What is a B2B dashboard?
A B2B dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems, ERP software, LinkedIn) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., lead conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, sales pipeline), enabling teams to monitor business performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
B2B 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 B2B dashboard?
An actionable B2B dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive B2B dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and stakeholders show the business's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Revenue analysis: by product line, using attribution for large budgets.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from acquired customers
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
B2B manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-department views with drill-downs to see performance by client, product, region, team member, and sales stage. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-department reporting: overall performance, product, client, or region reporting across departments
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market and strategy mapping
- Industry, market, and customer research
Operational B2B Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and department managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Sales: pipeline status, lead conversion, deal velocity
- Customer support: ticket resolution time, customer satisfaction scores
- Finance: budget tracking, expense management
- Operations: supply chain efficiency, inventory levels
Operational B2B 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 B2B dashboard?
To build a B2B 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 sales data, ERP software for operational data, and LinkedIn for lead generation.
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 B2B dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like sales monitoring, budget tracking, and operational efficiency.
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 conversions, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" 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 B2B reporting use cases, such as sales monitoring, budget tracking, and operational efficiency.
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. Leads, revenue, expenses, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, product line, region, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your B2B dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your B2B dashboards:
Share
Share your B2B dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a B2B dashboard?
B2B dashboards should include a mix of sales, operational, financial, and customer metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of business operations towards goals. They include:
Sales KPIs measure the buying process (from the business perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Lead metrics: lead volume, lead conversion rate
- Sales metrics: deals closed, sales cycle length
- Customer metrics: customer retention, customer satisfaction
Operational KPIs compare your business outputs to the cost, including:
- Efficiency: cost per lead, cost per acquisition
- Productivity: revenue per employee
Financial KPIs compare the input with the output from one business stage to another
- Revenue: total revenue, recurring revenue
- Profitability: gross margin, net profit margin
Customer and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your business performance:
- Customer: customer lifetime value, churn rate
- Cost: operational expenses, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, CAC
- Effectiveness: average deal size, average contract value
To analyze these B2B KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: direct, partner, LinkedIn vs email
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Business: client, branch, region
- Product: product line, service type
- Customer: industry, company size, location
