Sales dashboard: the indicators the board should see

The sales dashboard the board actually uses has few screens, one per audience, and each screen answers the questions of the meeting where that audience decides. Every month and every quarter, the board looks at revenue against target, the forecast for the period, pipeline coverage and the numbers that show whether growth pays for itself. Every week, the sales manager looks at where the funnel got stuck and who on the team needs help, and every day the rep opens the list of what needs to happen for the book of business to move. Each number sits next to the target and the previous period, has a written definition of what goes in, where it comes from and who answers for it, and stays on the dashboard only while someone makes a decision with it. Most of the dashboards I find in diagnostics go the opposite way: forty charts on a single screen, built at the request of different people over two years, which nobody opens before the meeting.

In many companies, someone builds a CRM dashboard with everything the system can display, and the TV in the sales room starts showing funnel, ranking, heat map and pie chart. At the monthly meeting, the CEO asks why the quarter is below target, and the answer comes from a spreadsheet the manager prepared the day before, because no chart on the dashboard answers that question. In the State of Sales Analytics survey, 58% of sales leaders said that the complexity of the business and of the underlying data makes the output of sales analytics hard to interpret (Gartner, 2020), and a dashboard overloaded with charts leaves all of that interpretation to the reader.

Why does nobody read the dashboard with forty charts?

The dashboard grows by accumulation. Marketing asks for leads by source, the sales director asks for the rep ranking, CS asks for the quarter’s renewals, and each request becomes one more block on the same screen without anyone asking which meeting that number will appear in. Nobody removes the old chart, and after a year the same screen mixes what matters to the board with what matters to the rep.

Two failures come with the excess. The first is the number without a reference: R$ 1.2 million in pipeline, with no target and no previous period beside it, does not tell anyone whether the situation is good or bad, and each person in the room reads it through their own mood. The second is the number without a definition. If the manager counts any created deal as an opportunity and the director counts only the ones that went past the first meeting, the meeting spends half an hour arguing about whether the number is right and ends without a decision. In how to make data-driven decisions I argue that the useful question in front of a dashboard is what you do if the needle moves right, and what you do if it moves back. The dashboard that answers it is built in the reverse order of the dashboard by accumulation: it starts with the meeting, goes through the question and only then reaches the chart.

Sales dashboard by audience: what each level needs to see

The board, the manager and the rep look at the same data at different levels of detail and at different rhythms: the quarter’s revenue, the same revenue broken down by rep and by stage, and each rep’s deals that make up that number. With the three screens on the same CRM source, nobody builds a private spreadsheet with another version of revenue.

Level	Meeting and frequency	Questions the screen answers	Main indicators
Board	Monthly revenue committee and quarterly review	Will we close the quarter? Does growth pay for itself? Where is the risk for next quarter?	New revenue against target and against the same period last year; forecast and error of the previous forecast; pipeline coverage for next quarter; CAC, payback and NRR by segment; revenue concentration in the largest deals
Sales manager	Weekly pipeline and forecast meetings	Has the funnel moved since the last meeting? At which stage do deals get stuck? Who needs support?	Deals created, advanced and lost in the week; stage conversion; stalled deals and deals without a next activity; monthly coverage by rep; actuals against target pace
Rep	Start of the day and biweekly 1:1	What do I do today? Which of my deals are cooling off? How far am I from my target?	Today’s and overdue tasks; deals in the book without a next activity; meetings booked for the week; actuals against individual target and required pace

The board’s screen

The board decides budget, hiring, segment priority and, at the limit, the target itself. Its screen fits in a ten-minute read and shows the quarter, with the forecast next to actuals and pipeline coverage for the following quarter, which is where the board still has time to act. CAC, payback and NRR come in with the formulas from RevOps metrics, broken down by segment. The board can open this screen on Monday to see whether any number left the agreed range and leave the full discussion for the monthly committee. Deal lists and activity rankings stay out, because they pull the board into micromanagement.

The manager’s screen

The manager decides where the team puts its energy during the week. The screen shows how the funnel moved since the last meeting, the exception lists and the month’s actuals against target pace, filtered by rep. It stays projected during the pipeline review, and the stalled-deal and no-next-activity filters from that ritual appear here as counts, with a click leading to the list. The monthly forecast follows the sales forecasting method.

The rep’s screen

The rep decides what to do today, and the screen works as a work queue: today’s tasks, deals in the book that lost their next step and the distance to the individual target converted into how much the rep needs to close per week until month end. A public ranking tends to make CRM records worse, because whoever is behind learns to hide weak deals, and I prefer to leave comparisons between people with the manager, for use in the 1:1.

Marketing and customer success follow the same logic

Marketing leadership needs to see how much of the pipeline and new revenue came from each source and how much of what it delivered sales accepted, under the criteria of the SLA between marketing, sales and customer success. CS leadership needs the renewals for the next ninety days, the low-health accounts without a recorded plan and expansion against target. Both screens start from the questions of the meeting and read the same source as the sales screen, so the board receives a single version of revenue.

