6 Sales Dashboard Examples (+ How to Make Them)

The growth of your business is defined by your goals. Without setting ambitious, actionable goals, your business stays stuck in limbo—coasting along, but never improving. Goals often act like a roadmap through time: We’re here right now, and we want to get to here. But planning to reach a destination means knowing where you are in the present.

It’s the same in sales.

Sales goals are difficult to achieve. But they’re all the more impossible if you don’t know exactly where you are right now.

Enter the sales dashboard. When used correctly, a sales dashboard gives you real-time, accessible data that lets all of your teams adjust their strategies and do their best work. Simply put, your dashboard acts like a sales goal GPS. With the right sales dashboards, you’ll know exactly where you are, exactly how far away your current goals are, and where it may be necessary to tweak your sales strategy to achieve them.

In this guide, we’ll give you an overview of what a sales dashboard is and walk you through five examples of popular dashboard types.

• What is a sales dashboard?

• Rep performance dashboard

• Sales calls dashboard

• Products dashboard

• Leads dashboard

• Deal dashboard

• Activity dashboard

• Custom dashboards

A dashboard is sales tech that provides a visual representation of your most recent performance metrics. It gives you a concise view of results-based data like sales-to-date, sales-by-region, lead conversion rate, sales growth, and so on.

It also lets you track activity-based metrics so you can view calls made, emails sent, and what the average lead response time is to different outreach methods.

Dashboards are an essential tool for any business with plans to increase revenue and set ambitious growth goals. Without a sales dashboard, you’re left to analyze dizzying amounts of data on your own. Trying to compile all those sales analytics metrics manually is an impossibly exhausting task with a massive risk of critical human errors.

A good sales dashboard is the solution. It organizes your most recent sales-specific data into easily understandable visual graphics—saving your teams precious time and increasing understanding, motivation, and accuracy.

Of course, there are different dashboards designed for a variety of metrics and circumstances. Let’s dive a little deeper into five of the most-used dashboard types using examples from Zendesk Sell.

What is a sales rep performance dashboard?

A sales rep performance dashboard lets sales reps and managers track individual and team performance in real time. Performance dashboards are typically customizable and easily adapted to display the particular metrics you want to track.

There are numerous variables that are important to reps and managers, so most dashboards include tracking options for the following:

• New deals per month (within the fiscal year)

• New deals for this month

• Forecast for this month

• Top current deals

• Revenue for this month

• Pipeline coverage for this month

The best sales dashboards will update these numbers in real time as the day goes on. This means reps have access not only to their own personal metrics, but to their team’s metrics as well.

Why a sales rep performance dashboard is useful

Tracking sales metrics in real time means reps and managers can view their performance as it’s happening. With this information displayed in a pleasing, simple-to-process visual layout, they’re able to stay on track and reach their quotas more easily.

The two primary benefits of the rep performance dashboard, however, are improved rep coaching and improved customer experience.

When managers can clearly compare rep performances based on hard numbers, they’re able to pinpoint areas where multiple reps are struggling. One of the challenges when developing successful sales coaching techniques is figuring out what reps actually need coaching on. The sales rep performance dashboard succinctly highlights areas of success and struggle, allowing managers to create targeted trainings with real impact.

Meanwhile, as reps improve, so does the customer experience. Not only do prospects and customers benefit from better-trained reps, they also benefit from reps who are aware of their entire pipeline. By tracking metrics like “open deals,” the rep performance dashboard lets reps know when they’ve left prospects hanging for too long. This awareness means reps are more likely to reconnect with prospects in a timely manner, thus increasing nurture and conversion success rates.

Additionally, if your sales dashboard is integrated into your CRM, then your chosen metrics can help non-sales departments make their own targeting decisions. If marketing has access to the dashboard and they see that numbers are stalling towards the end of the month, they can rework their materials towards quick-fix tactics like BOGOs or end-of-the-month sales.

It’s certainly possible for the sales team to meet with marketing and have that discussion in person, but why waste time setting up a meeting when marketing could simply glance at your dashboard?

How to make a sales rep performance dashboard

The most important step when creating an effective performance dashboard is determining which metrics you want to track. Obviously it’s easy to say “all,” but that’s not necessarily helpful to your reps. A useful performance dashboard is clean and easy to read, not cluttered with numbers. Choose five or six key metrics you feel will be most beneficial to your team and work from there.

