellow/green view of sales performance, so she can open the door to larger conversations on if, when and how she needs to get more involved.

Essential reports:

1. Revenue contributions
2. Pipeline potential

The SVP or VP of Sales

Bottom Line: Where should I focus my attention to help close big deals?

Dashboard best practices: This dashboard should serve two purposes. First, it should give you the confidence and visibility to be a proactive leader. Second, it needs to keep you out of the weeds and focused on high-impact business activities.

Essential reports in this Dashboard:

1. Quota Progress and Win Rate
2. Top Opportunities
3. Stalled Opportunities
4. State of Pipeline

Your direct reports, the RVP/Divisional Sales

Bottom Line: What products/regions/reps are driving revenue in my region?

Dashboard best practices: Give them the ability to get deep into their data. These dashboards are all about slicing, dicing and reporting across objects. If your direct reports can drill into how their teams are performing by rep, region, product, etc., they'll know which issues are high-impact and require executive focus.

Essential reports in this Dashboard:

1. Top products
2. Top regions
3. Top sales reps

These three dashboards expose the right level of transparency to all of your key stakeholders. And we all know that increasing transparency improves accountability, motivates change, and will ultimately help you close more deals.