Which sales KPIs go on each screen?

Outcome and activity indicators

An outcome indicator measures what already happened, such as closed revenue and won deals, and an activity indicator measures what the team does to get there, such as meetings held and proposals sent. The board looks mostly at outcomes, because it decides about the quarter, while the manager and the rep need activity, because the month’s outcome arrives too late to fix the month. The care lies in choosing the activity that predicts outcomes in your funnel. Counting calls encourages the rep to call more people who never pick up, while counting meetings with decision makers, together with the share that turns into opportunities, measures the effort that moves deals. To find out which activity predicts outcomes, compare what happened before the proposal in the deals won and lost over the last two quarters.

Comparison with target and with the previous period

Every number on the dashboard needs two references beside it: the target shows the distance to the commitment, and the previous period shows the trend. In an illustrative example, a company with a monthly target of R$ 2 million and 22 business days needs to close about R$ 91 thousand per business day, and on the tenth business day the expected figure is close to R$ 910 thousand. With R$ 800 thousand closed on that day, the manager knows the team is 12% below pace and still has twelve business days to act; without the pace line, the same number looks good to the optimist and bad to the cautious. In a seasonal business, compare with the same month of the previous year. Agree before publishing on the tolerance range that sets the color of each number.

One number per question

For each question in the meeting, the dashboard shows one main number in highlight and keeps the detail one click away. If the question is “will we close the quarter?”, the number is the forecast against target, and the breakdown by category and by rep sits in the drill-down. With five charts for the same question, each person picks the one that confirms their own opinion and the meeting goes back to debate. In the operations I follow, the board’s screen fits in six to eight numbers, and the manager’s in eight to ten, including the exception lists.

How do you write the definition sheet for each indicator?

The indicator sheet is the written definition of the number in one table row: what goes in, what stays out, where the data comes from in the CRM and who answers for it. Without the sheet, the meeting argues about whether the number is right; with it, whoever disagrees redoes the math using the signed definition. The financial metrics already have formulas in the RevOps metrics article, and the table below covers the operational indicators that cause the most debate on sales screens.

Indicator	Question it answers	What goes in and what stays out	Where it comes from in the CRM	Owner
New revenue	How much did we sell to new customers in the period?	Won deals from new customers by close date; renewals and expansion go to the CS screen	Amount and close date in the new business pipeline	Sales leadership
Pipeline coverage	Do we have enough open deals for the remaining target?	Value of open deals with expected close in the period, divided by the remaining target; past-due dates stay out	Open deals by stage and expected close date	Sales manager, with RevOps
Win rate	Out of ten decided opportunities, how many do we win?	Won divided by the sum of won and lost in the period; open deals stay out	Status and close date	Sales manager
Forecast error	Did the number we committed at the start of the month hold?	Percentage difference between the commit recorded at the start of the month and actuals	Dated forecast record and won deals	Sales leadership, with RevOps
Deals without a next activity	How many deals lost their next step?	Open deals without a future task or meeting	Activities associated with the deal	Manager, with each rep
Meetings with decision makers	Is the team talking to whoever decides?	Meetings held with a contact flagged as decision maker; cancelled ones stay out	Logged meetings and contact role	Sales manager

The owner explains the variation in the meeting and answers for the definition when someone proposes a change, and whoever runs the CRM or RevOps configures the report according to the sheet. Every change in definition gets a date, and the dashboard shows the break.

Why does the average hide the problem in the sales report?

The average is the most common shortcut on dashboards and the one that hides the most problems. In a hypothetical example, a team of eight reps has an average win rate of 25%. Broken down by person, the rate shows six reps around 30% and two close to 10%, both hired less than six months ago. A board that looks only at the average concludes the team is stable, and the manager who breaks it down by person discovers that onboarding is not developing the new hires.

The total hides problems in the same way. Suppose, in the same example, that the company hit the quarter’s target and a single contract accounted for 40% of new revenue: the dashboard shows green, and without that contract the team would have closed 60% of target. That is why I put revenue concentration on the board’s screen, meaning how much of the quarter came from the three largest deals, so the board knows whether the result has a chance of repeating. For sales cycle and time in stage, use the median, and for win rate and deal size, break the numbers down by segment, source and rep on the manager’s screen.

Roadmap to build the sales dashboard in the CRM

The roadmap starts with the meeting and leaves CRM configuration for the fourth step.

