Understanding your sales pipeline is vital to business success, as it allows you to measure and assess your performance at various stages in your sales cycle. This in turn allows you to plan your team’s activities and workloads more effectively, and also enables accurate forecasting to inform future plans.
One of the best ways to understand and manage your sales pipeline is using a dashboard. A sales pipeline dashboard can give you quick and easy access to vital statistics and details, helping you to pick out your priorities at a glance and focus your attention on the activities that need the most attention.
For a sales pipeline dashboard to be effective, though, you have to set it up correctly. So, how do you effectively manage your sales pipeline using a dashboard?
What Is The Sales Pipeline & Why Is It Important?
Your sales pipeline is essentially a visual representation of where all your potential customers currently are within your purchasing processes. The pipeline follows your sales cycle from lead generation through to conversion and deal-closing, and helps you to organise your activities according to which processes and customers need attention.
The sales pipeline also helps you to measure performance, enabling you to identify sections of your sales processes that need optimising to cut down costs or time, or to improve success rates at that stage.
Pipeline management is therefore the process of overseeing and directing activities within your sales pipeline, tracking prospects, leads and opportunities at every stage to get an idea of how well your processes are working and where you can make improvements for even better results.
Using A Dashboard For Sales Pipeline Management
Dashboards are a great way of seeing everything you need to know at a glance, which makes them perfect for managing sales pipelines. Different businesses will have different needs from their sales pipeline dashboard depending on their size, industry, and whether they’re B2B or B2C, so it’s important to plan your dashboard accordingly.
Think about what information you need to see most, and which data metrics will give you this information in an easy-to-digest format. Consider which KPIs you need to track, how much detail you need to see, and whether it would be more helpful to view statistics per team or per individual.
You should also think about which platform to use for your dashboard. It’s important to find a dashboard service that’s easily adjustable and customisable so that you can adapt it over time as your needs change or develop. You should also think about any other SaaS tools you might want to integrate with your sales pipeline dashboard to increase its utility.
Which Metrics Should Your Sales Pipeline Dashboard Cover?
Sales pipeline dashboards can be used to show a wide variety of metrics - but more isn’t always better. Rather than packing your dashboard with every single relevant detail, pick out the metrics that are most important to your business and which will help you understand your pipeline quickly and effectively.
The most important or useful metrics will vary from industry to industry and business to business, but as a general rule, consider using the following metrics to understand and manage your sales pipeline.
Open Activities, Cases & Opportunities
These form the core of your sales pipeline, showing you exactly where your potential customers are at every stage of your sales cycle and which actions need to be taken to progress them further towards a closed-won deal.
Your open activities, cases and opportunities essentially act as a to-do list. Activities generally refer to lead generation tasks such as emailing, calling, and performing demos. Cases represent customers who have initiated contact and need a response quickly to aid retention. Open opportunities represent leads within your sales funnel requiring further action to push them to convert.
Tracking these three metrics allows you to see exactly what your team is working on and what yet needs to be done, allowing you to efficiently delegate and reassign workloads as necessary to ensure tasks are completed on time and conversion rates are optimised.
Sales Cycle Tracking
Another key aspect of your sales pipeline to track is the length of our sales cycles. You should track the average amount of time it takes to take your leads through your sales processes until a closed-won deal is reached; you can then measure the current sales length cycles of different cases or the averages of teams or individuals to identify where sales are taking longer than they should.
Tracking how the sales cycle average changes over time is also an effective way of measuring performance - if your averages are going up, you need to find out why.
Lead Generation Metrics
Lead generation is vital to the entire sales funnel, so you need to know how well your business is managing it. You can include a variety of metrics on your sales pipeline dashboard to observe lead generation, such as:
- Frequency of new opportunities or leads added to the pipeline
- Average lead response time, plus the percentage of leads followed up within your target time
- The percentage of leads followed up, tracked against the percentage of lost leads
- Your average customer acquisition cost (CAC), along with a list of current CACs per customer, team, or individual team member
Performance Metrics
Your sales pipeline isn’t just about what you’re doing, it’s about how well you’re doing it. Performance metrics allow you to assess whether your business is on the right track with its sales processes.
The most important is your win/loss ratio - the percentage of opportunities or leads you generate that you go on to convert to a closed-won deal. You should track your win/loss rate against an industry standard, and if you start to fall behind, then it’s time to look deeper into your sales processes to find out why.
It’s also helpful to track conversion rates at different stages of your sales funnel - if you’re losing leads in large numbers at a particular point, then something needs to change. Track this for your whole team to measure overall success rates, but also track conversion rates by individual - this will help to highlight where specific team members may need additional support to overcome issues.
Forecasting & Planning Metrics
Finally, your sales pipeline should help you prepare for the future as well as manage the present. Your sales pipeline dashboard should allow you to track your projected sales against your actual sales to gauge whether you’re meeting your targets. Other helpful metrics for aiding forecasts and planning include:
- The ratio of sales from new customers vs existing customers - upselling is key to sales growth, since the CAC for existing customers is much lower.
- Current pipeline value - estimate the total value of leads in your pipeline to forecast future revenue more accurately
- Product gaps - how well each of your products or services are performing compared to their projected sales
Conclusion
A well-designed sales pipeline dashboard is essential to understanding and managing your sales pipeline more effectively. If implemented correctly, it can help you to identify issues in your sales processes much more quickly, and can also help to manage workloads more effectively. By choosing the right metrics and design for your sales pipeline dashboard, you can massively streamline your sales pipeline management process.