Dashboards drive behavior. If you don’t read another word in this article, at least remember that. From your sales reps to your senior executives, what they see in their dashboards will inform the decisions they make and the strategies they implement to achieve their objectives.

Many people confuse the real purpose of dashboards. You shouldn’t think of them as simply visual representations of your reports. Think of them as behavioral drivers, and if you’ve designed them correctly, they’ll guide, condition, and motivate your sales team to over perform.

First, how do you know your team’s actually using their dashboards? Ask your Salesforce administrator to check the last refresh date of each of their dashboards. If your team isn’t refreshing their data daily, your dashboard isn’t driving behavior or results. It’s that simple.

So how do you build a better dashboard?
Hopefully by now you’ve established some strong KPIs for your team. If not, I recommend a quick read on my Killer KPIs article to get a good handle on how they’re made. Once you have KPIs in hand, you can go about creating an effective dashboard for your sales team by following these five cardinal rules:

1. Make it their data, not yours. For a salesperson, a dashboard should get them where they need to be, not show them where they are. Build dashboards that promote action (call volume, meetings, progress to incremental goals, overdue tasks, upcoming events, etc.). Salespeople are inherently action oriented, so make what they see encourage more of what they do—sell!

2. Encourage competition. Salespeople are competitive by nature. They want to win at whatever they do. Don’t be afraid to rank them within their team via the dashboard to coax them to go beyond their minimum. Trust me: no salesperson you want on your team is happy at the bottom. Without competition, you run the risk of a sales team becoming comfortable with where they are instead of aiming for where you want them to be, or worse, they might get in a rut and start underperforming. That’s not good for them or for you.
    
3. Keep dashboards simple. Your sales team isn’t stupid, but most of them aren’t by nature analytical, and you probably want your team concentrating on selling rather than parsing data. Every metric on their dashboard should easily and immediately relate its key objective. If it doesn’t, rework the visual until it does.
    
4. Tell a story. Our brains prefer order over chaos. It just makes sense to us if we can put a narrative to something or fit it within a satisfying structure. The sales dashboard should do something similar for your team. For example, mirroring the dashboard to the structure of your sales cycle makes things easily understandable to that sales person. Or, you can categorize graphics into similar objects (leads, campaigns, opportunities, etc.), or by type (calls per day/week/month).
    
5. Socialize it. This is similar to encouraging competition but includes a broader audience. Socializing the dashboard by publishing it at regular intervals will make those metrics in the dashboard skyrocket. If a salesperson knows their performance will be read by senior executives or other departments, believe me when I say they’re going to work hard to make sure they’re meeting their minimums every time. Nobody wants to underperform on a dashboard the CEO reads every Monday morning.

Remember that the sales dashboard drives behavior less than it displays data. We can always pull more detailed, complex reporting in Salesforce to parse and analyze results. Dashboards should be a quick, simple means to drive action toward that measurable result. Follow the five steps above, and you’ll give your sales team the means to succeed every time.

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