We all should! Seriously, regardless of your role in your organization, dashboards are an excellent, quick view of the information contained in your CRM system. We take the time to put the information into our CRM system, why not allow it to present the information we want to see most, back to us, in a clear, concise manner.

I’m a Marketing user and I have a plethora of dashboards I view on a daily basis, but my top choices are:

• Leads by Lead Source

• Opportunities by Lead Source 

• Actual Revenue by Lead Source

For me, it’s important to see that:

A) My department is generating leads

B) The leads we’re generating are warm enough to become opportunities

C) And that we’re closing leads and can calculate a positive ROI

For Sales, dashboards are very important from both a sales management reporting perspective, as well as a sales user perspective. Here are some examples of useful dashboards for sales:

• Pipeline Charts

o Opportunities closing this month, next month, this year 

• Opportunities by Product

o Opportunities closing this month, won opportunities, lost opportunities 

• Sales Leaderboards (to see how your entire team is doing)

• Top Customers

• Actual Revenue (by month, by quarter, by fiscal period)

• My Open Leads or My Open Opportunities

For those in the customer service area, dashboards provide a compact view of your tickets/cases and allow you to prioritize your efforts. Some customer service centric dashboards include:

• Tickets by Priority

• Tickets by Customer

• Tickets open more than 30 days

All users have the ability to go in and create any dashboards they want and then share them with whomever they’d like. For example, a CEO could share their high level dashboards with the rest of their management team, or the VP of Sales could share some with their sales team, or individual users. The bottom line is, all users can have many dashboards and create, delete, share and hide whichever dashboards they see fit, making dashboards very effective for each individual user.

If you have specific dashboards you think others would benefit from, please share them with everyone!