Have you ever wondered how to build sales financial dashboards seamlessly for your business? Sales dashboards are important for providing actionable insights into the performance of a sales team. It can also help a sales team to make strategic decisions. A good sales dashboard visually tracks key sales metrics, uncovers trends and patterns, and identifies opportunities and challenges. This can eventually enable data-driven actions.

In this comprehensive guide, we will walk through the step-by-step process for building effective financial sales dashboards that drive results.

Gather and Connect Your Data

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 you need:

• 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

Using built-in connectors in your dashboarding platform, integrate and connect the data from these sources. If unavailable, use API connections or custom SQL queries to connect.

Conduct thorough data exploration across sources to uncover data issues that need resolving beforehand. Clean the data by handling blanks, duplicates, formatting inconsistencies.

Transform the data into an analysis-ready form using filtering, aggregation, calculations. Blend together data from multiple sources using relationships and modeling features.

Define Key Performance Indicators

KPIs translate your sales objectives into measurable metrics 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.

Determine Relevant 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

Keep the number of dimensions focused or your dashboard can become fragmented. You can drill down into specifics as needed.

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.

Visualize Key Performance Metrics

Dashboards come alive through meaningful, easy-to-decipher data visualizations. For sales KPIs, use charts that best represent the data.

• Column Charts: Compare metric values across various dimensions
• Line Charts: Observe metric trends over date periods
• Gauge Charts: Display key numbers against goals
• Tables: View granular statistics broken down by multiple attributes

• Cards: Highlight top-level KPI values like revenue, and sales count

Make the visuals uniform in style and color-coded by measures for better clarity. Allow interactions like drilling down from summary to details.

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.

Track Insights and Enable Data-Driven Decisions

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 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.