You can always build a dashboard manually in Excel, but why give your reps more screens to toggle between? A comprehensive CRM platform not only lets you build customizable dashboards, but also integrates with your sales software to keep your data accurate and up to date.

What is a sales call dashboard?

A sales call dashboard displays current data about your reps’ sales call volume, length, and success rates. Ideally, sales call dashboards are integrated with your CRM’s power dialer and call-recording features so that data from the calls automatically populates into the system, but it can be entered manually if you don’t have those features.

NOTE: We do recommend investing in a CRM that includes those features for easier data analysis. Juggling fewer programs means more efficiency and increased accuracy.

A sales call dashboard measures a series of chosen sales call metrics that can be interacted with in real time. As you can see in the image above from Zendesk Sell, those metrics can include:

• Outgoing calls (there’s frequently a quota for this metric, so live tracking is critical for reps)

• Average outgoing call time

• Incoming calls

• Average incoming call time

• Number of outgoing calls by week

• Number of outgoing calls by month

• Number of incoming calls by month

• Outgoing lead calls per rep (Top 10)

• Outgoing deal calls per rep (Top 10)

• Average outgoing call time per rep

• Average number of outgoing calls by deal result

• Outgoing calls by call outcome (this doesn’t refer to closing or not closing, it refers to whether or not the call was answered and whether or not a voicemail was left)

• Average outgoing call duration by deal result

Depending on your company, your sales team, and your technological capabilities, you may use more or fewer of these metrics, but all of these options should be available in your sales call dashboard.

Many sales call dashboards are also filterable by time, lead owner, lead owner team, lead owner group, deal owner, deal owner team, and deal owner group.

Why a sales call dashboard is useful

Sales call dashboards are invaluable tools for managing quotas and planning sales tactics. Sales call dashboards keep reps on track by recording the number of calls made, their duration and outcome, and prompting reps to move on if a call is lagging. The dashboard also has the ability to live-update the list of top reps, which can foster a healthy sense of competition.

Sales reps work towards multiple quotas in a given month (or day), but some are far easier to track than others. Manually tabulating sales calls would be extremely inefficient, especially if reps were also required to track their length and outcome!

Sales call dashboards make tracking simple.

They also provide useful insights into a team’s sales tactics. By analyzing the number of calls initiated vs. answered during specific days and time periods, sales managers can hone in on the best times to call prospects. Reps can also use the same data to look at individual leads. If they’ve been having trouble reaching a particular person at a certain time during the day, they can easily pivot and try a different time next week.

How to make a sales call dashboard

Sales call dashboards are extremely difficult to make without some form of call monitoring/tracking software. Having reps manually enter call data is a recipe for inaccuracy and frustration, which negates the entire point.

If you want to use a sales call dashboard, you at least need an integratable power dialer, but as always, we recommend simplicity. A CRM like Zendesk Sell gives you a built-in sales call dashboard feature alongside call-monitoring software that automatically manages your data.

What is an activities dashboard?

Activities dashboards track the details of specific sales activities in relation to your sales process. They are usually connected to your CRM and automatically log certain activities such as autodialer calls and emails. Activities dashboards track a great deal of quota-related activities, so they can be useful for any company looking to improve or track activity metrics.

Metrics tracked by activities dashboards include:

• Activities on leads per month by activity type

• Activities on deals per month by activity type

• Average activities on closed deals

• Activities per region

• Activities per lead industry

All of these metrics are filterable by time, activity owner, lead owner, lead owner group, and deal owner.

Why an activities dashboard is useful

Activities dashboards are a great way to keep track of which activities add the most to successful deals or conversions. By looking at the frequency of certain activities in relation to quotas, you can analyze which activities your reps should spend their time on.

For instance, in the graph example above, you can see that the yellow bar for “calls made” fluctuated a lot from June 2020 to April 2022. However, when you look at the activities on closed deals section lower down, you’ll see that in terms of the number of calls made, the deal success ratio was never greatly affected. That means that the number of calls per deal is likely not the deciding factor in getting a prospect to convert for this company.

