Businesses adopt CRM solutions to align teams, learn from data, and scale effectively. A CRM dashboard is like a homepage. It displays a summary of the information most crucial to the user when they first log into the CRM.

Effective CRM dashboards should give full visibility of the sales pipeline, deliver accurate revenue forecasts, and provide a snapshot of individual sales performance. So why are so many sales managers still frustrated?

Effective data visualization is essential in creating highly effective dashboards in any CRM system.  Unfortunately, when dashboards aren’t configured or rendered well, the impact of the data is lost. Today, we’ll offer some tips on how to design better CRM dashboards that your team will actually use.

One key doesn’t open all our houses

There is no magic dashboard design that will work across the spectrum. You must customize your CRM dashboards to display the data that’s important for your users. So, how do you do that?

First, answer the following questions:

• Who is going to see the data?

Is this a dashboard for the sales team? Or perhaps it’s meant to provide customer service insights to the department manager.

• What kind of data do they want to see?

Data that’s important to sales isn’t necessarily important to marketing. Think about the types of reports and lists each segment of users will need to best perform their jobs. Sales, for example, may prefer to see their newest leads, open opportunities, and forecasting pipeline.  Marketing might want to see the number of hits to see which marketing campaign was most successful.

• Will they be interacting with the data or just viewing it?

Will the users be modifying the data and sharing it with other team members? Or are they just monitoring? How you set up the dashboards depends on the purpose that information is meant to serve. 

• Will they need to download or print the information? 

If the information must be downloaded and sent to a client or outside party, you may decide to alter how it renders. A colorful chart would be more eye catching than a list and may be easier for an outside party to analyze quickly.

Once you’ve determined how to customize the CRM dashboard for a particular set of users, establish a clear idea of the content you want to highlight in the dashboard. Don’t overload the dashboard with information that isn’t needed.

Instead, enable dashboards to suit individual roles and preferences i.e. whether the user is an executive or an admin, sales or service team rep.

Does this dashboard look good on me?

Once you’ve determined what will be displayed and to whom, determine which visualization type will best represent that data on the CRM dashboard.  The goal is to make the data understandable, and visualization is key in achieving this. It means keeping the dashboard visually inviting.  Try to stick to simple color schemes that group similar data together.  For example, use the same color to represent all sales related data and a different color to represent marketing related data.

How your data looks has a huge impact on your user’s desire to consume it.  If the dashboard presents a simplified view which is easy to understand, it will help make your users experience more productive. Are you choosing the right visualization type?  If you’re comparing values, try a column/bar chart.  If you’re visualizing relationships, use a tree map. If you’re displaying percentages, try a pie chart.

What works?  What doesn’t?

Design your CRM dashboards to present select performance indicators with the flexibility to focus on specific data points. Do not try to combine all metrics into one dashboard.  Remember, keep the data simple.

Performance indicators of marketing strategies can be determined through a focus on reporting.  Use visual aids like graphs, timelines and heat maps to illustrate KPI’s and other data points so marketing can easily determine which strategies are working and which aren’t.

Performance indicators of sales data include lead management, sales pipeline, and upcoming activities to close deals. Use colors to give sales reps quick insight on where leads stand. Red can mean “Overdue” or “Requires Immediate Attention”, whereas green might indicate their to-do list for the day, with yellow representing their plan for the next day’s work, etc.

Service related dashboards might include tickets received versus tickets pending, open tickets versus closed.

Admins and team leads will want to see dashboards to analyze the team’s performance as well as individual performance. So, you may want a combination of summary charts that offer a quick snapshot and individualized reports that are color-coded by user so the admins can immediately grasp which data is related to which employee.

I’ll take that to go

Many industries have reps in the field, so more users are using mobile CRM as compared to the Web version. Mobile CRM dashboards should focus on more real-time, short, and precise pieces of data. Web CRM dashboards are generally more detailed and comprehensive.

By setting up mobile dashboards correctly, field reps can easily review KPI dashboards in a meeting, having breakfast, awaiting a flight, or in virtually any situation where they prefer the convenience of accessing visual performance data from their phones.

So, in a nutshell, CRM is important to efficiently manage your customers, get new customers and ultimately increase your sales which is everyone’s goal.  The CRM dashboard is important to ensure that each user in your company has a real view of what they need to focus on to be productive and manage their time efficiently.  To achieve this, it’s critical to personalize your CRM based on different users and their needs. There is no one method to achieve this, but if you get a good understanding of your users and what they need to be successful, you are well on your way to building a successful, data-driven business.