My dashboard needs a makeover
How to design an actionable sales dashboard
DEAR STAGE 2: I was the first sales hire at a seed-stage company. We made our second hire late last year, and we’re now in the process of onboarding two more AEs. We use HubSpot, and while it’s working ok for me, I don’t think we have the right reporting or dashboards set up for a larger team. I’m not sure what these new AEs are each working on day to day, or if those activities are actually helping them to hit their goals. What should I be looking at? ~My dashboard needs a makeover
DEAR MY DASHBOARD NEEDS A MAKEOVER: As you step into what sounds like a new management or leadership role, your dashboard is critical. My partner, Mandy Cole, wrote a fantastic article on this topic: Measuring What Matters. It covers the 4 most important types of dashboards for leaders:
Company Performance
Team Performance
Leading Indicator Snapshot
Wall of Shame
I can’t do better, so check it out!
That said, I think the most important thing you can do at this stage of the business is figure out what to show this new team on THEIR dashboards. You have the opportunity to direct their time and attention from day 1, while giving them the information they need to hit their goals!
Dashboards are often confusing. They usually show too much information and aren’t actually actionable. I’ll take a page out of Mandy’s book and share that at the rep level, there are two fundamentally different types of dashboards:
Things I need to do (actionable / proactive)
How I did (results / reactive)
They are both important, but most companies get fixated on the latter. They give reps a lot of details on results, instead of acting as a central hub to actually guide his/her work and influence those outcomes.
For a rep joining a new company, the actionable dashboard is critical to success. It should answer the question “what do I need to do today/this week?” and be structured so that the most impactful actions are front and center. Time scale matters too — you need to know what is overdue, what should be done now and what’s coming up. Depending on your week, you may be playing catch up or have the time to get ahead, and it should be simple and easy to do either from your home screen.
Dashboards should absolutely vary by role (BDR, AE, AM, etc…) — do not make the mistake of assuming one size fits all! Let’s consider your new AE and some of the things he or she might need to see on that actionable home dashboard:
New leads assigned today
Next step actions for current prospecting sequences
Overdue actions/tasks
Meetings that occurred yesterday (did you send the right follow up?)
Meetings scheduled for this week/future (is everyone fully prepped?)
Exception reporting on ROE: conflict with a partner, overdue new leads, missing/blank fields, deals at X stage without Champion identified, etc…
Pipeline progression (what deals are you tracking for this month/period?)
What doesn’t matter on your “actionable” dashboard? Other people’s stuff. This should be a place where you come to get work done, not compare/contrast or get distracted.