How to make an activities dashboard

Activities dashboards are slightly tricky because they need to be backed up by internal automated tracking software. Reps can manually enter completed activities into the dashboard, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Ideally, you’ll start with an automated CRM like Zendesk Sell. This CRM can provide auto dialer tracking, task management, and email monitoring to make sure every activity is logged throughout the day.

What is a products dashboard?

A products dashboard tracks your company’s success metrics and quotas by both the amount and type of products you’re selling. While not necessarily the most popular dashboard for companies with one primary product, these dashboards provide key insights for companies with multiple products or base products with significant add-ons.

As you can see in the sample product dashboard from Zendesk Sell, these dashboards track numerous metrics including:

• Won deals (of the day)

• Sold products value (of the day)

• Products - sold units (of the day)

• Average discount on sold products

• Average total discount on deals

• Units sold per month

• Won deal value vs. product quantity

• Quantity of products sold by deal source (especially useful for B2B sellers using distributors)

• Most won deals by product (top 10)

• Most lost deals by product (top 10)

• Units sold per sales rep

• Sold products value per sales rep

These metrics are also sortable by time, deal owner, deal owner team, and deal owner group.

Why a products dashboard is useful

Product dashboards are one of the most useful dashboards for large-scale B2B companies selling multiple products at different price points. They provide live data on product sales, which is crucial to managing and adapting inventory, distributors, sales plans, and marketing plans.

Product dashboards and inventory: Strategic inventory management becomes much more manageable with access to comprehensive data on what’s selling, what’s not, and what products are frequently bought together. By analyzing the products dashboard, your inventory team can assess what products they need to stock more of, what might be phased out soon, and which products might benefit from a bundle packaging option.

Product dashboards and distributors: Product dashboards provide a simple way to monitor distributor sales without constant meetings. By tracking where products are sold, your teams can check in on distributor success and monitor product trends. These trends can then be passed to your inventory and marketing departments to enable more effective planning for the future.

Product dashboards and sales plans: At the end of the day, if your products aren’t moving, it’s time to change your sales plan. Whether that means a change in the product or the tactic is case-by-case, but you won’t know that change is necessary without live product updates on a dashboard.

Additionally, tracking which products are selling on a day-to-day basis helps your reps successfully cross-sell and upsell. When they can see which products their fellow sales reps are combining, it gives them guidance regarding the right product bundles.

How to make a products dashboard

Unlike the previous dashboards, product dashboards aren’t just dependent on the sales department. In order to have a successful product dashboard, you need to ensure that your sales, marketing, and inventory departments are in alignment. Cohesive and goal-oriented product tracking is futile if all three of those departments aren’t working off of the same data.

Product dashboards are all about getting everyone on the same page. The easiest way to do that is with a sales CRM that your entire company uses. When your departments are connected by a single system, everyone has access to the same numbers and can work together to improve collective metrics, not just departmental ones.

What is a lead dashboard?

Lead dashboards track lead entries, qualifications, and conversions on a day-to-day basis. Depending on the size of your company, this dashboard could either be used directly by your sales team or by your lead-generation subteam.

Despite industry-wide efforts, lead generation remains one of the hardest aspects of sales. It’s also one of the most tedious. Entering and qualifying leads is a lengthy process (especially when done manually) that takes hours and hours away from productive rep-to-prospect conversations. Lead dashboards exist to make the lead generation process easier to manage.

As you can see in the lead dashboard above from Zendesk Sell, the metrics tracked by a lead dashboard include:

• Added leads

• Converted leads

• Added leads by month

• Converted leads by month

• Active leads by status

• Unqualified leads by reason

• • Reasons include: no budget, not the decision maker, and not the right timing

These categories can be further broken down by time, lead owner, team, or group.

Why a lead dashboard is useful

Lead dashboards are primarily used for quota tracking, lead sorting, and pipeline management. Similar to a rep performance dashboard, lead dashboards use live lead addition and conversion numbers to help reps track their own performance while keeping an eye on their peers. These metrics also allow reps to see their conversion percentage, not just their conversion number, which is critical to certain companies’ quotas.

Lead dashboards are also extremely useful in lead sorting and pipeline management. By keeping track of why leads were deemed unqualified, your sales team can discard absolute ‘nos’ while keeping leads marked ‘not the right time’ on the backburner for a later cycle. This decreases the number of new leads needed in the next cycle while ensuring that no opportunity is missed.

