Thus, even all best customer service practices are focused on improving customer retention and customer satisfaction, which leads not only to a positive customer experience but also to a higher possibility for customers to come back to the company and purchase from it again and again. Thus, whatever we discuss about the business and its functioning, we will come back to sales in every case.
But what about the sales themselves? Is there any “one size fits all” rule that is acceptable for both SMBs (small and midsize businesses) and large enterprises that will help them to boost sales sky-high and improve sales management? There is one.
The modern age is all about data-driven decisions and data-driven experience, and so are sales. You can’t manage your sales strategy and ensure its success if you don’t analyze and collect sales data. By the way, it is even highly unlikely you will be able to compete with companies that do collect sales data while you don’t.
But what is the main issue with sales data? It’s huge. Thus, to analyze it all, or at least to check it all out, you have to generate it in specific formats, as huge sales reports are just impossible to understand and use. Even such a small thing as sales reporting format matters, as wisely generated sales reports are easier to understand and interact with.
The best sales reporting format is a sales dashboard. That is why we are going to tell you what is sales dashboard, what are the types of sales dashboards, and also we will give you some useful sales dashboard examples.
What is sales dashboard?
Sales dashboard is a type of sales report that is generated as an image that includes visualization of key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and the progress of their achievement according to pre-set sales goals and targets.
The main advantage of sales dashboards is that they provide data in up-to-minute mode. This means sales managers are always equipped with relevant data about their sales performance, the sales performance of subordinate teams, the process of sales KPIs, and other important data managers need to make thoughtful decisions.
Another great advantage of sales dashboards is that sales dashboards are customizable. Sales dashboards have their purpose to help sales teams analyze their work and make necessary decisions to improve their sales performance and achieve their sales goals faster, so sales dashboards also can be adapted to your current business needs.
Sales dashboard customization means you can change sales KPIs and sales metrics visualized in your sales dashboards, so you can design each sales dashboard in accordance with your existing business needs.
Are sales dashboards better than the CRM system?
Sales dashboards aren’t the solution that is meant to replace CRM systems. CRM system is the tool that allows you to manage your relations with customers, provide them with fast and effective service, handle customer orders quickly, and so on.
You can’t just ignore CRM software and rely on sales dashboards only. Sales dashboards are only sales reports of specific design, while the CRM system is a multi-feature platform that provides you with numerous functions to manage your business inventories, handle orders, communicate with customers through different contact channels, manage sales pipelines, collect customer feedback, create customer profiles and buyer personas, and so on.
On the other hand, a sales dashboard is the most advanced way to create a sales report. Sales dashboards are your best friends when analyzing sales performance, and they are meant to provide you with the big picture of all sales processes you manage.
Sales dashboard examples: best ones
There are numerous sales dashboard examples, but we have filtered most of them and decided to provide you only with those that are truly valuable and useful. So, let’s learn those sales dashboard examples that can help your business improve sales performance.
Sales performance dashboard
The sales performance dashboard is one of the sales dashboard examples that focuses solely on the sales performance of your teams. Thus, its main purpose is to help your sales executives learn whether their subordinate sales reps are meeting the sales objectives or not and what is the current progress in reaching those sales targets.
The sales performance dashboard has to include some vital sales metrics, such as Average Revenue per Unit (ARPU) - a brilliant benchmark to see how much money has been generated by different types of sales, even though this sales metric doesn’t include customer acquisition costs in the calculations.
Another vital metric to include is customer acquisition costs (CAC) - you have to understand how much money you spend on acquiring each new customer, because it strongly influences your profit. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is another significant metric, as each acquired customer doesn’t leave you after one purchase, you can use further opportunities to convince the client to complete new purchases.
You have to include diagrams that will show your sales performance by the above-mentioned sales metrics within the last 6 to 12 months, as well as overall profit, sales revenue, number of customers acquired, and correlation between sales targets and current revenue to see whether your sales reps are underperforming or overperforming.
Sales cycle length dashboard
Sales cycle length sales dashboards are important because by managing your sales cycle lenght, you can cut operational costs, and improve agent performance and customer satisfaction. The longer the sales cycle is, the more effort it takes for sales reps to close each opportunity and move to another lead, so you can lose a lot of opportunities if your sales cycle works inefficiently.