1. List the meetings and the questions. For each ritual, from the monthly revenue committee to the rep’s daily routine, write the questions the meeting needs to answer and the decision that comes out of it. This document replaces the wish list of charts.
2. Choose one number per question and write the sheet. Define what goes in, what stays out, the source, the owner, the target and the tolerance range. The leaders who will use the screen sign the sheets before configuration.
3. Check data quality. Measure how complete the fields that feed each number are, such as close date, amount, source, loss reason and next activity. If half of the lost deals have no reason, the loss-reason chart shows the opinion of whoever filled in the other half; the way to fix the base is in CRM data quality.
4. Build one screen per audience. Configure the screens in the CRM itself, on the same source, with permissions by level and drill-down one click away, in the order of the meeting agenda.
5. Publish with a date and an owner. Present the screen to its audience, explain each sheet and say in which meeting it starts to count. Flag on the screen any indicator whose data is still incomplete.
6. Use the dashboard in the meeting. From the agreed date, the meeting runs with the dashboard open and parallel spreadsheets stay out. A disagreement about a number becomes a task for whoever runs the CRM, due before the next meeting.
7. Cut what nobody looks at. Every quarter, check which reports were opened and which numbers appeared in a decision recorded in the minutes. Whatever passed neither filter leaves the dashboard.

How do you run the meeting with the dashboard open?

The dashboard changes the meeting when whoever runs it knows how to read the number in front of the team. The reading follows an order: the main number against target and against the previous period, the question about the cause, the click into the drill-down that shows where the variation is and the decision with an owner and a date. The director who sees the quarter below pace and asks “what happened?” hands the meeting back to everyone’s opinion. The director who opens coverage by segment, sees that mid-sized companies have half the pipeline needed and asks the marketing and sales leaders what each will change in the next three weeks moves the conversation toward action.

Running the meeting this way takes practice, and most leaders I know have never practiced it. In the same Gartner survey, only 20% of sales leaders said they consider it important to help other teams understand the implications of what the analysis finds. Once leaders learn to run it, sales is held to numbers it helped define, marketing discusses on the same screen the pipeline it generated and customer success sees, through the forecast, the onboarding volume for the next quarter. In the first weeks, open by checking the previous meeting’s decisions in the minutes and reject any explanation the dashboard does not show.

Sales dashboards and L&D: what HR needs to assess

How to recognize the need

Leaders arrive at the monthly meeting with their own spreadsheets, the CRM dashboard exists and nobody opens it during the conversation, and discussions end without a recorded decision. Another sign is the number of saved reports: when the CRM holds hundreds of them and nobody can say which ones the board uses, the company spent time building dashboards and no time preparing leaders to run the meeting with them.

Who takes part

The core group is the board, the sales, marketing and CS leaders, the managers and coordinators who run weekly rituals and whoever runs the CRM or RevOps. The board defines the questions for its own screen, and during the program the managers run a real meeting with the new dashboard and receive feedback. In the Revenue Operations training I deliver, this exercise is the one that most changes the following week’s meeting. Reps come in later, in a short session about their own screen.

How to measure

Before the program, record how many reports the dashboard has, how many were opened in the last month, in how many meetings the dashboard stayed on screen and how many decisions with an owner and a date came out of each meeting. Repeat the count after a quarter. The result HR takes to the board is a smaller dashboard, open in meetings, with more decisions in the minutes and fewer parallel spreadsheets.

If your company’s board has a dashboard and keeps deciding from the spreadsheet prepared the day before, that is the work of the in-company Revenue Operations training. I run the program with the board, the marketing, sales and CS leaders and whoever runs the CRM in the same room, on your operation’s data, and each leader practices running their own meeting with the dashboard open. The group leaves with the RevOps metrics matrix written, with the definition sheet for each indicator, and with the SLA between marketing, sales and CS that feeds the numbers on the screens.

Frequently asked questions

What is a sales dashboard?

It is the dashboard that brings together the sales indicators an audience needs to decide in its meeting, with each number next to the target and the previous period. In a well-configured CRM, the company keeps one screen for the board, one for the manager and one for the rep, all on the same data source.

Which indicators should the board see on the sales dashboard?

New revenue against target and against the same period last year, the quarter’s forecast with the error of the previous forecast, pipeline coverage for next quarter and the metrics that show whether growth pays for itself, such as CAC, payback and NRR. Add revenue concentration in the largest deals. Deal lists and activity rankings belong on the manager’s and rep’s screens.

How many indicators should a sales dashboard have?

One main number per meeting question. On the board’s screen, that usually means six to eight numbers; on the manager’s, eight to ten, including the exception lists. The detail stays one click away, broken down by segment, source and rep.

What is the difference between outcome and activity indicators?

An outcome indicator measures what already happened, such as closed revenue and won deals. An activity indicator measures what the team does to get there, such as meetings with decision makers and opportunities created. Choose the activities that predict outcomes in your funnel, checked against the deals won and lost in recent quarters.

How often should the sales dashboard be reviewed?

The CRM updates the numbers every day, and each audience reads its screen at the rhythm of its own meeting: reps daily, managers weekly, the board monthly and quarterly. The dashboard structure goes through a quarterly review, when the company cuts the reports nobody opened and updates the definition sheets that changed.

How do you train leaders to use the sales dashboard?

With practice on the company’s real dashboard: each leader runs their own meeting with the screen open and receives feedback on the reading order, the questions asked and the decisions recorded. Participants include the board, the sales, marketing and CS leaders, the managers and whoever runs the CRM. HR measures through dashboard use in meetings and the decisions recorded in the minutes.