What is a sales dashboard?
A sales dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, sales software, ERP) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., sales growth, conversion rates, average deal size), enabling teams and executives to monitor sales performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
Sales dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a sales dashboard?
An actionable sales dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive sales dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and sales directors show sales' bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Sales performance analysis: by region, product, or sales team, using historical data and forecasts.
- Revenue analysis: total revenue, recurring revenue, and revenue growth.
- Cohort analysis: customer retention, expansion, and lifetime value by customer cohort (purchase period, acquisition source).
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Sales manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-region views with drill-downs to see performance by sales rep, product line, territory, and sales stage. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-region reporting: overall sales, product, client, or territory reporting across regions.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market and product mapping.
- Customer and market research
Operational Sales Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and sales managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Lead management: lead source, conversion rates, follow-up status.
- Sales activities: calls, meetings, emails, and follow-ups.
- Pipeline management: deal stages, expected close dates, and deal size.
- Customer feedback: satisfaction scores, feedback trends.
Operational sales dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a sales dashboard?
To build a sales dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are CRM systems for customer data, ERP for sales transactions, and sales software for activity tracking.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of sales dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like pipeline management, sales forecasting, and performance tracking.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom sales targets, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "sales" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your sales reporting use cases, such as pipeline management, sales forecasting, and performance tracking.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Sales, revenue, conversion rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, sales rep, product, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your sales dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your sales dashboards:
Share
Share your sales dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a sales dashboard?
Sales dashboards should include a mix of funnel—lead generation, conversion, closure—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of sales activities towards business goals. They include:
Sales funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the sales perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Lead metrics: new leads, qualified leads, lead conversion rate
- Engagement metrics: calls, meetings, follow-ups, response time
- Conversion metrics: deals closed, win rate, sales cycle length
Efficiency KPIs compare your sales outputs to the cost, including:
- Lead generation: cost per lead
- Engagement: cost per meeting
- Conversion: cost per acquisition, cost per sale
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Lead generation: lead-to-opportunity ratio
- Engagement: meeting-to-conversion rate
- Conversion: close rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your sales performance:
- Sales: total sales, average deal size
- Cost: sales expenses, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, sales growth, CAC
- Effectiveness: average order value, customer lifetime value
To analyze these sales KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: direct, partner, online vs offline
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: sales stage, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Product: category, line, feature