The sales cycle length sales dashboard should include such sales metrics, as the current length of a sales cycle for each type of sales you use for each contact channel or lead type, or at least the average sales cycle length for all types of leads. Secondly, you have to determine what stages of a sales pipeline (or sales funnel, depending on how you understand your sales processes) customers pass during their customer journey - it can be 4 stages or 5, it doesn’t matter a lot. You have to segment deals by the stage of the sales pipeline they are currently at. For each sales pipeline stage, you should also measure its duration - like for the awareness stage it can take 10 days, while for the negotiation stage, it is 5 days or something.
You can also segment sales cycles by managers by measuring the average sales cycle length for each single sales manager working on the project. It is a bad idea to compare sales cycles for inbound sales managers and outbound sales managers, or sales managers who work with absolutely different types of deals.
Sales conversion dashboard
The sales conversion dashboard is important because it shows how many leads are you converting to customers. First of all, the success of a business today depends not only on the number of leads acquired but on the business’s ability to convert those leads into loyal customers who will stay with the business for a long time and provide needed stability for the company.
A sales dashboard that focuses on measuring sales conversion should include the following sales metrics: Lead Conversion Ratio as the main one because lead conversion ratio shows how many of your leads were converted into real sales opportunities. The industry benchmark for lead conversion ratio is from 2 to 5%, but still, it doesn’t mean that you can’t perform it better. Also, you have to include such a sales metric into your sales dashboard as a lead-to-opportunity ratio, which should be at least 15%. An opportunity-to-win ratio can also be included to measure how many qualified leads have been turned into customers. You can also include customer churn to measure your customer retention, but this is not a direct sales metric, it is more about customer service quality, though it still affects your sales progress.
All these sales metrics interact with each other and depend on each other - for instance, if you see a huge difference between the lead-to-opportunity ratio and the opportunity-to-win ratio, it can point to huge problems at some exact stage of a sales funnel - either on its end or its beginning because if you can convert leads into qualified leads, you can further convert them into customers.
Sales opportunity dashboard
Sales opportunity dashboard as one of the most useful sales dashboard examples is the best way to measure your sales opportunities and the productivity and efficiency of your sales teams regarding the use of those opportunities. Sales opportunities are perhaps the most important part of the sales process, as it only depends on you how will you use those opportunities - you have already got them.
The sales dashboard should definitely include the overall number of sales opportunities you currently have and compare it to the number of sales opportunities you had for the previous period, for instance, for the previous month or quarter. You have to understand also the value of those opportunities combined, and the average value of each single sales opportunity. You have to measure the conversion rate or win rate, too, as you have can use it to forecast how many sales opportunities will be converted to wins at the end. You have to measure the number of lost opportunities and opportunity churn rate and see its correlation with the churn rate for the previous period. There is no generally accepted industry benchmark for opportunity churn rate as for every industry it will be very different, but still you can use historical data to decide whether your sales strategy or sales reps training programs need any changes. You can include the customer reasons for churn to measure what reasons harm your sales the most and make needed decisions to change the situation.
There are also many different sales dashboard examples and sales dashboard templates, including revenue dashboard, sales funnel dashboard, sales KPIs dashboard, sales pipeline dashboard, sales territory dashboard, and so on. All of them can work as images or as XLS files, whatever you prefer, but in most cases, when we are talking about sales dashboards, we do mean that they are visualizing data in the most comprehensive way, and they should be generated automatically too.
Thus, you have to choose the software to provide you with the best sales dashboards.
How to choose a reliable vendor for sales dashboards software?
First of all, you have to answer the following questions.
- What do you want to measure in your sales dashboards? Different sales reporting examples include different data, so you can learn whether those sale reports examples meet your business requirements.
- What are the limits of customization? You have to get your sales dashboards customized to meet your business needs. Each example of a sales report can be customized, but how? Can it be adapted to your requirements? That’s the question.
- What do genuine reviews say? If real users can provide their buyer stories and describe what have they benefited from, you can conclude this offer is valuable.
Conclusion
As you see, each different example of sales reports has its pros and cons, but nowadays, there is nothing better than sales dashboards. Sales dashboards provide real-time data, they can be customized and they are as comprehensive as nothing else, but still, there are some more valuable sales dashboards examples and sales dashboards templates than others. We have provided you with some guidelines on how to design useful sales dashboards, but we also offer to check out our outbound call center software - if you need a tool to generate outbound sales, that’s for you - and yes, it has numerous powerful reporting tools, including up-to-minute dashboards too!