As for pipeline management, tracking active lead status lets reps know where their leads are in the conversion process and which leads need immediate attention. It’s extremely difficult to simultaneously track all of your individual leads while giving promising ones personalized attention. The lead dashboard sorts your leads in order of status priority so that your sales reps know exactly where their focus should be.

How to make a lead dashboard

The first step to creating a lead dashboard is to determine where your leads are coming from. Are you managing leads from marketing (MQLs), sales (SQLs), or both? Are you pairing your dashboard with automated lead generation software? Do you have a lead qualification team or are you relying on your sales team for generation and qualification?

Additionally, look at your lead scoring plan. Is it automated or manual? If it’s manual, do you have a sheet that needs to be integrated with your dashboard?

Once you have the answers to those questions, you can either build a lead dashboard via Excel or you can keep things simple by investing in a lead-driven CRM. Sure, you can keep it all separate. But integrating your dashboards streamlines important lead data by keeping it clear, accurate, and relevant. It also helps you move data to other related dashboards — like the deals dashboard.

What is a deals dashboard?

The deals dashboard is the sibling to your leads dashboard. It tracks similar metrics and is primarily used for quota tracking, deal value quality management, and sales pipeline management. The best CRM platforms will automatically populate relevant data from your leads dashboard to your deals dashboard if your company is using both types.

As shown in the deals dashboard from Zendesk Sell above, deals metrics include:

• Won deals value (per day)

• Won deals (per day)

• Lost deals (per day)

• Unqualified deals (per day)

• Added deals (per day)

• Deals forecast by month

• Active deals by pipeline stage

• Won deals by attribute (industry, name, rep, pipeline, source)

• Added deals per month

• Won deals per month

• Lost deals by reason (too expensive, poor follow up, lost to competition)

• Top 10 won deals (by value)

These metrics are further sortable by time, deal owner, team, and group.

Why a deals dashboard is useful

The deals dashboard slightly differs from the other dashboards because its benefits only reveal themselves in the longer term. Unlike the other dashboards we’ve looked at, the deals dashboard isn’t going to update as frequently because the number of deals closed or progressed on a given day is nowhere near the number of leads contacted, products moved, or calls made.

However, that doesn’t mean the deals dashboard isn’t useful.

Your deals dashboard is vital to accurate forecasting, pipeline assessment, and long-term sales tactics. By analyzing the data on your deals dashboard, your teams can estimate expected sales (based on timelines), track deal progress, and gain feedback on when their tactics are working and not working.

The deals dashboard is also extremely useful for sales managers. By tracking deals through the sales process, managers can pinpoint pipeline stages where deals are stalling and address those trouble spots with training or new sales plans.

Managers can also restrategize with information from the ‘won deals by deal source’ metric. If a large percentage of successful deals are coming from one or two specific sources, they can pivot more sales reps towards leads coming in from those sources. Similarly, if certain sources are not producing any deals, they can tell reps to back off those sources and save valuable time.

How to make a deals dashboard

The deals dashboard is arguably the easiest one to manually create and manage, but its utility skyrockets when paired with all of the above dashboards. Rep performance, outreach percentages, product metrics, and lead quotas all influence the success of an individual deal. As a result, the best deals dashboard is the one that’s easily integratable with the rest of your sales analytics.

It’s become the theme of this piece, but it always bears repeating: simplicity equals success. There’s a reason top companies choose to unify their dashboards in one, comprehensive CRM. With a sales CRM platform, you won’t have to build dashboards — they’re pre-programmed to save you time and headaches. You won’t have to enter endless information because you can integrate your CRM with all of your outside sales software. Most importantly, you won’t have to worry about data transparency between departments, because your whole company will have access to the same streamlined data.

Simply put, using a CRM catapults sales success to the next level through data-driven solutions.

Of course, it’s possible that your company needs a dashboard that’s more specific than these five. The good news? With the right platform, customizable dashboards are not only possible—they’re darn near effortless. Once you choose which metrics you want, you can create custom queries and visualize whatever data you have access to.

With a powerful CRM like Zendesk Sell, the ways you can visualize data are limitless. You need your sales data to work for you, not the other way around. Sales goals are already difficult to hit — don’t let inaccessible data stand in your way.