Four Types of CRM Dashboards You Didn’t Know You Needed

Most sales managers use CRM dashboards to track the sales pipeline; however, a CRM dashboard can help you zero in on many other aspects of your sales environment. Here are four dashboards – most of which can be added quickly – that can greatly increase the effectiveness of your CRM system:

Type: User-adoption dashboard
What it does: Checks how many people are using your CRM system and how they’re using it.
What it tells you: Whether your users are consistently using the tools provided to them and if that usage is consistent or sporadic. This kind of dashboard can also tell you if, after training, there’s a spike then gradual reduction in usage.
Why you need it: The fact that people are logging into your CRM system is not necessarily a sign that the user community is using the application to its full potential. The user-adoption dashboard ensures that users are providing “quantity activities,” i.e., number of opportunities, as well as “quality activities,” i.e., pipeline velocity.

Type: Data-quality dashboard
What it does: Checks and reports on standard objects in the database to assess data quality and record completeness.
What it tells you: Assesses the activity that’s taken place on your CRM system and then applies a formula that checks the database record against a set of rules. The results are then displayed on a dashboard so that corrective action can be taken.
Why you need it: This dashboard ensures that the information getting into your CRM system is high quality and thus less likely to create false leads and dead-end contacts.

Type: Search-engine optimization dashboard
What it does: Tracks lead origins by search engine, search type, keyword, and campaign.
What it tells you: Discovers the sources of your leads and tells you how many leads came from organic searches, were paid leads, came from referral links on other Web sites, and so forth.
Why you need it: You’re spending money to get those leads, so knowing how they pay off and which leads convert quickest can help you tune your marketing mix to create the most revenue and profit.

Type: Marketing-metrics dashboard
What it does: Tracks the leads that marketing created, the pipeline activity generated by each marketing campaign, and the return on investment (ROI) for marketing activity.
What it tells you: Allows you to monitor the performance of your marketing team to ensure that it’s using resources in a way that results in revenue and profit.
Why you need it: Since your marketing group is an important source of sales leads, it’s crucial to ensure that the marketing team actually creates leads that convert easily into real opportunities and, eventually, customers.

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