• A CRM dashboard provides a broad overview of sales activity and key performance indicators.
• A CRM dashboard typically includes new leads and deals, sales pipelines, KPIs, and recent and upcoming activity.
• When building your CRM dashboard, think about sales goals, design, KPIs, usability, and any future revisions.
• This article is for business owners and sales managers interested in using CRM dashboards to streamline their sales processes.

Customer relationship management (CRM) involves all kinds of variables and data points that change frequently, so staying on top of things can be difficult. CRM dashboards, however, update key data in real time so you and your sales team can make the smarter decisions. Making full use of their dashboards is a key part of successful sales.

What is a CRM dashboard?

Dashboards are an important tool in the best CRM software. They provide a quick overview of your sales activity and key performance indicators (KPIs). CRM dashboards typically focus on images, charts, and figures instead of long sections of text. You and your sales team can use them to see an overview of the effectiveness of your sales pipeline and determine what to do next.

Perhaps more importantly, CRM dashboards are largely customizable. This personalization gives you the flexibility to highlight the metrics that matter most to you and your team. These metrics can include acquired leads, secured deals and, of course, key performance indicators. CRM dashboards are also useful for tracking the progress of individual sales team members towards certain goals. [Read related article: 12 Features to Look for in a CRM]

To remember: A CRM dashboard is a customizable tool in many CRM software platforms that provides high-level insight into a company’s sales activity and key performance indicators.

Benefits of CRM dashboards

Here are some of the reasons a small business might want to use a CRM dashboard:

• This keeps your team on track. A detailed sales report may not always be what your team needs to keep pace and achieve their goals. The high-level information presented by a CRM dashboard can be enough to tell your sales reps what needs to be done now and what can wait, saving time and effort in analyzing detailed reports.
• It streamlines the work of your team. Analyzing reports isn’t the only sales activity that takes time, just like generating these reports. With CRM dashboards, your team can quickly determine which tasks need to be done first without clicking on your CRM software to generate reports. This function can save a lot of time.
• It updates in real time. A CRM report is a static document that rigidly presents data for a specific time period. A CRM dashboard, on the other hand, reacts and instantly reflects changes in your data. This way, your team can build their strategy on the basis of your most recent KPI data rather than outdated numbers.
• The result is overall stronger sales processes. Because CRM dashboards put your sales team’s work into the present, they translate into better overall sales performance. A current picture of your sales pipeline and the progress of your prospects is much more meaningful to your team than data from an old report, so CRM dashboards are especially powerful in guiding your sales team.

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What should you include in a CRM dashboard?

Here are some components you should include in your CRM dashboard:

• Your sales pipeline. Your CRM dashboard should allow you to see the progress of all your pending sales offers based on the stage of the pipeline they are currently at. It should report open deals, aging leads, lost deals, and urgent needs. Often times, your sales pipeline widget will appear as a set of horizontal bars showing the value of all transactions for each stage of the pipeline (for example, $ 10,000 in possible sales after the proposal).
• Your new prospects and secure offers. CRM dashboards often present leads and deals in terms of the percentage of sales value they represent for all possible opportunities. In other cases, your dashboard will simply present a list of new leads and offers. Regardless of the setup, you’ll know that some leads need immediate attention to convert to leads. You will also see which prospects have become customers.
• Recent activities of your sales team. With the number of calls, emails, and other communications a sales team can take per day, sometimes it’s difficult to quickly determine who did what and when. Your CRM dashboard can display this information alongside other interactions with prospects, such as their website visits and social media engagement. If you see gaps in your team’s approach, you can revise your strategy accordingly.
• Your most urgent tasks. Like any good software interface, a CRM dashboard should include a list of urgent tasks and the deadlines for each. Your tasks should be a mix of goals that you entered manually and tasks that your CRM has automatically designated as needs. Typically, you will need to set up CRM workflows for your dashboard to automatically generate this data.
• Your key performance indicators. Perhaps the most important component of the CRM dashboard, KPIs tell you the current values ​​of the metrics that matter most to you. Without a clear view of KPIs, your team might not know which tasks should come first.

Advice: Your CRM dashboard should include your new leads and deals, sales pipeline, KPIs, and recent and upcoming activity.

Things to consider when creating your CRM dashboard

In addition to the above fundamentals, you should consider the following factors when creating your CRM dashboard:

• The most important KPIs. There is no shortage of KPIs in the sales process, and there are too many KPIs on a dashboard. You should limit the KPIs on your dashboard to those that your team really needs a snapshot to be successful. These KPIs can include follow-up contact rates, average sales pipeline length, and lead response time.
• The most important sales goals and methods. Your CRM dashboard should reflect the business activities directly related to lead generation. This could mean focusing on engagement metrics with your blog content, repeat purchases from current customers, or the length of the sales cycle for business prospects.
• The look of your dashboard. CRM dashboards can contain a lot of information and you might be tempted to go too far in your dashboard design for the best results. You need to resist this temptation and keep it simple by maximizing white space on your dashboard and using (at most) three colors in your charts.
• How easy to understand your CRM dashboard is. Smart design alone can’t save a cluttered CRM dashboard. The widgets of a user-friendly CRM dashboard should be organized for quick exploration. These widgets should also help your sales team understand the progress of each individual prospect along your sales pipeline. Contextualizing your prospects greatly facilitates their sale.
• How your dashboard can be improved. A CRM dashboard should never have a definitive form. No matter how proud you are in your dashboard design and setup, you should commit to regular testing and modifying it as needed. At least quarterly, ask your team what works and what doesn’t on your dashboard. Then work alongside your sales reps to redesign it to increase your chances of success.

Did you know? When building your CRM dashboard, you should consider your KPIs and sales goals, design and usability, and the potential for future revisions.

Examples of CRM dashboards

To show how the above considerations play out with actual CRM dashboards, here are some examples of CRM dashboards and explanations of their structures.

This Salesforce CRM dashboard example is filled with charts that display key revenue figures and sales reps’ KPIs. It only uses blue, green, and navy as colors (except in its top right widget) while leaving plenty of white space. This design and the inclusion of both top-level data (revenue) and more specific information (lead status by owner) fills all kinds of blanks for the user company sales team.

This Freshworks CRM dashboard shows the user’s private, field and internal company sales in a pie chart based on the progress of those transactions. Elsewhere, this dashboard uses only blue bar charts and lots of white space, following basic CRM dashboard color and design principles. The icing on the cake is the center-bottom tool for quickly adding new or existing reports.

This HubSpot CRM dashboard provides transaction pipeline charts and numbers for the business user. Thanks to this dashboard, the user company can implement several filters to understand the evolution of sales over several periods. The dashboard uses a single graphic and large white space for a clean and intuitive feel. You can use this dashboard as a reference to design a CRM dashboard with a strong emphasis on a small set of digital KPIs.

If your CRM is more focused on multiple types of graphical data, the other examples might be better references. Ultimately, the best CRM dashboard is the one that works for your team, no matter how many changes you make or don’t make.