In today's marketplace being organized is imperative to stay competitive. Managers want to be able to analyze sales metrics and track performance of existing campaigns without having to sort through mountains of paperwork and reports. Business dashboards can streamline data, and unlike "scorecard" type reports, can drill down to one sales process such as conversions for an email campaign in real time. Overall sales performance or just department statistic can be tracked and the necessary adjustments can be made rather quickly and this is invaluable to department heads or sales managers.

Sales Optimization

Sales strategies for new or existing campaigns can be tweaked or scrapped as a direct result of information and statistics provided by quality business dashboard software. Key default features such as tracking sales, website traffic and conversions for leads are crucial for determining if a tactic is successful. An elegant user interface or buttons and whistles in the dashboard is useless unless the program can track goals set forth by sales managers. If a business dashboard cannot compare campaign performance to sales goals it is a waste of time for most companies.

Business Dashboard Features

A robust business dashboard should have useful features such as useful features such as a customizable interface, B2B tracking separate from consumer sales, and an embedded help menu.

Good visualization is important, pie charts, bars and graphs would ideally be choices for the dashboard user. Managers want to have visualization of metrics for sales personnel. Managers want to have visualization of metrics for sales personnel. Forecasting sales campaigns is vital and projected sales can be compared to the actual statistics.

Whether the company is a new start-up or an existing corporation, managing sales information, roi's (returns from investments), and projected goals is key to making the necessary adjustments needed to keep sales from falling. With a well developed business dashboard companies should be able to:

• Track sales and campaign statistics
• Identify products and services the are not performing well.
• Provide geographical statistics for sales and service.
• Generate printable reports for later use.
• Sort data by user preference

Successful companies are always looking for ways to become more efficient and obtain as much information as possible about their projected goals and bottom line, a business dashboard can provide this.

Resources:

Pepperdine.edu: Using dashbaord business based intelligence systems
Tech Target: What is business intelligence dashboard