How to Build Power BI Sales Dashboards with Examples

Have you ever wondered how to build Power BI sales dashboards to monitor the revenue performance of your business? Power BI is a great tool for building sales dashboards that provide actionable insights into the performance of a sales team. It can also help a sales team to make strategic decisions. A good Power BI sales dashboard visually tracks key sales metrics, uncovers trends and patterns, and identifies opportunities and challenges. This can eventually enable data-driven actions.

I used to work as a Financial Analyst in Autodesk for 3 years where I produced Power BI dashboards for sales directors and finance directors. I will summarise my experience in more detail in this article.

In this comprehensive guide, we will review the types of Power BI Sales Dashboards walk through the step-by-step process for building effective financial sales dashboards that drive results.

Types of Power BI Sales Dashboards

You can roughly divide Power BI Sales dashboards into 2 types: pre-revenue and post revenue.

Most pre-revenue dashboards focus on customer acquisition activities. This kind of dashboards is very common in B2B sales departments since the sales cycles are long and require proper analysis to get the full picture. These dashboards typically rely on the data sources like CRMs, call tracking software packages or email sequences software. The goal of pre-revenue dashboards is essentially to forecast the sales in the nearest future and find bottlenecks in the process of conversion of leads to customers.

Most post-revenue dashboards focus on what products, sales people, regions drive more revenue. This kind of dashboards is used by both the sales and finance departments and both by B2C and B2B businesses. These dashboards rely on the sources of revenue data like ERPs, Accounting systems, etc. The goal of those dashboards is usually to monitor the trends of what is bringing revenue now vs what used to bring revenue before. These dashboards can be integrated into sales review meetings, quarterly planning, etc.

Useful Power BI Sales Dashboard KPIs

The exact Sales KPIs that you should include into your Power BI dashboard depend on the purpose of your dashboard. You will see examples of most of those KPIs in the dashboards below.

Common KPIs for Sales Performance Power BI Dashboards are:

• Sales this year vs last year vs target
• Sales by Salesperson, region and product
• Sales growth by product, region, etc to identify sales potential
• Year over Year revenue growth

Common KPIs for Power BI salesperson management dashboards are:

• Number of leads and their conversion rate
• Quarterly sales comparison
• Sales growth on customer level
• Customers with higher and lower sales volume as compared to last year/quarter

Common KPIs for Power BI Sales Pipeline Dashboards

• Number of leads by lead source
• Conversion of leads into opportunities and sales
• Expected revenue by month and quarter

How to Build Power BI Sales Dashboards

Step 1 – Define Key Performance Indicators

KPIs translate your sales objectives into measurable metrics on your Power BI sales dashboard that pinpoint progress. Outline 4-5 critical KPIs under these categories:

• Volume – e.g. Sales Count, Pipeline Count
• Efficiency – e.g. Win Rate, Velocity
• Growth – e.g. New Customers, Revenue Growth %
• Marketing Impact – e.g. Campaign ROI, Lead to Customer %

Focus on big picture metrics that offer insights into sales health, trends and outcomes. Granular statistics can overload your dashboard.

Below is the process that we use for KPI planning:

1. We create a list of business questions that a client needs to answer
2. We group these questions into logical categories. Each category would become it’s own page
3. We create tables in a google doc that specify the formulas and chart types needed to answer every business questions
4. We include a screenshot from our previous work to demonstrate how the data will be visualised.

Once you know your KPIs, it is also important to plan for the dimensions. Dimensions are attributes by which you want to segment your KPIs for deeper analysis. Useful dimensions for sales dashboards include:

• Time – Year, Quarter, Month, Week
• Geography – Country, Region, State, City
• Products

• Customers – New, Existing
• Sales Reps
• Lead Source

Step 2 – Connect your data to Power BI

The foundation of an impactful sales dashboard is access to accurate and up-to-date data. Your dashboard is only as good as the data behind it.

Here are the key data sources that you might want to use:

• CRM system like Salesforce – for tracking pipeline, closed sales, accounts, contacts
• Finance system like NetSuite – for tracking revenue, costs, margins
• Marketing automation platform – for tracking campaign ROI
• Excel or CSV files – for additional sales data

Some of those sources have a native integration to Power BI whereas you might need to use third-party connectors or build a custom connector for other sources. You can read our Power BI Connectors guide to help you find the best way to connect your data to Power BI.

It is important to conduct thorough data exploration across sources to uncover data issues that need resolving beforehand. The data issues are very common in the data sources that rely on manual entry like CRMs and Excel Sheet. Examples of issues that you could face are:

• Inconsistent data types – some columns may contain both text and number data
• Inconsistent data format – for example the campaign names might have inconsistent naming convention
• Missing data – where there are a lot of blank values within the same column

Once those issues are taken care of, it will be analysis-ready. You will be able to blend together data from multiple sources using relationships and modeling features.

Step 3 – Design Your Sales Dashboard Layout

With data connected and KPIs defined, start structuring your sales dashboard layout. Use these best practices for effective design:

• Single Page Format: Place all key visualizations in one scrollable canvas for consolidated view.

• Logical Grouping: Cluster related metrics into clear sections – Volume, Efficiency, Growth etc.
• Top Down Hierarchy: Position summarized KPIs first, detailed breakdowns below.
• Consistency: Maintain unified color schemes, formats, chart types across visuals.
• Annotation: Use descriptive titles and synopsis to provide context for the data.

Keep the layout clean, organized and focused only on crucial sales metrics. Avoid cramming your dashboard with decorative elements.

Step 4 – Setup Automatic Refresh

As a single source of truth for sales data, your dashboard needs to stay refreshed with latest information. Leverage native auto-refresh capabilities in your dashboard platform to schedule hourly, daily or weekly data updates.

Identify optimal refresh frequency based on source data timeliness, dashboard usage peaks, and volume of data. Real-time direct query connections offer the most up-to-date dashboards. But balance refresh needs with data warehouse loading.

Benefits of a Power BI Sales Dashboard

An impactful sales dashboard becomes a decision nerve center for critical functions like:

• Measuring sales team effectiveness KPIs
• Monitoring campaigns driving maximum pipeline
• Identifying customer segments with most growth opportunities
• Comparing sales rep performance
• Spotting downward trends in velocity metrics
• Planning revenue goals based on historical data
• Optimizing processes to improve win rates

With continuous data-driven insights from your dashboard, you can course correct strategy, realign operations, address challenges – driving higher sales results.

3 Best Practices for Power BI Sales Dashboard Adoption

Getting organizational adoption is vital for dashboard success. Here are proven tips:

1. Make it Visually Intuitive: Simple, easy-to-understand visuals keep users engaged.
2. Foster Cross-Department Buy-In: Get input from sales, marketing, and finance during build-out.
3. Drive Regular Usage: Share dashboard proactively with comments, hold review meetings.

Conclusion

By following the step-by-step approach above for planning, designing, building and deploying your sales dashboard, you can enable data-driven decision making across critical business functions. This ultimately leads to meeting key revenue goals and accelerating sales growth trajectory.

If you need professional help in creating your sales financial dashboards from data sources, feel free to contact us at Vidi Corp today. We are more than happy to help you with creating perfect dashboards, that can support your business in the long run.