Running an enterprise business is no solo effort. It’s more like 6 Orchestras with 19 conductors, and they have all loosely agreed to the same sheet music – but still haven’t figured out what order to play them. I understand this challenge. I’ve been there running trying to figure out what happened last week, how does this compare to last year, and why did this number go up, and that number down, and what did that team over there do? We probably should tell that other team we did this, and….and…and. It’s a weekly sprint that nearly every team goes through, all to just try and understand what happened.

I have always felt there was a much better way. Yet, when I was deep in the spinning cycle, I could never get anything stable, there was to many variables happening. But what I have discovered is – most of it is a waste of time. You don’t need high precision on an ocean of metrics. You need high precision on a select few that really impact your business, and most importantly can be affected by your team. Once you can agree to what those are, you can begin to stabilize a more static picture of the business and drill through to pinpoint where/why the key metrics changed.

Now that I have a much better tool with Microsoft Power BI, I have created a working Demo of this shareable Sales and Marketing Dashboard I always dreamt about. This dashboard is a starting point for any business user to focus on the few important KPIs that move their business, and then empower team members the ability to drill-down and explore what drives them. The beauty of this dashboard is it takes all the different data sources from different teams, and connects together so everyone can all see how the business is doing with a common foundation.

The Executive Dashboard

This report is meant for everyone engaged in running the business a high-level business overview. Executives, Directors, Managers, and Individual Contributors. This reflects the true Business Momentum – everyone should understand what these numbers mean and each team has clear accountability on what is the driving forces behind them.

This Report gives a high-level picture of how different parts of the business are working to generate customers (paying you money), from Leads Generated (real people interested), and Visitors (come on your website), and the Ads (you pay for on Google Ads). This demo dashboard rolls up the 2020 YTD performance on the few important KPIs the organization has all agreed on. The right 2 charts show the current year performance versus prior years. The Left chart shows the performance over time, and the right one is YTD accumulation compared to previous years. I personally love this view as it demonstrates your true momentum compared to previous years. In short, Trending above last year is generally good. If not, there may be something wrong.

The Customer Dashboard

This report is meant for anyone that needs to get insights into your Customer Sales. We typically see Product Managers, Product Marketers, Research Managers, Product Development, Business Management, and Finance professionals interested in this view.

In this report we are showing the all up Sales Revenue, Gross Margin, and Profit from the products sold. We can then drill into that based on information we know of our Customers such as Gender and Age Group. At first glance of this data, you can clearly see we have a strong skew towards Males in terms of customers, sales, and profit. Instantly we should ask, is that the right balance? Additionally, we can easily see Females ages 21-25 love OneNote, and Males ages 21-25 Love Excel. Why do Females love OneNote? How can we get more Males to buy OneNote? This report can help you start to find interesting insights to your customer base and begin to ask questions that can affect how you move forward.

The Profit Dashboard

This report is meant for anyone that wants to understand how much Profit we are making by Product and Category (This should be everyone!). Typically, you will see Category Managers, General Managers, Product Managers, Finance Managers, Pricing Analysts, etc interested in this report.

In this report we are again showing the all up Sales Revenue, Gross Margin, and Profit. However, we are breaking this information down based on the data from our Product Catalog that holds the price and unit cost (left table) and comparing it with our actual Sales Performance (right table). One cannot always expect the Product Unit Margin to be the actual Sales Net Gross Margin. In typical sales motions there are often promotions and discounts, product returns, shipping, etc that would typically roll up in the right view. With this comparison you can now see how much of an impact from a Unit Margin, to a Sales Margin. In this data example we don’t have any discounts applied, but you can easily see the highest Margin Product (OneNote) is driving the highest amount of Profit. While the Highest Sales Amount (Power BI) is driving a modest amount of profit.

This Sales and Marketing Dashboard Demo is meant to be a starting point for you to see and share the power when you connect your data across the organizations. You can now quickly get answers and insights – all to make better decisions.

This report can be highly customized to your business and I’d be happy to schedule a demonstration and get a discussion going.