How Business Dashboards Can Optimize Sales and Marketing PipelinesIn 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.

Business intelligence dashboards have been around since the eighties but the jury is still out as to whether these "intelligence" tools are effective at delivering better results. Over the past few years, enterprise managers have adopted marketing and sales dashboards as a way of measuring performance of their marketing and sales teams. Most popular preconfigured models provide a screen full of graphs, tables, and other visual aids which depict real-time outputs. However, out-of-the-box products don't often provide data in a manner that optimizes performance.

A dashboard to organize and manage the company’s content can do wonders for sales and increase business productivity. However, it is easy to say in a meeting, “let’s get a dashboard,” and not realistically see how a dashboard will affect a company.